The Golden Ass

The following could be said to constitute an explanation of why I left in the middle of church today and had to pray afterwards. It also, at least figuratively or literarily, constitutes an act of reaching out towards those I left behind.

“He would never get one image out of his mind: the back of Alex’s head as he lay face down in the rice patty, his feet up in the air. Tom wept as he recalled, ‘He was the only real friend I ever had.’ Afterward, at night, Tom continued to hear the screams of his men and to see their bodies falling into the water. Any sounds, smells, or images that reminded him of the ambush (like the popping of firecrackers on the Fourth of July) made him feel just as paralyzed, terrified, and enraged as the day the helicopter evacuated him from the rice patty.”…
…
One of the hardest things for traumatized people is to confront their shame about they way they behaved during a traumatic episode, whether it is objectively warranted (as in the commission of atrocities) or not (as in the case of a child who tries to placate her abuser). One of the first people to write about this phenomenon was Sarah Haley…In an article entitled ‘When the Patient Reports Atrocities,’ which became a major impetus for the ultimate creation of the PTSD diagnosis, she discussed the well-nigh intolerable difficulty of talking about (and listening to) the horrendous acts that are often committed by soldiers in the course of their war experiences. It’s hard enough to face the suffering that has been inflicted by others, but deep down many traumatized people are even more haunted by the shame they feel about what they themselves did or did not do under the circumstances. They despise themselves for how terrified, dependent excited, or enraged they felt.” - p. 12-13

The American holiday of Memorial Day is tomorrow. As I was leaving church today, I was angry and, sensing that something monstrous that wasn’t right, felt the need to pray. My feeling that way reminded me of something that happened recently with a friend.

That friend had responded to a terrible and painful experience in his family by turning away from God in alienation and anger rather than towards God in trust and for healing. I reacted to him with continual annoyance and aggravation bordering on anger. It eventually dawned on me to ask myself why I was responding to him in that way. Soon after, God presented before me something that helped me realize that what my friend had experienced was trauma. I was then able, in prayer, to see that, in my responding to my friend the way I did, I was relating to God in essentially the same way he did. I was not trusting that God is present and at work and faithful to His task and mission. I was only able to see that as God called me trust. I am no longer angry.

“Tom had been a devoted and loyal friend, someone who enjoyed life, with many interests and pleasures. In one terrifying moment, trauma had transformed everything…
…We want to think of families as safe havens in a heartless world and of our own country as populated by enlightened, civilized people. We prefer to believe that cruelty occurs only in faraway places like Darfur or the Congo. It is hard enough for observers to bear witness to pain. Is it any wonder, then, that the traumatized individuals themselves cannot tolerate remembering it and that they often resort to using drugs, alcohol, or self-mutilation to block out their unbearable knowledge?
Tom and his fellow veterans became my first teachers in my quest to understand how lives are shattered by overwhelming experiences, and in figuring out how to enable them to feel alive again.” – p. 10-12

The friend I mentioned with whom I was angry? Prior to his traumatic experience, he and I had been planting a small and fledgling church together. It felt like home for me. It wasn’t perfect, but we were heading in the direction of doing what I had been wanting to do in and as a church for years. After his trauma, he was unable to pastor any longer, and the church was shattered into fragments that now, mostly, have little relationship with one another.

I was in a kind of spiritual exile for about a year afterwards – and to some degree still am. When I tried to re-integrate into a church community, I unexpectedly ended up at some point in tears, triggered by old traumatic wounds of death and alienation, wounds from which I thought I had healed. The church I was visiting today is the one that “sent me out” to plant the one that fell apart in trauma.

“His name was Tom. Ten years earlier he had been in the Marines, doing his service in Vietnam. He had spent the [4th of July] holiday [of 1978, 10 years after his trauma] holed up in his downtown-Boston law office, drinking and looking at old photographs, rather than with his family. He knew from previous years’ experience that the noise, the fireworks, the heat, and the picnic in his sister’s backyard against the backdrop of dense early-summer foliage, all of which reminded him of Vietnam, would drive him crazy. When he got upset he was afraid to be around his family because he behaved like a monster with his wife and two young boys. The noise of his kids made him so agitated that he would storm out of the house to keep himself from hurting them. Only drinking himself into oblivion or riding his Harley-Davidson at dangerously high speeds helped him to calm down.
…
At the end of his tour of duty, Tom was honorably discharged, and all he wanted was to put Vietnam behind him. Outwardly, that’s exactly what he did. He attended college on the GI Bill, graduated from law school, married his high school sweetheart, and had two sons. Tom was upset by how difficult it was to feel any real affection for his wife, even though her letters had kept him alive in the madness of the jungle. Tom went though the motions of living a normal life, hoping that by faking it he would learn to become his old self again. He now had a thriving law practice and a picture-perfect family, but he sensed something wasn’t normal; he felt dead inside.” – p. 7-8

Though it was only half way through, I didn’t “storm out of” the church service this morning. I wasn’t “afraid to be around” the pastor and church members. Part of why I felt the need to pray after I left, however, was because I did feel an urge to lash out in a way that would be hurtful to at least some of the leaders and members of the church. I genuinely love the people of that church, but I wasn’t feeling the connection or the love in that moment. I was feeling something else. And, I wasn’t willing to “just go through the motions and fake it.”

When and why did I leave, you might ask? After the time of worship in music and prior to the sermon, one of the associate pastors spent ten to fifteen minutes talking about how God "honors a military calling.” He gave examples from the New Testament of how God "used the military to advance His Kingdom.” He also gave a fairly extensive interview of a church member in the Coast Guard to exemplify those points. In the interview, it was also discussed how disciples are formed in and by military "service." The Coast Guard officer being interviewed talked about how his time in the military has helped him to understand what service even means in the first place. I was happy and thankful that I didn’t have to sit in squirming anger through the official liturgy of the American Military color guard in the middle of our (supposed) worship of Jesus, but…

“Trauma, by definition, is unbearable and intolerable. Most rape victims, combat soldiers, and children who have been molested become so upset when they think about what they experienced that they try to push it out of their minds, trying to act as if nothing happened, and move on. It takes tremendous energy to keep functioning while carrying the memory of terror, and the shame of utter weakness and vulnerability…posttraumatic reactions feel incomprehensible and overwhelming. Feeling out of control, survivors of trauma often begin to fear that they are damaged to the core and beyond redemption.” – pg. 1-2

So, in my strong disagreement with the pastor, perhaps I left because I found what was happening to be unbearable and intolerable. Perhaps it was a trace of a traumatic experience for me, in and of itself? Maybe, like Tom, I’m damaged…

In any case, I do believe that the reason for the disconnect between the pastor’s statement that “God honors a military calling” from the horrific ways that war damages, disfigures, and disorders the “imago dei” – which hopefully are becoming readily apparent as we begin to come face to face with and imagine stories like Tom’s - is, perhaps, related to the effects of a primordial trauma on all of us. We tend to push painful truths out of our minds.” Especially when they are rooted in a blinding display of false worship. “She did it…the serpent deceived me.”

“[T]raumatic experiences do leave traces, whether on a large scale (on our histories and cultures) or close to home, on families, with dark secrets being imperceptibly passed down through generations. They also leave traces on our minds and emotions, on our capacity for joy and intimacy, and even on our biology and immune systems.” – p. 1

Immediately after the above noted segment of the worship service, the same associate pastor advertised a book on grief. Insofar as I was able to hear or am able to remember, he didn’t mention PTSD. Assuming I’m not mistaken, I wonder why?

*Note: all of the previous quotes are from a book called The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel A. van der Kolk, M..D.

* PHOTO FROM HERE: SEE LINK.