Thursday, July 18, 2019
The Traumatic Fragmenting of Emotion and Reason
[I posted this yesterday on Facebook]
"[E]motion is not opposed to reason; our emotions assign value to experience and thus are the foundation of reason. Our self-experience is the product of the balance between our rational and our emotional brains. When these two systems are in balance, we 'feel like ourselves.' However, when our survival is at stake, these systems can function relatively independently...
When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict (as when we're enraged with someone we love, frightened by someone we depend on, or lust after someone who is off limits), a tug-of-war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience - your gut, your heart, your lungs - and will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery."
- from: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.
This is a book about trauma and its treatment. To me, Ben Shapiro is (merely) a figure head. I hear this voice represented in many who intend to tear down the arguments of their enemies with "facts and logic."
What's especially interesting, however, is that I frequently hear this battle cry from BOTH liberals AND conservatives.
So, again, I just quoted a book on trauma. What this says to me, then - if he relies on "facts and reason" over and against the "emotions" of liberals - is that, according to our neurology, Ben Shapiro isn't coolly, objectively, and neutrally building an argument in a peaceful and respectful debate so much as participating in a long, violent, and bloody history of trauma at the heart and foundation of our national narrative. His presumption that reason and emotion don't generally function harmoniously is his presumption that we are constantly in a war zone of traumatic crisis in which our survival is at stake.
By the same token, if liberals are doing the same when they hang their hat on the logical contradictions in conservative positions - such as how conservatives claim to be pro life while being war mongers, or claim to hold the moral high ground in general and on sexual ethics in particular while Christians show no statistical difference in divorce rates and support a serial abuser and adulterer - they are living into and embodying the same exact trauma as Shapiro and his followers. (This doesn't mean that the contradictions have no import; only that, in and of themselves, they only say we're suffering PTSD)
Perhaps justice doesn't look like being right in a debate so much as the healing of a long and bloody history of trauma in relation to our familial enemies.
When our emotional and rational brains are in conflict (as when we're enraged with someone we love, frightened by someone we depend on, or lust after someone who is off limits), a tug-of-war ensues. This war is largely played out in the theater of visceral experience - your gut, your heart, your lungs - and will lead to both physical discomfort and psychological misery."
- from: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M.D.
This is a book about trauma and its treatment. To me, Ben Shapiro is (merely) a figure head. I hear this voice represented in many who intend to tear down the arguments of their enemies with "facts and logic."
What's especially interesting, however, is that I frequently hear this battle cry from BOTH liberals AND conservatives.
So, again, I just quoted a book on trauma. What this says to me, then - if he relies on "facts and reason" over and against the "emotions" of liberals - is that, according to our neurology, Ben Shapiro isn't coolly, objectively, and neutrally building an argument in a peaceful and respectful debate so much as participating in a long, violent, and bloody history of trauma at the heart and foundation of our national narrative. His presumption that reason and emotion don't generally function harmoniously is his presumption that we are constantly in a war zone of traumatic crisis in which our survival is at stake.
By the same token, if liberals are doing the same when they hang their hat on the logical contradictions in conservative positions - such as how conservatives claim to be pro life while being war mongers, or claim to hold the moral high ground in general and on sexual ethics in particular while Christians show no statistical difference in divorce rates and support a serial abuser and adulterer - they are living into and embodying the same exact trauma as Shapiro and his followers. (This doesn't mean that the contradictions have no import; only that, in and of themselves, they only say we're suffering PTSD)
Perhaps justice doesn't look like being right in a debate so much as the healing of a long and bloody history of trauma in relation to our familial enemies.
The Binding of Forgiveness and Creation in the Body of Jesus
So, I had a pretty good spot for my prayers this morning...
I continued to work, think, and pray through something I posted yesterday on Facebook [see link here], where I explored the supposedly impersonal debates on justice that occur across the political aisle and which ended in the suggestion that justice is and can only be embodied in enemy love....
Facing the level ocean surface as a sign of stillness at the foundation of creation to and from which all moving waters of life flow, I was moved by how the creation narrative similarly is diffused and infused in and through every aspect of our lives, including justice. I imagine this creative flow as being similar to how our bodies - and everything else - are largely made up of water."...and the Spirit was upon the deep..." "Let justice roll down like waters..."
I was thus given in that context to see that justice as enemy love requires a New Creation. This gift is partially owed to my presence on this unique and set apart morning of vacation rest before the horizon of all that appears and disappears before us.
Part of my morning prayer liturgy is Psalm 23. "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies...." In Jewish culture, to sit or recline at table with someone is an act of friendship. As we come to the table of friendship before and in the creative Spirit at the beating heart of all that is, the contours of the enemy disappear and a new horizon of fellowship begins to dawn like a poetic or choratic groundswell of a rising wave soon to come to a brief fullness or the opening mouths of an angelic song of praise.
My liturgy also moves through The Lord's Prayer. Here, I am given to see that every act of forgiveness means and requires an act of New Creation. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Of course, this is an extension of my meditation on justice. Here, if justice is tied to forgiveness, it is untied from punishment.
I've always been confused about whether or not forgiveness "erases" the wrong or the debt. If forgiveness is tied to redemption, and if God faithfully "uses all things for the good" - including and ultimately fulfilled in the cross - then we can't just "erase" the past without dishonoring it and the integrity and existence of all that was and has been, right? Every time I've heard "forgive and forget" as a motivational quote, I've been struck with genuine confusion. It never struck me as redemptive.
Carrying Psalm 23 forward with me in my meditative prayer, then, justice is restoration of relationship patterned after the love of the One who ever sustains, preserves, and is creatively present and at work for the redemption of all things.
In the video, you can hear the wind. The refreshing and relieving coolness of a breeze is the creative breath of God. Where relationships have taken the character of murderously oppressive desert heat in which signs of life are as common as those of death and are quite distant from one another and thus seen infrequently, the creative wind of forgiveness from the other side of the horizon - and from the other side of what's hidden behind the contours of the enemy's appearance before us at the table of fellowship - is a refreshing delight that quite actually restores the soul.
My prayer liturgy also includes a "scripture for the week." This week - co-incidentally with my fellowship with the narrative of the waters and breath of creation - it's John 1: 1-18:
With this gift of the binding of forgiveness and Creation, I now understand that what people who talk about forgiveness as erasure were pointing towards was not a temptation for a logical empowering personal choice to eradicate evil from memory but, instead, is always radical newness that carries the past with it redemptively. This is a carrying forward that is otherwise inexplicable without both the ever-creatively freeing breath of God and and the image held before us sacramentally of God's bearing of our burdens upon himself for our healing.
The reason a link remains between the broken past and redemptive future is Jesus. It is his very body itself that bears the wounds of the past and carries them into new creation, not forgotten but forgiven. Anyone who forgives and doesn't simply forget thus encounters Jesus, the one in and through whom creative redemption shines forth.
Not surprisingly, then, he is the culmination and fulfillment of the story being told by King David in Psalm 23 and by the Jewish community in Genesis 1 as they look forward to and hope in another Exodus of God from their Babylonian enemies. We see all of this embodied at its climax in the life of King Jesus. As recorded in the gospel stories that follow John 1, his body, life, and message is and carries this climax to us to delight in as we participate in and embody with him his New Creation where enemies like lion and lamb, donkey and elephant, lay together.
I continued to work, think, and pray through something I posted yesterday on Facebook [see link here], where I explored the supposedly impersonal debates on justice that occur across the political aisle and which ended in the suggestion that justice is and can only be embodied in enemy love....
Facing the level ocean surface as a sign of stillness at the foundation of creation to and from which all moving waters of life flow, I was moved by how the creation narrative similarly is diffused and infused in and through every aspect of our lives, including justice. I imagine this creative flow as being similar to how our bodies - and everything else - are largely made up of water."...and the Spirit was upon the deep..." "Let justice roll down like waters..."
I was thus given in that context to see that justice as enemy love requires a New Creation. This gift is partially owed to my presence on this unique and set apart morning of vacation rest before the horizon of all that appears and disappears before us.
Part of my morning prayer liturgy is Psalm 23. "You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies...." In Jewish culture, to sit or recline at table with someone is an act of friendship. As we come to the table of friendship before and in the creative Spirit at the beating heart of all that is, the contours of the enemy disappear and a new horizon of fellowship begins to dawn like a poetic or choratic groundswell of a rising wave soon to come to a brief fullness or the opening mouths of an angelic song of praise.
My liturgy also moves through The Lord's Prayer. Here, I am given to see that every act of forgiveness means and requires an act of New Creation. "Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Of course, this is an extension of my meditation on justice. Here, if justice is tied to forgiveness, it is untied from punishment.
I've always been confused about whether or not forgiveness "erases" the wrong or the debt. If forgiveness is tied to redemption, and if God faithfully "uses all things for the good" - including and ultimately fulfilled in the cross - then we can't just "erase" the past without dishonoring it and the integrity and existence of all that was and has been, right? Every time I've heard "forgive and forget" as a motivational quote, I've been struck with genuine confusion. It never struck me as redemptive.
Carrying Psalm 23 forward with me in my meditative prayer, then, justice is restoration of relationship patterned after the love of the One who ever sustains, preserves, and is creatively present and at work for the redemption of all things.
In the video, you can hear the wind. The refreshing and relieving coolness of a breeze is the creative breath of God. Where relationships have taken the character of murderously oppressive desert heat in which signs of life are as common as those of death and are quite distant from one another and thus seen infrequently, the creative wind of forgiveness from the other side of the horizon - and from the other side of what's hidden behind the contours of the enemy's appearance before us at the table of fellowship - is a refreshing delight that quite actually restores the soul.
My prayer liturgy also includes a "scripture for the week." This week - co-incidentally with my fellowship with the narrative of the waters and breath of creation - it's John 1: 1-18:
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2 He was in the beginning with God. 3 All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being 4 in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. 5 The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it....14 And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth....16 From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace."To return again to the beginning, then. As I carry this Word with me along through my meditative prayer on justice, I am given to see that any act of New Creation means the presence and work of Jesus. The contours and horizon of all that appears and disappears before us is Jesus. Coming to the table of fellowship with one who was previously an enemy as an act of the creation of a new friend is Jesus. Forgiveness as creation of new life where death reigned previously is Jesus. This morning, before the sun came out, you can see in my pic above that the horizon didn't simply disappear into the distance but instead, as a visible sign and portent of the truth of my prayer, appeared as a bright light against the surface's shades of cloud and shadow.
With this gift of the binding of forgiveness and Creation, I now understand that what people who talk about forgiveness as erasure were pointing towards was not a temptation for a logical empowering personal choice to eradicate evil from memory but, instead, is always radical newness that carries the past with it redemptively. This is a carrying forward that is otherwise inexplicable without both the ever-creatively freeing breath of God and and the image held before us sacramentally of God's bearing of our burdens upon himself for our healing.
The reason a link remains between the broken past and redemptive future is Jesus. It is his very body itself that bears the wounds of the past and carries them into new creation, not forgotten but forgiven. Anyone who forgives and doesn't simply forget thus encounters Jesus, the one in and through whom creative redemption shines forth.
Not surprisingly, then, he is the culmination and fulfillment of the story being told by King David in Psalm 23 and by the Jewish community in Genesis 1 as they look forward to and hope in another Exodus of God from their Babylonian enemies. We see all of this embodied at its climax in the life of King Jesus. As recorded in the gospel stories that follow John 1, his body, life, and message is and carries this climax to us to delight in as we participate in and embody with him his New Creation where enemies like lion and lamb, donkey and elephant, lay together.
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