This is a really interesting, and helpful book that I wrote about earlier this year.  I want to bring it to your attention again, in case you have not read it.

“How do people, whose hearts and minds have been wounded by violence, come to feel and know the redemptive power of God’s grace?”  That is the central question and mission of Serene Jones’s “Trauma and Grace: Theology in a Ruptured World,” a new book from Westminster John Knox Press.

The book is both a collection of stories of people who have endured and survived trauma, and an analysis of how they did it by the grace of God.  It doesn’t necessarily offer answers; it provides food for thought and introspection.  Beginning with the story of Leah, a young girl that the author sponsored for membership in her church, Dr. Jones shares a tale of what we would least expect.  “…as the pastor began talking about the night ‘before Jesus’s death,’ Leah’s body grew rigid.  Her nail-bitten fingers began to twist the folded order of worship paper in her lap her face assumed a frighteningly blank look, her fear was cold and palpable.  When the pastor then invoked the words of Jesus, ‘this is my blood, poured out for you,’ she slid out of the pew and left the sanctuary.”

Leah later explained she had suffered a childhood of drugs, sexual abuse, and hearing about death, blood, and body parts had made her feel out-of-control and numb.  She could do nothing but escape the church.  What had been offered as a soothing balm of hope, she actually perceived as symbolically violent.  She said she felt alone with the problem, that of PTSD (post-traumatic shock disorder), and that she would figure it out for herself.  Jones responded, “no, it’s not just your problem.  It’s our problem–my problem, the church’s problem, God’s problem.  You don’t need to be alone, and I hope we can work on it together.  That’s what faith communities do.”  Rather that let Leah’s problem lie dormant, Jones goes deeply into the realities of PTSD, and what faith and the grace of God can offer.  We understand the situation clearly, and are offered many approaches of understanding and coping.

“…We are called to be those who testify, who try to tell the story of what happened in its fullness; those who witness, who receive the story of violence and create a safe space for its healing; those who reimage the future by telling yet again–without denying the event of violence now woven into it–the story of our faith.”  Jones claims she offers no answers.

The events, emotional and physical aftermath of September 11 is unfolded in both political and theological angles.  She recounts the story of Latisha, a young singular eyewitness to a murder, and how John Calvin (of all people, known for Protestant Reformation, and also by some as a rigid pre-fundamentalist) used the Psalms for healing, and an “imaginative landscape” and Scripture as a “lens of faith.”  We see examples of feminist theology, and women who somehow make their way through crises.  She talks about the peasant woman, “Mary,” the woman chosen to embody God on earth, and “Rachael” a symbolic woman at the heart of genocide – both losing their children in violent acts, inhuman and beyond comprehension.  How did they, and how do we remain alive with both personal and political death all around us?  How do we re-image and create ourselves anew in the midst of unspeakable horrors?  God only knows.

Serene Jones knows first hand the infinite, mysterious tango of life and death, and the intricate tension between trauma and redemption, sin and grace.  She writes, “…a series of events…left my faith hurling downward and led to the writing of this book…the loss of a pregnancy, the collapse of my marriage, a sudden and then long illness, the death of a friend–and then pushed ahead full throttle by a few monumental events–family members hit by the Oklahoma City bomb, my daughter almost dying in my arms, a brutal cancer, and a profound betrayal…I had lost my faith.”

Ultimately, the trauma and grace all of us experience in infinitely individual ways, one way or another, Jones explains as inexplicable, unearned, and unachievable.  We cannot buy it, and despite need, it cannot be earned.  “…from medieval atonement theory to womanist survival theology… in a shared-narrative, dramatic structure: God breaks in and saves,” is the hope and reality of survival in the chaos, sin, evil and damage that life brings.  “Grace overwhelms and something new happens,” is the point, according to the author.