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EMBODIED INSIGHT

Some insights slowly emerge and change things over a significant period of time. Humans go through periods of trauma, when their very being is damaged. Healing from trauma is slow and painful, whether it is caused by physical trauma, verbal abuse, abandonment, confinement, terror, or deep loss. Dictionary definitions tend to stress trauma caused by a physical wound. However, in recent years, we have become more aware of the trauma associated with war. Even when the soldier survives without an obvious physical wound, we have begun to use the term “trauma” more inclusively.

The four major categories into which our human experience of life can be analyzed (time, space, substance, and causality) become crucial for understanding and assessing a person’s basic sense of life.

In her book Trauma and Grace, Serene Jones does not mention these categories as a distinct topic. This makes her work with traumatized people (mostly women) that much more convincing. The categories are used in the most natural way as the best possible description of what is going on. Trauma is a name for deep disruptions in our sense of our own substance, our causal role in events, our sense of surrounding space, and our apprehension or sense of lived time.

A powerful example is found in Jones’ work with women who are unable to bring a child to term, much as they might try. “Women have told me that along with their inability to make a child comes a sense of their inability to make a future”: a very personal and existential sense of time. For these women, Jones writes, “time stretches before them as a story of parching barrenness or violent bloodiness.”

This death of hope and expectancy has a spatial counterpart, a “rupturing of self.” There is often dissolution of bodily borders. Jones writes, “By ‘borders,’ I refer to those morphological lines that mark the difference between the outside and the inside of self. In the throes of reproductive loss, women often describe a feeling of not knowing where they physically end and where the outside world begins. This is because their insides are quite literally falling out.”1

Obviously, these meanings shade into a given woman’s loss of a sense of her own substance and her ability to be a causal agent. She becomes fragmented and dispersed, as if she had been leaking into the world. Her fragmentation means she leaves pieces of herself “in rags, in toilets, in medical waste cans.”2

Jones describes other traumatized women, victims of rape, abuse, or loss. Running through her scenarios is the language of time, space, substance, and causality (or the rupture of all these), without lapsing into technical, philosophical language. She stays close to the hurt and loss described by these traumatized victims.

Jones’ most careful statement of this structure summarizes one woman in this way: “(1) Instead of experiencing herself as an agent, the woman grieving reproductive loss knows herself as powerless to stop it and yet guilty for her perceived failure. (2) As her hope dies, she also becomes a self without a future. (3) She is a self, whose borders are as fluid as the blood she cannot stanch, a self undone. (4) And in the space of this undoing, she is the antimaterial self who does not give life; she takes it away.”3

Daunting as some philosophical categories might be, Jones uses them to yield insight into the real nature of lived experience. The disruption of trauma is a rupturing or shattering of these categories.

Grace in these traumatic circumstances moves slowly, healing very gradually. Healing often happens, if it happens, in a group of other traumatized people, listened to and guided by a sensitive leader. Perhaps none of us is ever healed completely. I believe, however, that having a sense of God’s presence is not a merely spiritual or ethereal experience. It is something that offers us a different take on or a different way of seeing our very being, in all its substantial, causal, temporal and spatial structures. Though we do not need to use technical language, we need to be aware of the intrinsic change in how we experience ourselves in the presence of God.

Stories such as those told by Jones suggest that we need to be very careful in our language about God. The penumbra around the word “presence” needs to be monitored carefully in our language. Though language about God often thoughtlessly presupposes a male God, Jones points out that, at such times, lifting up prayer to “ ‘Mother God’ seemed a cruel joke.”4 We need to do caring, careful searches for the best ways to express our deepest experiences.

To explore trauma as a realm that may be entered by grace, we need to be aware of the very physical or embodied aspects of both trauma and grace. Trauma clinicians, Jones reminds us, speak of “the visceral traces left behind by traumatic events, traces like quick-startle responses, headaches, exhaustion, muscle aches, distractibility, and depression—all of which sporadically haunted my own interior world. If the aftermath of violence was this visceral, I reasoned, it made sense that grace capable of touching it should be equally physical.”5

Most religions do suggest muscular, embodied ways of being in the presence of God: kneeling, prostrating oneself, standing, bowing, singing, raising one’s arms. To be in God’s presence is not merely a “high-end” experience. There are even stories about how, in the presence of God, we may be ordered to take off the shoes from our feet (Exodus 3:5). Insight into God is an embodied, visceral experience, not merely an intellectual hunch.

1. Jones, Trauma and Grace, 137.

2. Ibid., 138.

3. Ibid., 139.

4. Ibid., 127.

5. Ibid., 158.