Trauma and Recovery
by Rev. Colin Bossen, April 12, 2009
My first year out of seminary I served a small rural Unitarian Universalist fellowship. I was there for one year as an interim minister. When I arrived the congregation was in a period of long decline. A few years before they had called a part-time settled minister who had not been a good match. During her tenure the congregation lost almost half of its members and gained a reputation for being an unwelcoming and divisive place.
The fellowship was located on a country back road. We rarely received visitors. When we did they usually did not come back. I worked hard with the community to help them become better at welcoming newcomers. Towards the end of our time together we thought we finally had enough returning visitors to hold a new members class.
We scheduled it well in advance. We advertised it, sent out invitations, and spoke with several potential new members on the phone. Four or five people confirmed that they were planning to attend. But the Sunday of the class only one person showed up.
I will call her Sally. She had been coming to the services every Sunday for about a month. She was interested in joining the congregation. We decided to run the class just for her. I am glad we did because through her I was reminded of one gifts our religious community has to offer, the gift of healing.
I led the class with Carol, the President of the Board. Whenever I organize a class for new members I always begin it by asking those assembled to share a little bit about either why they are a member of or interested in joining or attending a Unitarian Universalist congregation. That membership class began with Carol sharing her story.
Carol was a lesbian and she and her partner had been members of the congregation for close to a decade. She had been raised in a conservative religious household. When she came out as a lesbian she had been chastised by her family and made feel that there was something wrong with her. Then, to her relief, she found Unitarian Universalism and the fellowship. She felt warmly embraced and accepted. She was delighted to find a religious community that not only failed to condemn her for her sexual orientation but taught that being a lesbian was perfectly normal. She was now dedicated to building and sustaining the Unitarian Universalist movement because of the great gifts it had given to her.
I shared a little of my own story about growing-up Unitarian Universalist. Then I invited Sally, our potential new member to share hers. She began to cry. As the tears rolled down her face she said, "I have not been to church since I was twenty one. My mother raised us Catholic. I was a wild child and early on I rejected the church's teachings about women and original sin. I could not believe that there was something wrong with me just for being born. I did not see human beings as wicked. And I did not think it was fair to blame Eve for the expulsion from the Garden."
"When I was in high school and later afterwards I began to rebel against my mother and the church. I stayed out late. I went to parties and I slept with boys. When I was nineteen I met the love of my life. He was a college student a couple of years older than me. He was gentle and kind and he rode a motorcycle. We had a great time together and we were planning to get married. We got an apartment. My mother did not approve. She told me that we were living in sin."
"One day my boyfriend was killed in a motorcycle accident. He was hit from behind by a truck. I was devastated. After the funeral I went to my mother's Catholic church. It was a beautiful old building filled with stone and stained glass. I asked to speak with the priest. I asked him why my boyfriend had died. He could not give me a good answer. He implied that my boyfriend died because of the lifestyle he led. He said I needed to repent for my sins. My boyfriend had been such a gentle and loving man. I could not believe that God would have killed him because of his sinful actions."
"I left the church after that conversation. I could not bare to it any longer. And my life fell apart for awhile. The next years of my life were devoted to partying--drinking, drugs and trying to forget. Eventually my life spiraled out of control. I joined AA and then NA and somehow managed to give up both alcohol and drugs. I got a real estate license and built my own business. I started to take long walks in the woods and enjoy the silence of nature."
"But recently I have been feeling like something was missing in my life. I needed a community. I started to ask around. Someone I knew suggested that I try a Unitarian Universalist congregation. I was nervous. I was not sure I wanted to give organized religion another try. The thought of entering a church building was very painful. But one Sunday I managed to work up the courage to come here. And I found you all. I did not feel judged. I do not fear that I would be told I was wicked because of things that had happened in the past. And so I have been coming here now for a month. And I feel like I am starting heal from wounds that I did not even know I had."
When Sally finished her story we all sat in silence for a few moments. Then she dried her eyes. We said that we were glad our congregation could be there for her. We asked if there was anything more that we could do to support. She just smiled and said, "thanks for listening." So then I told her a bit about Unitarian Universalist history and the covenants by which we live. And then she signed the congregation's membership book.
I left that congregation a couple of months later to come here. I have not talked to Sally since then. But I learned that she became the congregation's membership coordinator and that the congregation has since called a full-time minister, the first in its forty year history.
Whenever I think about Sally I think about the purpose of liberal religious communities like ours. Our free Unitarian Universalist faith has many things to offer the world. One of the most important of these is our ability to be a space for healing.
Most people have experienced some sort of trauma in their lives. Almost everyone has lost a loved one, faced a terminal illness, struggled with drug or alcohol addiction, dealt with the shame of job loss and unemployment or the terror of homelessness. A healthy religious community should be a place where we wrestle and recover from those traumas. It should offer us a safe space to heal our wounds and seek shelter from the world's storms.
It is good for us to reflect upon these things today for today is Easter Sunday. The promise of Easter is that love can overcome death, that in the face of great pain there is hope and that after a trauma there is chance for recovery.
Easter is a holiday which we Unitarian Universalists have long had a difficult relationship with. More than any other holiday Easter encapsulates the differences in theology we have with the Christian churches. For orthodox trinitarian Christians--be they Catholics, Lutherans or Methodists--the Easter holiday is about the death and resurrection of Jesus.
In most interpretations Easter hinges around atonement theology. Atonement theology can be summed in the simple formulation Jesus Christ died for your sins. Atonement theologians argue that it is not the life of Jesus that is significant, it is his death. For atonement theologians to be a Christian means to have right belief. We all born with original sin and without the intercession Jesus Christ and the church we are destined for the stormy fires of hell. The only way we can avoid such damnation is by accepting Jesus as Lord and savior. Jesus is savior because his death sacrifice is understood to have been a substitution for all of humanity sin's. God punished Jesus in the place of all of humanity.
Traditional Unitarian and Universalist Christians choose to focus on the life of Jesus rather than his death. For Unitarians like William Ellery Channing Jesus was important because he believed that all humans had a spark of the divine within. Jesus's life suggested that if we tried we might let that spark catch fire. Similarly, for Universalists like Hosea Ballou, Jesus was a moral exemplar whose teachings could inspire people to acts of justice, compassion and mercy. Jesus was important because the love he taught and shared lived on long past his death.
The early Universalists dispensed with hell and mocked atonement theology. Ballou believed that the power of God's love would lift everyone into heaven. He was famous for his pithy parables. He suggested that God did not worry about sin much in the same that parents did not worry about dirt. Arguing with those who suggested that only people with good character or who had lived lives without blemish were loved by God and would get into heaven he wrote: "Your child has fallen into the mire, and its body and garments are defiled. You cleanse it, and array it in clean robes. The query is, Do you love your child because you have washed it? or, Did you wash it because you loved it?"
Theologians like Ballou and Channing suggest that there is a fundamental dichotomy between the views of the orthodox trinitarians and Unitarian and Universalist Christians. The orthodox uphold on the one right belief as the purpose of the religious community. Our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors--and we as their descendants--focused not on right belief but upon right action. For our forbearers Easter was a time to focus on the love for humanity that Jesus taught and the spark of the divine that lies within all of us.
Contemporary Unitarian Universalist scholar Rebecca Parker argues that the life of Jesus and the example that he offers is about creating a community of healing for the marginalized and outcast. In a recent book, "Saving Paradise," co-authored with Rita Nakashima Brock, Parker puts forth the case that Jesus and his early followers were trying to teach people how to create paradise on this earth. According to Parker and Brock the purpose of the church was to create a paradise in this world. That paradise was to be a place for healing and transformation.
To bolster their case Parker and Brock cite early Christians such as Irenaeus, the second century Bishop who wrote, "The Church has been planted as a paradise in this world." They also discuss the poet Ephrem. He argued against the emerging atonement theology. We believed that the purpose of the religious community was to create "a circle of love." The purpose of the church was to be a place where people reflected upon their past sins, learned to love better and built paradise on Earth. One of his poems offered simple but provocative instructions: "One person falls sick--and so another can visit and help him; / one person starves--and so another can provide him with food and give him life; / one person does something stupid-- / but he can be instructed by another and thereby grow. / In this way the world can recover; / tens of thousands of hidden ways are to be found, / ready to assist us."
The early Christians who joined congregations like those of Ephrem and Irenaeus were in need of healing and in search of recovery. The Roman empire under which they lived brutalized its subjects. Slavery formed the backbone of the labor system. Women were not regarded as equal to or afforded the same rights as men. Children were often beaten and abused by their parents and guardians. Life could be short, violent and unpredictable.
The early church not only sought to offer a place to recover from trauma, it was, as a community, recovering from the trauma of Jesus's death. Jesus was supposed to have been the messiah. He was supposed to have brought about a new age of justice where the kingdom of God reigned upon Earth. Yet he died on the cross, a fate for common criminals, humiliated and abandoned by almost of all of his disciples.
Different accounts and interpretations of the crucifixion of Jesus suggest how the range of responses that people have to trauma. Take, for example, the stories offered in the Gospel of Mark and the non-canonical Acts of John.
The Acts of John suggests that some people respond to trauma by disassociation and denial. The author rejects Jesus's death as part of his reality. Jesus did not die. His death was an illusion, a "symbol." With this account the author was able to claim that Jesus remained with him beyond death. It was almost as if the trauma of Jesus's death had not happened.
The Gospel of Mark portrays how a small group of women sought to care for Jesus after his death. They went to his tomb with the intention of honoring their teacher by tending to his body. And yet when they arrived they discovered that his body was already gone.
What happened to it is a matter of wide debate. Many claim that he was resurrected. Others suggest that his body was stolen by Roman authorities who wished to prevent his followers from venerating it. What actually happened to Jesus's body though is beside the point.
What is important is that the women faced their loss. They tried to carry forward their love for their teacher. They may have fled in terror at the unexpected discovery at the tomb but they were willing to open the door and look inside.
Ultimately one suspects that both the women and the author of the Acts of John sought to carry on Jesus's message of love and healing. Most early Christians focused on the life of Jesus rather than his. He taught a path of love, justice and forgiveness that they sought to emulate and build upon. And this ultimately is what the Easter story is about. After the trauma of Jesus's death many in his community were able to recover and bravely carry on his work.
Parker and Brock, our Unitarian and Universalist ancestors and early Christians like Irenaeus and Ephrem all remind us that when we are faced with trauma we have choices. We can ignore it, pretend it did not happen, run away or we can face it while at the same time embracing life.
I like to think that our religious community is a place for such choices. It is a place for Carol and Sally and everyone else who is seeking healing in life. It can be a place where we seek to build paradise on this earth and wrestle with the reasons for trauma and loss even while being gentle with ourselves.
May it be so,
and may our time together
be a time for healing,
our community a place for love,
and our worship
a reminder of all of life's hidden balms.
Amen.