*The Body Keeps the Score or, Embody Trauma, Embody Joy

It is Good Friday.  On this day Christians around the world remember, and in some places re-enact, the passion and death of Jesus Christ, the one sent to reconcile earth to heaven and humanity to God. 

It is taught that Christ had to die on the cross ‘to redeem the sins of the world,’ but the theologies of redemption have historically relied on theories of power and appeasement – sin offends God therefore God requires some form of payback.  That’s never felt very persuasive to me.  The notion of God requiring a payment that we by definition cannot achieve belies the God of womb-mercy, of compassion and forgiveness, in whom I believe.

Alternatively, it may be understood that the crucifixion was the price Jesus paid for being so completely revolutionary in his teaching of inclusive love and egalitarianism.  Perhaps true, but still incomplete.  This formulation continues the focus on an imbalance of power, only this time it is human political power that is offended and so exacts its price.  Still not redemptive in any holistic way.

So what is Jesus doing up there?  Born in poverty, raised in obscurity, teaching publicly that Yahweh is a God of love, One whose care and concern is not limited to the “haves” vs. the “have-nots.”  Apart from the possibility of a small insurrection against Rome, what could possibly have earned him the distinction of public execution?

My core belief about Jesus of Nazareth is that his purpose in living and dying, teaching and healing, was two-fold: to show us the deepest truth about the Divine, and to demonstrate the deepest truth about Humanity.  Fully human and fully divine, Jesus embodied in a single presence the dualities that we most identify with, and most fear. 

In particular, the mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ demonstrates the deeply human experience of embodied trauma and embodied joy. The reality of sin is that we do damage to each other and to ourselves, sometimes deliberately and sometimes in ignorance.  And that damage is encoded in our cells; today we call it trauma.  Our traumas may be tiny or cataclysmic, but they are ours, and we carry them with us in every moment.  Until we can confront the reality of our pain and the pain we have caused to others we cannot release its effects and begin to heal.

At the same time, Christians know ourselves to be Resurrection People.  We are not defined by our sufferings, however real they may be.  We are invited over and over into the arms of a loving, healing, forgiving God, one who did NOT abandon his Son to torment and death, but stood witness along with the women who loved him, waiting for the moment when all limitations would be released and transcended, and the joyous shout would be heard in the heavens, “He is Risen!”

To be fully human is to be wounded and healed, sinful and forgiven, rising and falling, singular and communal, wise and foolish, sorrowful and joyful, all in equal measure as physical and spiritual beings.  The goal of human existence, if there is one, is to be conscious of it all.  All of this is already happening all the time.  To what extent are we willing to see, embrace, and accept it all? All! 

Good Friday is the perfect time to look at what the body knows: that pain and suffering are real, but they are not the last word.  They are simply one half of the human condition.  See it, sit with it, know it to be one’s own, and when it is time, move through it to the joy which is our other, equally human, birthright. 

* Credit for the title goes to the magnificent book, The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, by Bessel van der Kolk.