Baptizing the Vision of Trauma

This is part two of an overview of the book “God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World” by Scott Harrower where he illustrates how to interpret the Bible through “blessed” eyes.

I will comment in blue, and quote expensively.

As a therapist, I’d like first to explain why this is important, and offer some resources of how to think about this. Feel free to skip this lengthy part to the book review appearing below the icon of St Silouan.

Forget about God and religion, it’s not just the Bible, but life and the world that needs to be interpreted. If an atheist, simply replace the word “God” with “the world” and you’ll see how Harrower is showing us how to perceive the world and people as reasonably safe and trustworthy.

Harrower correctly notes that a traumatized person may not be able to appropriate such a “blessed” viewpoint. Just their capacities to form trusting relationships with people has been shattered, so with God, see HERE

Indeed, whenever a person inveighs against the injustices of God, or of anything, the intellectual objections are secondary, these things often come from a broken heart.

Even then, a rationally minded person has another obstacle to overcome before they are willing to even consider a loving God. After all, how is it that God comes to heal and save us from this world of death…which He Himself created?

Christians too wrestle with this. Of course, that is not the final pinnacle of Christian experience, and theology is simply an explanation for our experience.

The problem with the rational mind, as Iain McGilchrist has said, is not that it is rational, but that not only can it not see other ways of thinking, but that it believes that what it perceives is the whole of truth and that there are not and cannot be any other ways of thinking. Likely why the world over, in all of history, peoples have communed with God not through intellectual arguments but things which shape their heart and imagination - song, praise, art, and communal worship.

Of course, perception of God must begin with beauty, to evoke desire to know Him, as all knowledge functions, one must love to know (anything). I've written on that HERE and note that for Plotinus, reasoning itself is simply the recognition of beauty, HERE

Recall, once, reading was communal, Christians listened to Gospel reading almost as part of an aesthetic experience, one which attuned the listener into a specific way of being, liturgically shaping disciples into a certain type of people. HERE

We often need to joint our attention to God’s first in oder to interpret the world, in a community, as I’ve written HERE

Joint attention is also the context in which we learn to point at things, which is where both existential meaning (meaning of life) and semantic meaning (meaning of words) develop.

God (or a good enough parent) stands outside us, interpreting attending as significant.

Religions also make use of joint attention, and can be thought of as exercises in orienting attention toward the highest principles (which might also (in a nontheistic idiom) be thought of as attending to the nature of awareness itself) HERE

This is because we usually believe what we desire to believe, and what we desire is dependent upon how we live. If you wish to desire to believe or know a thing, you must live a certain way.

Indeed, the liturgy is to form us into the types of people who desire to know God, and then are capable of receiving His spirit.

Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship - see HERE

Consider also that only love perceives love. HERE

If one has never experienced love, or loved himself, and who’s life has been cruel, stunted, who’s known only betrayal and disappointment from his guardians and fellows, who looks out into the world and picks out the ugly horror of life, this person, I’d say, even if presented with good logical proof, would be justified in rejecting it, as it doesn’t “fit” with all his other data points -it doesn’t make sense within the entire narrative of his life experience.

As Esther Lightcap Meek has written HERE:

“….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”

“The healing path requires that we embrace the possibility of nonbeing that hurtful experiences involve. If we deny the threat, or resign ourselves to it, we aren’t doing the healing thing with the Void. The healing thing is to admit our need truthfully and cry out for deliverance.

This is what happens when we come to the end of ourselves and start to look in hope beyond ourselves for help. We open ourselves to what we cannot manufacture and cannot presume to deserve. We open ourselves to what can only come graciously: the possibility of new being…

In the Void, we must cry out in hope for the gracious deliverance and inbreaking of new being. This is a key act of inviting the real.

We begin to move from deep hurt and need, choosing to move beyond shutting down, to reach out beyond ourselves, to the possibility of new being, and invite its gracious involvement.
The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion."

We love in order to know. A mere mental affirmation of God is useless.

Also, form the Christian standpoint, without love, reality itself cannot appear. Our intentional stance can either invite reality to disclose itself as gift, or shut out any apprehension of the Good and Beautiful completely. HERE

Truthfully, modern enlightenment epistemology has created many of these problems, which presents a worldview where we falsely believe that we know how things work. as Chrales Taylor noted that prior to this stance, the conditions would have yielded lament, not theodicy; see HERE

It is a mystery, but, pretty much everything is.

There is an old saying, evil is not a problem to be solved, it is a cross to be born.

There is a difference between a problem and a mystery.

A problem is a temporary hindrance, and a proper response to it is to attempt to remove it. The mysterious is quite different: it does not so much confront me, as envelop me, draw me into itself; it is not a temporary barrier, but a permanent focus of my attention.  See HERE

God and things truly give themselves to be participated in.

Again, as ether Meeks has observed,

“There is one big thing that this involves, something a knowledge-as-information mode utterly overlooks: our body.

We have to indwell and bodily feel that response. It’s not enough to know what it is; we must know what it feels like in our bodies. It is not mindless processing of opaque information. 

Learning to identify, care for, trust, and tap our felt body sense is a key to effective knowing ventures. ”

As Deb Dana says, regardless of what our mind tells us, the story we believe follows the state of our nervous system, and for a trauma survivor their body is screaming : “Danger!”

Plus, plenty of deep thinkers have pointed out that evil is, by one definition, that which lacks being, or logos/rationality, therefore one would expect the very phenomena of ontological irrationality would be expected to elude a rational explanation.

The intellectual answer usually given, which can only ever be partial, and is swallowed up in the horror of trauma and quite useless, involves two points.

1) We must distinguish between God’s antecedent will, His initial, universal desire for all things to align with His goodness and His God's consequent will.

Think of a mother, she delights in buying a cupcake for her child. Unfortunately, the child refuses to eat their dinner, thus her consequent will is for the child to forgo the cupcake, for a greater good.

2) An answer most religions will give, somewhat platonic, is simply that God cannot do more. Not only that, but to ask why would be incoherent.

The idea is that God creates from sheer nothingness as the absolute, non-being gradually being pulled to Him though all stages of being, infused with large ontological absence of being and goodness, until finally God is all in all, all reality is “rational”, filled with His logos, and made into well being.

Ok. Why did God not start with that? Just make Adam wise and loving to begin with!

However, if one really looks at this question, it will prove to be non-sensical.

For only God can always exist, everyone else is created (a creature), and, by definition, creatures are formed in time necessarily with a past, and this past is ontologically part of what it is now.

To ask the above question is to ask why could God not create a creature made perfect with all the attributes of a past (the lessons learned from mistakes, the choices of love or hate etc that shaped them into a moral loving person) but without an actual past….but a creature is, by definition, something with a past, and it is their decisions made in time that has partially determined what they are now.

It is like asking why God cannot make a married bachelor. The term itself is an oxymoron. It’s easy to see here, takes some work to apply it above.

The consequence of this is profound though. It means God Himself, in the person of Christ, is down here, weeping and in pain and shock, living through this hell with us.

My point is that, regardless of how, or even if, we can understand how suffering and a loving God can coexist, it is the actual experience of traditional Christianity.

Still, as the Orthodox Priest Fr Aidan Kimel likes to say, at the end off the day, the Cristian God is the God on the hook (or cross).

Thus one final answer, which is not rational: A poor mangled man hanging on a cross dying of love.

I often contemplate Him until the problem of evil itself dissolves into the heartbreaking grief of shattered love…

Atop the holy mountain on mount Athos Christ is said to have appeared to St. Silouan, and these are the words He gave to this ill mad world :

"Keep your mine in Hell, and despair not"

                                                                       

Ok! The book! Harrower writes:

“Successful perception of another person is a highly relational mode of knowledge in which seeing and interpreting requires the attentiveness of both persons involved in that relationship. One of the reasons why perception shaped by horrors is unsuccessful for generating knowledge that may function as the basis for recovery is that it is a lonely interpretation of the world and as such is subject to the uncertainties of a solitary mind trying to navigate unnatural circumstances.

The problem of a mostly isolated perspective points out that we need other personal minds to help us successfully interpret one another and ourselves. Hence, the depth at which we engage with and interpret one another affects the degree of success in perception.

In order to know God and his perspective, people need to access his stream of consciousness or to have it opened up to them.

Engagement with God requires more than being able to state things about him: it involves a person-to-person relationship in which his perspective is understood and appreciated”

This compassionate kind of relating between people is likely to occur as they become aware of the invisible and visible ways by which God brings about new life to people by offering them safety, a larger story, and a community of faith, hope, and love. …

There were men who lived in the wilderness under the oppression of demons “horror” view of the world, yet this was transformed by Jesus.”

“These men are isolated and live where dead bodies are laid: such a life is a relational and aesthetic wasteland. At least one of them self-harms..

They relate not only to people in a distorted manner, but to evil angels too: they are demonized and made to be mouthpieces of demons (Matt 8:29). However, after Jesus frees them, their perception changes:

“This story fleshes out the blessed perspective in that Jesus has the power to overcome those perspectives and influences that create relational, psychological, and physical absences in people’s lives. It dramatically models a rapid transition from a trauma interpretation of life to a different one in the wake of Jesus’ presence and healing.”

“.... he delights in remaking them through the Son. The demonstration of this is clear: God the Son brought new life into those experiencing objective and subjective horrors: the demonized, the ill, the outcasts, and even the oppressors themselves.”


                                                 

- A drawing I did of Elijah 

Jesus’ nature, qualities, and powers are those of Yahweh, the Creator of all things, he has the power to restore humans from horrors, trauma, and the corresponding toxic skepticisms.

By seeking a reorientation of our conscious relationship to reality through Jesus, we may encounter the personal Trinitarian power to restore shalom and blessedness to the entire created order, including the images of God.

Jesus points out Hades as an enemy of life (Matt 16:18)

God’s stance for life is a stance against death, horrors, and trauma. This means that actions that lead to death, horrors, and trauma cannot be attributed to God as his ideal, even when God destroys people and places in biblical books such as Joshua. Nor can they be said to occur in a manner that denies that they are evils—these offend and sadden God even if he uses them as means himself….

…Seeing is always an act of both noticing and interpretation. Perception driven by the living God will therefore be an act of deliberate interpretation and affirmation of life, even when it occurs in the feeblest forms: “Faith is the specific way in which religious people actually experience what is happening.”

                                                      

Faith chases after the “living God” perspective revealed in a blessed interpretation of human experience. Faith leads to the creation of cultures and artifacts that reflect these beliefs, which in turn become means of communicating the blessed perspective to others.

This culture employs, as Risto Uro puts it, “not only Christian words, but also images and embodied acts that both articulate the meaning of ‘God’ for Christianity and form the Christian experience.”

Jesus shares his perspective with Peter, inviting him to see that something special has come about for Peter. Jesus directs Peter to focus on what Jesus is focusing on: Peter has God’s perspective on Jesus.

This shared attention and perspective on Jesus includes God’s insight and is not sourced in provisional and doubtful human ruminations on the world, as the horror reading is.

Whereas mere reason brings neither peace nor intellectual security, blessed knowledge begins to “satisfy a natural desire” for God’s perspective, which will ultimately occur in the beatific vision in which we see all things at their best and also through God’s eyes. ”

….a blessed perception shares God’s perspective beyond what mere flesh and blood can see and interpret. God shares his awareness with Peter in order to speak of Jesus in a larger way”

The coming of the Christ demonstrates that history is not subject to random forces but is ordered and purposeful under God’s direction. This divine revelation means that Jesus’ disciples have a historical warrant in the person of the Christ for a new interpretation of history in the light of God’s character. ”

The truths that Jesus teaches are the facts that the Spirit uses to redescribe the world for those whose perspective is evolving...

“By his Spirit, Jesus directs and secures their attention toward events in the world in a way that parallels his own divine perspective. First, he “opened their minds to understand their minds so that they could understand the Scriptures” (Luke 24:45). Second, he points to the promised Holy Spirit, who will enable continued understanding beyond that immediate point in time.

For Paul, this renewal is contrasted with the patterns of thinking that conform to the fallen state of affairs in the world. Paul describes the universality of horrors at great length in Romans 1 and 2.”

“The renewal of our minds means that the Christian develops a new “theological instinct.”

This means that both our reasoning about and our language for God will be “baptized” and not imprisoned by horrors and trauma.

The New Testament point of view on the new perspective given by the living God continued into the second generation of Christians...."

                                                                        

“Importantly, the aims that directed the way that the early church interpreted Scripture were based on faith, hope, and love.

The blessed perspective therefore generates dispositions and perspectives that are consistent with developing the safety, story, and community required for recovery from trauma.

Faith, hope, and love both will fuel recovery in the person who has been traumatized and will generate compassion and thoughtful care in those who accompany and support them.

This involves the renewal of the moral and creative dimensions of those made in the image of God, which in turn heals and reestablishes relational aspects of personhood.”

This viewpoint, note, was not born out of some comfortable middle-class dining room, but from a bloody experience of martyrdom, persecution, and hardship.

“Perception is a way of seeing that draws into it our personal history and the perspective of others…

As A. N. Williams expresses: “There is … a difference between Christian and secular epistemology, inasmuch as the Christian one acknowledges not only the frailty of the human mind, but its dependence on a mind greater than its own: the divinity that not only dwarfs the discourse“that seeks to represent it, but lifts those who offer the discourse beyond themselves.”

This is a counterhorror, posttrauma, and nonskeptical manner of interpretation that takes each of these seriously but is not overwhelmed by them....

 It can determine the parameters for the kinds of questions about and responses given to the theologi“cal, anthropological, and existential issues that are raised by horrors and trauma.”

By taking this pressure off the trauma survivor to interpret everything by themselves, ”

God appears to be a silent monster in this story, by either actively bringing calamities on his people’s heads or passively failing to care for his people.

A blessed reading that interprets the Gospel with the living God in mind can recognize the real monsters for who they are.

Parodies of perfect humans and angels are the enemies. Their actions and dispositions wrestle with the goodness of God and his invisible providence, and they result in destruction.”
                                                              

This isn’t to say this is true, this IS to say this is what the Christian story is, but then, of course, if one wishes to gain such a perception, one must engage in the Christian ritual acts, otherwise, from the outside it may indeed seem an incredible naive wishfulment to think, admit all this horror, God is somehow loving!

This is because man is a liturgical being, no brain on a stick, his consciousness is shaped by his acting in the world. During the liturgy identities are performed, bodily rhythms participate in the story of Christianity which engages the heart and imagination, incarnating moral habits and ways of being. 

Story and Myth itself can be as reasonable (proportional to a view of the world we either have or can imagine having - the story may extend or deepen our rationality, but it must appeal to it in some way) as any philosophy.

Indeed it is Nietzsche who makes the remarkable claim that the very notion of validly interpreted historical truth is essentially mythic, and that mythos is always prior to logos, Mythos—as a richly imaginative store of pre/super-rational culturo-linguistically embedded meanings—is seen by both thinkers as the grounds of human logos. That is, human reason is not the grounds of truth and any human picture of truth is grounded itself in something more basic than itself.

Collective imaginative narratives are not optional extras that cultures may or may not have; they are inherent to human culture and linguistically expressed human reason. As such mythos always gives rise to and shapes the understanding of reason (logos) that any given cultural life form largely accepts.

The proper discourse of God is praise, poetry, and song...otherwise we try to cram God into dead concepts.

By *participating* in the rhythms of ritual we order our hearts to receive God.


Right praise = right knowing.

Liturgy trains us to see the Truth of God, it forms us into the type of people who can perceive the signs of transcendence all around us.

We must be taught to act our way into a new way of seeing.

The Orthodox Priest Fr Stephen Freeman explains how this works:

"An example would be the Holy Eucharist. Scripture and the Fathers teach that it is truly the Body and Blood of Christ. I accept that and proceed with that as a given. But, accepting that, does not mean that there’s some sort of immediate perception that tells me this is true. Indeed, the Church celebrates the Liturgy in a manner that helps me perceive its truth. The dynamic of the Liturgy, the fasting and prayer used in preparation, etc., all support their teaching.

It then happens, in time, that “glimpses” beyond my initial non-perception begin to appear. It’s like your eyes beginning to focus so that you see things in a manner not seen before. Much of what is going on is the purification of the heart. When the heart is pure, we see God. But seeing with a pure heart is not the same kind of seeing that we normally have with an impure heart.

So, again in time, we begin to trust this new perception, and act on it. Vladimir Lossky describes it as a “participatory adherence.” What a thick phrase! I think of this, somewhat, in terms of how I perceive someone whom I love. I extend myself towards them, and extend my empathy towards them. I work to see things from their perspective, etc. In responding to a new perspective given by the Scriptures and the Fathers, I extend myself towards it. I begin to act on the assumption that it is true. I “live into” it.

It also can be compared to learning a new language. There are the first classes, some vocabulary and examples of dialog. But there are also those first attempts at conversation – full of risks and mistakes and fumbling with words and grammar – but a true extension of the self towards something.

There are many things, like the Eucharist, that are part of the “grammar” and “vocabulary” of the faith. Little by little we practice and slowly gain a little fluency”

Harrower continues:

“God’s incarnation is an objective basis for orienting us to the fact that he cares about the safety and restoration of people’s relational, moral, and creative aspects. His care is not undermined or overturned by horrors or traumas. God’s actions, such as the incarnation, are historical and part of what make up reality; therefore, they cannot be ignored selectively but must be integrated with what we experience—even if it generates paradoxes”

God promises to overcome objective and subjective horrors by rescuing people from the consequences of their horror-making and trauma-perpetuating attitudes and actions….

God has the power to bring about a counterstory to the cross-generational horror-making genealogy that preceded Jesus.”

…In his earthly ministry, Jesus makes it objectively clear that God rejects horrors and trauma. He is morally and creatively opposed to them. In Christ, God condemns both objective horrors and subjective trauma, at the same time as offering hope for human horror makers…

David Bentley Hart captured this in the wake of the 2005 South Asian tsunami:

Our faith is in a God who has come to rescue His creation from the absurdity of sin and the emptiness of death, and so we are permitted to hate these things with a perfect hatred.… When I“see the death of a child, I do not see the face of God, but the face of his enemy. It is … a faith that … has set us free from optimism, and taught us hope instead.

Jesus rejects horrors so strongly that he ultimately and definitely will banish them and those who caused them."

In fact, rather than the naive pollyanna attitude of many blithe Christians today, Jesus seems much more sensitive to the horrific aspects of life.
                              

“….there is no indication that the people involved will be judged and destroyed in the future. Indeed, Luke tells us that these images of God are restored to dignity (Luke 8:26–39).

After their deliverance, one is described as “sitting at Jesus’ feet, dressed and in his right mind” (8:35).

Here we see God’s intent for humanity revealed through Jesus the horror defeater: the man is an image of God who is restored to his relational, moral, and functional capacities, and therefore restored as a person….

There is no anticipation of a future time in which this man will be judged, tormented, or destroyed. God aims to heal, renew, and restore these people...

The resurrection of Jesus is another historical instance through which God demonstrates his perspective on horrors. He rejects death as the great horror that it is…

“ Hans-Christian Kammler writes: “The gospel has its origin not in the world of death, but rather comes into this world marked by death as the word of the resurrected one from beyond, with transformative power. With Easter morning the dominion of death is broken; death no longer has the last word.” ”

However, it is more often than not an indirect comfort. Kammler continues, “The comfort of the gospel [that death is not the end of life] certainly remains a contested comfort, whose truth must always be authenticated by God himself against our own experience of self and world, and must be inscribed on our heart.”

When the resurrection becomes part of the way we perceive the world, the world looks different indeed. ”

“Horrors do not prevent Jesus from being present with Christians today, not even those horrors that he himself endured before they killed him: “The brutal and sinful circumstances of the [crucified Christ’s] human being do not prevent the fact that God is present with us in Christ,” writes Ola Sigurdson”

However, the “grotesque” details of the passion of Christ remind us that Jesus’ presence in the church (Matt 18:20) will take place amid suffering, death, and betrayal.32 This dynamic of life-in-the-midst-of-death describes the historical expression of the life of the church in many of its various social and political expressions. As a theological category, Jesus’ life-giving presence in the midst of social chaos and suffering explains the visible and unlikely historical survival of the Christian church.”
                                                         

“Christian hope is therefore a future-oriented hope. This hope includes the prospect of one day understanding ourselves, our experiences, and our interactions with others within God’s perspective. Only then will our lives “make sense”—divine sense.”

Perceiving our social environment through the eyes of faith and experiences of God mediated through the church will be one of the prominent ways forward”

How we memorialize the past confers different degrees of meaning to it and frames how significant it is for generating as well as anticipating a certain kind of future”

The knock-on effects of this for the present are that “memories take the form of habits and gut-level expectations and relational styles and they continue to influence one throughout life.ways of remembering and being in the present open possibilities for life beyond continually reliving an ongoing horror narrative.”

Deborah van Deusen Hunsinger writes: “If God in Jesus Christ descends into the worst hell imaginable in order to deliver us from the hells we inflict upon one another, then such a God is worthy of our trust.… in life and in death.

Joshua Seachris’s pointed question: “Is there an intelligible, existentially satisfying narrative in which to locate the experience of pain and suffering and to give the sufferer some solace and hope? Evil in a meaningful universe may not cease from being evil, but it may be more bearable.”

The final outcome of the entire process of each believing person’s creation, disorientation through the course of their life, and death and resurrection will lead to full ontological reorientation as an image of God....

 God’s own experience of trauma through the incarnate Son’s traumas allows him to empathize with us generally and know what it is like to struggle as a human “from the inside.” In Christ, God has knowledge of horrors and trauma from the perspective of the sufferer.

In addition to having general empathy for us, the indwelling of the Spirit means that God really may have specific empathy for each particular Christian, and therefore knows from the inside what it is like for you to suffer as you do.”

A trauma narrative recounts the trauma within the frame of a larger (positive) worldview. Consequently, the interpretation of life in view of trauma does not necessarily have to conclude with toxic beliefs such as mistrusting and questioning the dignity and agency of the self or others....

In this tragic context, there is room to act hopefully, meaningfully, and with integrity. Perhaps we can hazard to say that, from the perspective of our ultimate state, human beings experience horrible tragedies rather than permanent horrors per se.

In the context of trauma, God’s gaze means that “neither what we do nor what we suffer defines us at the deepest level…Volf continues: “Instead of being defined by how human beings relate to us, we are defined by how God relates to us. We know that fundamentally we are who we are … because God loves us.”

Christian remembrance occurs in a particular perspective: suffering remembered in organic connection with hope, restoration, and a future promise of freedom from death and pain. ”

This will hopefully place our lives in a context that supports “a sense of order, identity, agency, well-being, and solidarity, while also expressing the impossibility of fully comprehending the trauma. It is precisely the capacity to preserve such paradoxes that prevents a trauma narrative from slipping into banality....”

New, meaningful attachments arise. These transformations include a new self-understanding, a new way of receiving morally pure relationships, and relating to others in ethically pure and creative ways. Meaning is implicitly and explicitly perceived in the process of participation in these news ways of being in the world. This offers a lived response to the question of living meaningfully in the aftermath of trauma...”

….it affirms the reality of suffering and does not let us pretend that life should be or is a life free from the obvious suffering in the world. This insight is helpful for all members of faith communities, not just those who have suffered obvious and crippling trauma.

The Lord’s Supper recalls Jesus’ sufferings as well as our own and those around us. Memories of suffering, even if the suffering of others, serve to interrupt an oppressive and antirealist view of what human life looks like.

These memories of trauma unmask what Jon Sobrino calls “the culture of concealment.” By hiding horrors and trauma responses, opines Sobrino, we perpetuate a culture of “distortion,” which if it is unchecked means we are “living a lie.”

                                                                        

"The Lord’s Supper is a realist countermeasure to these “false realisms,” as Elizabeth O’Donnell Gandolfo puts it. Its honest realism about suffering interrupts “received narratives about ‘the way things are,’ subvert[s] official versions of the past and uncover[s] reality for “what it truly is.”

Second, “the memory of suffering in general [and of particular events] … subverts the prevailing mores and values of a world order in which resignation, insensitivity, individualism, and an understanding of happiness as success are the norm.” ”

In this view, a life strongly scarred by trauma and possibly incapable of achieving “success” will have little meaning. Matthew’s Gospel defines and gives meaning to people in relationship to God the Trinity. On this view, people who are traumatized neither are meaningless in themselves, nor are they incapable of positive influence on others...

 Jesus’ gaze is a particular way of seeing the world that is at the same time a spiritual interpretation of it. His perspective looks for the saving presence of God and adopts a particular…

All the elements of Christian liturgy—the gathered body, the music, the creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and all other ancient words and structures for gathering, preaching, confession, absolution, and blessing—play a unique role in recovering a sense of safety, self, and belonging after horrors.”

My next blog will be on why we ought to bring back the ancient and venerable practice of protest prayers.

                                                                        

I end with a poem by Baudelaire, who, as Marie Dauda tells us, “did not recoil from the mystery of God’s silence, he put it into verse. ‘Réversibilité‘ illustrates the opposition between the speaker, burdened with shame, hatred, and old age, and his addressee, an angelic and youthful figure of beauty, light and joy.

The title echoes the reversibility of merits and pains, which is, as Bloy reminds us, another name for the communion of saints."

Reversibility


Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Shame and remorse and sobs and weary spite,

And the vague terrors of the fearful night

That crush the heart up like a crumpled leaf?

Angel of gaiety, have you tasted grief?

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate?

With hands clenched in the shade and tears of gall,

When Vengeance beats her hellish battle-call,

And makes herself the captain of our fate,

Angel of kindness, have you tasted hate ?

Angel of health, did ever you know pain,

Which like an exile trails his tired footfalls

The cold length of the white infirmary walls,

With lips compressed, seeking the sun in vain?

Angel of health, did ever you know pain?


Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?

Know you the fear of age, the torment vile

Of reading secret horror in the smile

Of eyes your eyes have loved since long ago?

Angel of beauty, do you wrinkles know?

Angel of happiness, and joy, and light,

Old David would have asked for youth afresh

From the pure touch of your enchanted flesh;

I but implore your prayers to aid my plight,

Angel of happiness, and joy, and light.

- translation by Arthur Symons

The Gospel Through the Eyes of Trauma: A Horror Story

                                                              

There’s a reason historically Holy Texts were used liturgically. The entire point of ritual is to shape the person’s mind, heart, and imagination to receive the world and the transcendent in a particular way, for good or evil.

Those who’ve been traumatized often “read” the world through a shattered gaze.

In his book “God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World” Scott Harrower reads the Gospel of Mathew with a “horror hermeneutic” through the eyes of someone traumatized to illustrate this. 

As for book, I think Harrower illustrates the problem well, and indeed makes a good case that the Christian God and Way is essentially life-giving, nevertheless, his optimism for Christianity as a way of being with the trauma may be a bit naive, especially in a secular society, to so transform a trauma-survivor, even if only a bit, I think would require at least a tight community full of “thick” Christian practices and rituals, I write of this HERE and HERE

As James KA Smith, in “You Are What You Love” says:

“As lovers—as desiring creatures and liturgical animals—our primary orientation to the world is visceral, not cerebral.

Worship is essentially a counterformation to those rival liturgies we are often immersed in, cultural practices that covertly capture our loves and longings, miscalibrating them, orienting us to rival versions of the good life.

You won’t be liberated from deformation by new information, rather we regularly undergo a ritual cleansing of the symbolic universes we absorb elsewhere.

We are moved more than we are convinced. Our imaginations are aesthetic organs. Our hearts are like stringed instruments that are plucked by story, poetry, metaphor, images. We tap our existential feet to the rhythm of imaginative drums.

To be human is to inhabit some narrative enchantment of the world.”

We all receive the world according to how we have been shaped, the good news is that we can do so intentionally.

First, Harrower describes our condition, then explains how trauma effects a persons perception, and then he will present his “horror” reading of Matthew. 

For this blog, I'll just quote portions of the book. He writes,

“A negative presence has taken over the realm in which each particular life had its orientation, potential, and actualization. The life forms that remain are directed toward their opposite end, with the undeniable result that human persons live a “death-bounded and death-directed life.”

This is not a metaphor but a biological reality.

Griffiths describes the gory reality of life within death directedness:

“Traces of the cosmos’ surpassing beauty remain, some evident to human creatures and some not. But for the most part, the world appears to human creatures as it is: a charnel house, saturated in blood violently shed; an ensemble of inanimate creatures decaying toward extinction; a theatre of vice and cruelty.”

The strange, warped, unnatural environment is one of the drivers behind the “vice and cruelty” in the warped natural environment.

In fact, the human adaptation to the suboptimal environment motivates further dreadful qualities in relationships…marked by absences, or deprivations, of what should be there—in other words, various lacks of the kind of fullness that is proper to a thing’s nature. In their place we may see the presence of a negative aberration, like phantom pain in place of a limb.”

For Marion, “We encounter being in love, not in the ego. The proper formulation should not be ‘I think therefore I am’ but ‘I am loved therefore I am.’ ”

I believe that not only is there a lack or absence of life when a horror takes place, but that in that location (the mind, or body, or a relationship) a real negative reality is introduced in the place of life’s positive being.”

Acts of horror, witnessing these, and being victims of them all contribute to stripping away an image’s capacities for being a human kind of person by damaging the relational, functional, and moral capacities that come with being an image bearer.”

A diminishment in the personal capacities of a human person means that the personhood they possess, which allows them to recognize and relate to God in a life-receiving and life-giving manner, is gradually absent.

As a consequence, less of someone’s personhood, nature, and vitality is offered toward the development of life in other people. The fullness of their being, their unique “face” or self, is less available for life and the gaze of love.

Various kinds of pain stemming from the loss of being inhibit a person from offering their self forward as an expression and vehicle of love. Absences and pains distort perception, and as their consequence, we fall into various impersonal or contrapersonal misinterpretations of what being and life are, such as thinking “I think therefore I am” rather than “I am loved therefore I am.”

In other words, traumatic “reductions” of a person means that there is less intentional phenomena for life, less disclosure of God’s goodness through his images, and in its place there are distortions and voids. These impede processes by which a person’s being develops from their nature.”

                                                                 

Matthew’s Gospel was written as a story for a concrete religious community, and it also deals with the very complex aspects of human life.

As Ian Boxall writes, readers have an “active role in creating meaning through their engagement with gaps in and ambiguities of the biblical text.”

“One of the main insights from trauma studies is that, when a traumatized person interacts with anything in the world, they do so through the lens of their own trauma. ”

Traumatized readers may oftentimes not have the breadth of perspective and the relational resources with which to read Matthew in a reparative and helpful manner. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe theirs will be a paranoid reading by default.”

This is an interpretative approach to a text that inevitably finds the violence the reader and their approach skeptically anticipate. The consequences of this are that it generates and cements the normativity of the violent and traumatic worldview it seeks to find, thereby perpetuating violence at the core of reality.”

                                                                     

The Gospel of Mathew as Horror:

Harrows point out that the entire Gospel is full of horror:

“These include the massacre of children, profound loss, spectral beings such as angels and demons, a beheading, oppressive power systems, distressed people, torture, and suicide.”

....the genealogy of Christ that follows only serves to undermine any expectations that a messiah may yield hopes for human living and meaningfulness.

“Matthew’s story opens with a haunting record of human disaster stories.”

“Dynamic abundance and vitality should be the hallmarks of this extended family history. In its place, the genealogy retells the history of a doomed nation and its exile. It is a historical affirmation of the senselessness of humans and their cultures, even those who call on God”

If this is the way God cares for his own, then how about the rest of us? “Who is worse off: Those who believed God was on their side or those who never knew this God in the first place?”

“From the height of Israel’s political and spiritual glory under King David,” writes Frederick Dale Bruner, “Israel first gradually then precipitously declines until she falls into the pit of exile, losing her land, temple, kings, and thus, seemingly, almost all of God’s promises.

It is oxymoronic to think in terms of God’s chosen people: the reader searches the ruins in vain.

                                                                        

“Within these cycles, God is certainly alive, but perhaps only tangentially present and interested in the misery of human life.

This creates a tension in the later Old Testament literature: God is able to bless but somehow is not doing so. The deep question this generates is whether God is a kind of monster.

He is a monster whose actions reveal that he is an uncanny mixture of opposites: care and neglect, promise and punishment, blesser and blighter. His monstrosity could be argued along a spectrum: at one end, perhaps, he is uncaring where he should be caring; at the other end, he is more actively against his own people.”

“… historical events seem to be primarily driven by transgressive abuses of power. The unrelenting story of the struggle over self-rule and subsequent communal imprisonment is a far cry from ideal covenantal relationships and shalom.”

As the genealogy recounts the history of God’s people, it recalls that Israel’s own kings were often also oppressors. This point is made by both the inclusion of evil characters such as Joram (Matt 1:8) and Manasseh (1:10), as well as by the omission of known historical kings, whose lives were outrageous in their depravity and deaths.

The genealogy’s ending on the name of a man who was famously murdered unjustly, which indicates the mood according to which the story should be read. ”

It is reasonable to conclude that there is no such thing as shalom and that people will not flourish: neither then nor now.

This overwhelming truth is compounded by the ludicrousness of asking what kind of events could overturn this objective account of history as the basis for beliefs about God and persons.”

Mary loses her past life as she is taken to that strangest of lands, Egypt. There she will live as a foreigner under the threat of death (2:13)…she is hunted murderously by Herod, and later in the story when her son is crucified.”

Militarized people rip them from the grasping hands and arms of their mothers, fathers, and siblings. Death reigns, and life is crushed underfoot in order to satiate the powerfully oppressive.

In the larger scheme, nothing changes; people die senselessly and away from God’s care.

Hence, the “weeping and mourning” cannot be consoled: “She refused to be consoled, because they are no more” (2:18). Mary is doomed to raise her child in this woeful context.”

Self-interested people continually harass Jesus, as do demons. He has to withdraw from the public on a number of occasions. Even his very small band of followers ultimately betrays him. His only hope seems to be his intimate relationship with his Father in heaven. However, this relationship is destroyed to the point of abandonment, cementing deep pessimism about the care of God and prospects for meaning and hope for human beings.

God doesn’t help his own son, again defying expectations…

“Jesus’ cry of abandonment reflects our intuitive beliefs about the way the world is; he is not speaking about abstract concepts at this point.

Even though he is seen after death, Jesus is not the same person but a spectral version of the man who had been Jesus of Nazareth. He is barely recognizable. At the supposed high point of the narrative, when he is worshiped on the mountain before his disappearance, some of his followers doubt.

At that point, Jesus offers them a new vision of who God is and points people away from the faith of national Israel as they have known it. He then promises to be with them, at which point he disappears. He never returns, leaving the majority of them to be killed by various people groups around the Mediterranean.”

At this point, Harrower will now present us a “blessed” reading of Matthew, and investigate if it indeed might benefit trauma survivors.

That second part is HERE,  with my own comments. 

                                                         

Job & the Trauma of God

“Job’s response is not a confession of sin but a recognition of his limited knowledge about the God who has led him to discover Wisdom in the world at large. Job does not confess; he concedes he has done no wrong but that his knowledge of God is limited!”

- Trauma and Wisdom Therapy- A Commentary on Job, Norman Habel

God trauma is a horrific thing, Habel has written a book, superficial on the whole, but spotted with a few interesting thoughts throughout, that uses Job to illustrate both the experience, and one possible, almost Taoist, way through it, although I would point to many ways.

I'll mention this is not just a theoretical book, such as that of the much better thinker Marcus Pound, who has a view of Christianity not as something which heals the sense of alienation or split that accompanies us in so many ways; rather, Pound claims, it posits the split as such, only now from the perspective of excess.

I ought to also mention, this isn’t a Christian interpretation of Job, but a strait reading. For most ancient peoples, including Christians up until the 1500’s, if a text was deemed “scripture” it was used to commune with a god, it was thought to be this god speaking in the here and now, it always needed to be interpreted, (contra Luther’s rule of reading the plain sense) hence in Gregory the Great’s 4 volumes on Job he constantly plea’s with the reader not to read with fleshly eyes. I’ve written on how traditional Christians read the Bible HERE

Psychologically, Job is often seen as man beginning to have a new vision of God.

In any case, there are many ways to read the text, this is but one, which I think sheds light upon the experience of God trauma. I’ll simply quote large chunks and occasionally comment in blue.

In Trauma and Wisdom Therapy- A Commentary on Job -- Norman C_ Habel he remarks that the first thing Job is forced to confront is the “Eternal Why” as he explores the misery of meaningless existence.

For Job and the Wisdom community that Job represents, the hedge Job experiences is the opposite of what it’s supposed to be, a barrier to misfortune, and now acts as a boundary of inescapable misery created by God, here identified as the ancient Eloah.

His friends appear, accuse Job, give their own version of God and His ways, and Job tells them their words are all hot air and obvious untruths.

Job then moves to accuse God as his very enemy.

Habel writes,

“The narrater shows how a human being experiencing extreme trauma can come to the frightening conclusion that misery, servitude, and suffering are inevitable consequences of being a human being living on Earth.

He even goes so far as to laugh at the tradition that human beings are created in the image of God. They are not created to rule on Earth but to be slaves and hirelings.

Job does not experience his identity as being imago Dei (in the image of God), but as imago servi (a slave of God).

"Despite the devastating trauma of his community, the narrator reflects a wild hope embedded among expressions of deep despair and a sense of hopelessness. The narrator refuses to succumb to total despair; he dreams of a new day for his people, even if it is portrayed as a bizarre return from Sheol.

Yet, beyond the Covenant God and the God of unwarranted disasters, the narrator has Job expecting an unidentified power to intervene that will enable Job to “see” a different God, face to face. The way in which that hope is finally fulfilled for the traumatized Wisdom community is a consummate leap of faith by the Wisdom-oriented narrator.

Suddenly, amid his trauma, his agony, his isolation, and his hope of litigation, he has a wild dream of a Redeemer rising to be his advocate!

The trauma portrayal of Job is designed to undermine the concept of retributive justice as pivotal for divine human relations and to explore a new paradigm for understanding the role of divine justice in the world of a community suffering trauma.

The Covenant God of reward and retribution deserves to be exposed as a false god.

The pain, it would seem, is not so much due to the sickening impact of the colorful portrayal of the worlds of the wicked but rather the harsh reality that retributive justice is understood to be at the center of God’s relationship with humans.

Job, however, is willing to expose the Covenant God of Israel as a futile source of support for his traumatized companions.

                                                            

Habel then speaks of the next few stages on the way to wisdom :

“Job asks why he was born and forced to live in miseryAbove all, he asks why a hedge has been planted around him so that he sees no “way”—no meaning, purpose, or direction in life.

To ask “the eternal why” activates the spirit of the trauma sufferer to take even bolder steps— in contemporary terms activates the stress hormones in the mind, or in Wisdom School terms awakens the incarnate Wisdom in the heart.

Stage 2

Scream Bloody Murder

Job moves beyond questions of why or calls for compassion to screams and violent outbursts of anger in the face of the Covenant God whose harsh ways the community has been expected to endorse.

Stage 3

Test Your Old Beliefs

Job challenges the very idea that God is a constant compassionate and caring companion. In particular, he challenges the reality of a righteous God who is renowned for his fair administration of reward and retribution. He even accuses his God of being a Seeing Eye who relishes the sight of Job’s trauma.

Stage 4

Take a Leap of Faith

When the God of traditional values seems to be nothing short of an adversary or even an enemy, the trauma sufferer may contemplate suicide. Alternatively, he or she may dare to take a bold leap of faith and confront that God with a barrage of accusations or an attempt to take that God to court to reveal that God’s guilt.

Job contemplates that leap of faith and faces endless frustration until the healing process begins and he formulates in writing his declaration of innocence.

The decision of Job to record his experiences in writing is a precedent that the Wisdom narrator introduces to a traumatized community reluctant to make their faltering faith public.

The stage of challenging prior traditional understandings of God prepares the way for the introduction of existential Wisdom and Wisdom therapy to guide Job and the traumatized Wisdom community on a journey toward healing.

                                                  

Interactive Stages

Stage 1

Go Back to Wisdom School

That mystery is encompassed in an ancient poem that may well be designated a Wisdom Manifesto (ch. 28). In that declaration, we are confronted not only with the science of how to find existential Wisdom but also with a God whom the wise recognize as the original Wisdom Scientist. This God is a far cry from the perception of the Covenant God...

Stage 2

Tell Your Trauma Story

By making their trauma experiences public, the traumatized Wisdom community, whom the narrator is challenging, has opened the way to discern a solution to understanding the nature of their plight and their God.

Stage 3

Recognize the Option of a Would-Be Arbiter

Unfortunately Job had none, but someone may function as this.

Stage 4

Explore the Locus of Wisdom with the Wisdom Therapist

God, the Wisdom Therapist, poses insightful questions that challenge Job to leave the dust and ashes of his trauma location and explore locations where the healing presence of innate Wisdom may be discerned in the complex design of the cosmos.

The Wisdom therapy of the book of Job involves experiencing provocative questions that challenge previous understandings of God and reality, questions that guide the trauma sufferer into amazing new levels of consciousness that overwhelm the cruel world of trauma.

The narrator has opened the doubting minds and the traumatized spirits of his Wisdom community to an amazing cosmos where mystery and meaning are embedded in the “ways” of Wisdom that function as healing pulses for all who are conscious of their spiritual presence in the cosmos.

Stage 5

Celebrate Healing

Job has gained a deep Wisdom consciousness about the presence of Wisdom active in the world that surrounds him. Job has discerned God as the Presence of Cosmic Wisdom.

The Wisdom therapy Job experiences also has the potential for the traumatized community whom Job represents to dismiss their Covenant God and be free to experience the Wisdom that the Wisdom God identifies operating in every component of the cosmos that surrounds them, a freedom that is worth celebrating.

Wisdom was not first and foremost something humans “acquired” (qana), but A driving force in nature, a dynamic dimension of the universe discerned by ancient scientists of the Wisdom School, a force that warrants investigation even today.

Ironically, the God who finds Wisdom does finally speak, but his therapy does not focus directly on the personal guilt or trauma of Job but beyond Job on the Wisdom design of the cosmos.”

Thus, it doesn’t focus on answers, but rather on being present and open to a force, a Tao, a way. I've written on Ritual Knowing being a direction, not an explanation HERE.

Job, in the midst of his trauma, associates God’s inherent Wisdom with his power..

The educated reader will notice this corresponds to calvinistic and modern conceptions of God, departing from classical theism, that privilege His will above His nature, as Love, making God something like a really powerful person, a being in this universe existing more or less as everything else exists and acts, whose will is then in contest with ours, approached with a discourse of information rather than transformation, as I wrote about HERE. 

“Wisdom is not to be discerned by trying to understand the mind of God but by recognizing that Wisdom is a cosmic reality.

                                                        

Now, I'll say I think Habel is too neat, and optimistic, it's not that easy. From Trauma studies, we know Job would likely need an actual environment to heal his relationship to God first, first recovering safety, recovering the self’s story, and recovering community. One wonders what kind of restorative action may be pursued in the absence of the primary relationships that secure meaning. Also a community "shaping" of the grammar of being, HERE.  

Although Habel doesn’t mention it, part of Job’s trauma, it seems to me, must be his diminishment as a human being, both in his physical and mental capacity, on that note, I’ll mention Scott Harrower’s superb book, “God of All Comfort: A Trinitarian Response to the Horrors of This World:

“A diminishment in the personal capacities of a human person means that the personhood they possess, which allows them to recognize and relate to God in a life-receiving and life-giving manner, is gradually absent...

Negative presences, such as an absent stare into the distance or eyes that never make eye contact, replace what was once geared for person-to-person relating.

As a consequence, less of someone’s personhood, nature, and vitality is offered toward the development of life in other people. The fullness of their being, their unique “face” or self, is less available for life and the gaze of love.

Various kinds of pain stemming from the loss of being inhibit a person from offering their self forward as an expression and vehicle of love. Absences and pains distort perception, and as their consequence, we fall into various impersonal or contrapersonal misinterpretations of what being and life are, such as thinking “I think therefore I am” rather than “I am loved therefore I am.”

In other words, traumatic “reductions” of a person means that there is less intentional phenomena for life, less disclosure of God’s goodness through his images, and in its place there are distortions and voids. These impede processes by which a person’s being develops from their nature.”

In any case, Habel continues, 

"Job does not rehearse all the pains of his life again, even though Job outlines his personal history in his litigation narrative. In this Wisdom therapy, Job is taken on a journey with a different God—this God’s own life story is related to the cosmos and its origins. On that journey, Job experiences the therapy of endless questions about the wonders and design of a Wisdom-filled universe.

The outcome of this form of Wisdom therapy is for Job to gain an amazing cosmic consciousness, a profound Wisdom consciousness, and a challenging primordial consciousness—a new relationship with the Wisdom presence in the cosmos that surrounds him and the enigma of a God....”

This reminds me of the venerable way of unknowing, privileged in eastern Orthodox Christian apophaticism, or negative theology, and spoken about in works like the medieval mystical text The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that you can only experience God by forgetting and unknowing what you are most certain about.

Or St. Gregory of Nyssa’s way of constantly purging yourself of concepts viewing the journey towards God as a progression from light to a "dazzling darkness," where true knowledge is found in unknowing, Nicholas of Cusa’a Learned Ignorance, or in eastern ways, such as Ramana Maharshi’s way questioning just who is doing the questioning until one realizes one is not one’s mind, and even in modern therapy modalities such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy where you create space between your thoughts and your observer self.

"Wisdom therapy involves responding to a range of insightful questions that enable you to leap from the misery of the moment into the mysteries of the cosmos, from the turmoil of trauma into the unknown of the universe, where Wisdom is a pervasive, positive presence and its role a therapeutic force that binds and guides the realms of creation.

Significantly, the realms where Job is expected to discover the “answers” to the profound questions posed by the whirlwind therapist are in nature not society, in the domains of the cosmos and world of the wild, not the human communities where Job experienced his traumatic disasters.

                                                              

Thus Job has a new understanding of God, wisdom, and even what the “fear of God” means.

In her superb book, The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations,  Carol A Newsom notes that in this speech,  "the prose tale made no mention of wisdom and understanding...

Thus, one realizes that the poem is in no sense saying that humans have no access to wisdom. They will not find it if they look for it as an object (even an intellectual object) but only if they also know it through a comparable mode of being, a way of acting.”

According to Newsom, the wisdom poem asserts that life can be lived from within this viewpoint, from within the coherency of wisdom.

She writes, “Such a way of living does not entitle one to expect freedom from trouble (contra Prov 3:21–26 and the like). The coherency and meaningfulness of such a life is to be found as much within suffering as within peace.”

The existential psychologist Jeffey Boss also perceive this change in the idea of wisdom his book, Human Consciousness of God in the Book of Job: A Theological and Psychological Commentary, he writes,

“It is in the redefinition of the “fear of the Lord” wherein wisdom (or meaning) may be discovered coherently.”

“In the former, wisdom is seen as a passive object to be discovered. In the latter, wisdom is coming forth actively….he verses which follow are about living, active wisdom, which can be met only from life in its fullness, as 28:28 will conclude.”

Marshell sums up Boss by saying “that wisdom can be realized through the actions of a human person even if a human person cannot understand wisdom itself."

Boss argues that Job’s awareness of God is transformed as he encounters seven aspects of the divine person: “the nurturing God of stability,” “the destroying deity,”  “the self-concealing God,” “the far off object of desire,” “the ineffable Holy One,”  “God as destination,” and finally “the God beyond God.”

At the end Boss explains the lack of dialogue in the epilogue by stating, “This could mean that Job does not now encounter an aspect of God, but is with the God behind and beyond all aspects of God. This is the eternal ultimate reality.” The central insight gained, according to Boss, is “a religion which points outside itself towards what we may, unforeseen, become makes human growth possible.”

Habel agree's,

"In developing his rational arguments, Job called upon El-Shaddai to answer him. The rational arguments failed. El-Shaddai does not answer. It is significant that it is Yahweh, the personal name of God, related to the verb “to be” which conveys some sense of pure being, existence that answers Job.

Rather than rational arguments, we find in the God speeches descriptive images that stir the imagination and the emotions. Newsom notes that they “engage specifically aesthetic dimensions of understanding.” Robert Gordis calls them “poetic pictures rich in hyperbole.”

“As Newsom notes, “Only primary images can evoke the necessary recognition and emotional response.”

Of course, perception of God must begin with beauty, to evoke desire to know Him, as all knowledge functions, one must love to know (anything). I've written on that HERE and note that for Plotinus, reasoning itself is simply the recognition of beauty, HERE

The divine speeches, then, serve to demonstrate the presence of an ultimate reality in a way that transcends human reason. Though it cannot be comprehended, its presence is made real for Job through the images shared with him by God.

Writing of such concepts, Viktor Frankl noted that they “cannot be espoused and adopted by us on a conscious level—they are something that we are."

In his rather unique take, Dermot Cox in his book The Triumph of Impotence: Job and the Tradition of the Absurd, makes an interesting point about Job learning about the existence of some ultimate:

“Yahweh is not a God who takes away pain, or who carefully correlates the elements of existence so as to exhibit a pattern…

“He is essentially the ‘something outside’ that gives meaning to an absurd existence by the hope that there is an ultimate meaning, an ultimate plan. He does not show man the plan, for man could not comprehend it if he saw it.”

Viktor Frankl agrees: “What is demanded of man is not, as some existential philosophers teach, to endure the meaninglessness of life, but rather to bear his incapacity to grasp its unconditional meaningfulness in rational terms."

                                            

Habel continues,

"Job comes to know a God of cosmic Wisdom that transforms the trauma sufferer into a human being with a rich cosmic consciousness, an acute awareness of the domains of the cosmos to which he is connected by a common force called Wisdom.

Job’s response is not a confession of sin but a recognition of his limited knowledge about the God who has led him to discover Wisdom in the world at large.

Job does not confess; he concedes he has done no wrong but that his knowledge of God is limited!

By posing questions about the creatures of the wild, the therapist leads Job to move beyond his victim mentality as a traumatized human being to discern his “place” is the wider community of the wild where innate Wisdom guides all living creatures, even those in the wild, to celebrate life.

God responds by challenging Job to prove his capacity to comprehend the ways of Wisdom in the cosmos rather than face him in court.

In this response, Job recognizes he is “small,” especially in the context of the cosmic design. He does not confess “I have sinned” or “I have done wrong.” 

For Job the case may be closed, but YHWH renews the challenge with the introduction of Behemoth and Leviathan in the speeches that follow.

In this text, God declares that dominion over creatures such as the wild ass and the wild ox is not possible for humans. The wild ass defies the world of humans and refuses to obey a human taskmaster.

                                                             

In this discourse, the therapist who has awakened Job’s cosmic consciousness (ch. 38) and Job’s Wisdom consciousness (ch. 39) now awakens Job’s primordial consciousness. Job is also connected to the domains of chaos that are part of God’s cosmic design. To discern innate Wisdom active in all the domains of the universe is to “see” the dynamic Presence of Wisdom permeating the cosmos, and in the process to “see” God.

I have written HERE on how it is not from metaphysics that one is "inspired" to see the meaning of nature, perception must be "morally" conditioned -the senses rendered rational to mirror the rationality of the world, the Platonic axiom that “Only like can know, and be known, by like.”

I would say, and have written HERE we must be shaped a certain way to perceive the world. As Charles Taylor has shown, rather than the enlightenment subtracting various belief structure to show us the “real world” it simply replaced them, which we take for granted. 

After all, ritual shapes us and only certain kinds of people can receive the world a certain way, HERE I discuss this more. 

Habel goes on to say,

"In a roundabout way, Job has achieved his goal to meet God, not as his adversary in court but as the Wisdom Presence in the design of the cosmos. To see God as Wisdom Presence in the cosmos overcomes his sense of God as the Seeing Eye observing him down on Earth. God can be “seen” in the domains and design of the cosmos, not necessarily as a discrete celestial being but as a Wisdom force that integrates, permeates, and activates the Universe.”

I’ll mention this is a all a new way to imagine God, Newsom, in her book Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations, notes that Job’s response reserves “the possibility of a word yet to be spoken.” In Job we see several conceptions of God as well as reactions to our human experience.

Habel, in contrast to theological attempts to understand (the God of) the Book of Job, rather attempts to reconnect the self and the world.

Rudolf Allers, the famous existentialist Therapist defined as the ultimate goal of all psychotherapy: "To reconcile man and the world by looking not only at what is (conditions), but also at that which could (freedom) and should (meaning) be.”

As such, Marshall H. Lewis, a logotherapist commenting on Job, will say,

“….the problem is perhaps not so much the unfound answer as it is the question. For inasmuch as impersonal meaning would be the designator of something so remote from everyday human existence that it would have little, if any, actual existential relevance, an impersonal, generic answer to the problem of suffering would also be far too removed from actual human experience to be of solace, or perhaps even understandable (which, by the way, also portrays Frankl’s position on the theodicy problem: He held that there is indeed an answer, but one that we would not be able to understand intellectually). But…it is possible to address the problem of evil and suffering without fully understanding it; and the answer is not merely cognitive or affective, but existential.”

Another Logotherapist commenting on Job, Dr Atlas, states, “Like Job, the logotherapeutic patients are educated to realize that their problem may not be answered, and perhaps, need not be answered. Frankl and Job teach the patient and the student respectively to have unconditional trust in a very conditional life.”

Marshall H. Lewis in his book on Job remarks,

“To say yes to life means to realize the meaning of the moment through the categorical values simply because one makes the choice to do so. 

To say the same thing in the language of the Book of Job, it means to fear God and turn from evil, to choose disinterested piety—simply because one makes the choice to do so, makes the choice despite the inevitable suffering of life.

Lewis ends with this advice: "Live your suffering with such integrity and wholeness that God may, in fact, someday answer you.”