Grief

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From Blue Nights (2011)

  As ways of maintaining momentum go this one turned out to be better than most: I remember liking the entire process a good deal. I liked the quiet afternoons backstage with the stage managers and electricians, I liked the way the ushers gathered for instructions downstairs just before the half-hour call. I liked the presence of Shubert security outside, I liked the weight of the stage door as I opened it against the wind through Shubert Alley, I liked the secret passages to and from the stage. I liked that Amanda, who ran the stage door at night, kept on her desk a tin of the cookies she baked. I liked that Lauri, who managed the Booth for the Shubert Organization and was doing graduate work in medieval literature, became our ultimate authority on a few lines in the play that involved Gawain. I liked the fried chicken and cornbread and potato salad and greens we brought in from Piece o’ Chicken, a kitchen storefront near Ninth Avenue. I liked the matzo-ball soup we brought in from the Hotel Edison coffee shop. I liked the place to sit we set up backstage, the little improvised table with the checked tablecloth and the electrified candle and the menu that read “Café Didion.” I liked watching the performance from a balcony above the lights. I liked being up there alone with the lights and the play. I liked it all, but most of all I liked the fact that although the play was entirely focused on Quintana there were, five evenings and two afternoons a week, these ninety full minutes, the run time of the play, during which she did not need to be dead. During which the question remained open. During which the denouement had yet to play out. During which the last scene played did not necessarily need to be played in the ICU overlooking the East River. During which the bells would not necessarily sound and the doors would not necessarily be locked at six. During which the last dialogue heard did not necessarily need to concern the vent. Like when someone dies, don’t dwell on it. 31On the evening late in August when the play closed Vanessa took the yellow roses provided for her curtain calls and laid them on the stage, beneath the photograph of John and Quintana on the deck in Malibu that was the closing drop of the set Bob Crowley had designed for the production. The theater cleared. I was gratified to see how slowly it cleared, as if the audience shared my wish not to leave John and Quintana alone. We stood in the wings and drank champagne. Before I left that evening someone pointed out the yellow roses Vanessa had laid on the stage floor and asked if I wanted to take them. I did not want to take the yellow roses. I did not want the yellow roses touched.

• From White Oleander (1999)

  I buried my face in his chest, and let my tears and snot wet the front of his T-shirt. It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green. He held me, he was solid, he wouldn’t let me drift away. Talking to me, telling me nobody was going to hurt me, I was a great kid, nothing was going to happen. After a while he wiped my cheeks with the back of his hand, lifting my chin so he could look at me, pushing my hair out of my eyes. “You really miss her, huh. Tell me, is she as pretty as you?” I smiled a little, his eyes were so sad and kind. “I have a picture.” I ran down to my room, brought back a copy of my mother’s last book, Dust. I gently stroked my hand over her picture on the back cover, on the beach at Big Sur. Huge rocks in the water, driftwood. She wore a fisherman sweater, her hair swept back by the wind. She looked like a Lorelei, cause of shipwreck. Odysseus would have had to lash himself to the mast. “You’re going to be prettier,” he said. I wiped my nose on the short sleeve of my T-shirt, smiled. My mother was a woman people stopped in the market to wonder at. Not like Starr, but just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else. I couldn’t imagine owning beauty like my mother’s. I wouldn’t dare. It would be too scary. “No way.” “Hey, way. You’re just a different type. You’re the sweetheart type. Your mother looks like she could take a bite out of ya—not that I’d mind, I can take it rough too, but you know what I mean. For you, they’ll just fall down like flies.” He peered into my lowered face with his kind eyes, speaking so gently. “You hear me? You’re going to have to push the bodies out of the way if you want to go down the street.” Nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. Even if he was just lying to make me feel better, who bothered to do that now? He flipped through some of the pages, reading. “Look, this one’s about you.” I snatched it away, my face flaming. I knew the poem. Shhh Astrid’s sleeping Pink well of her wordless mouth One long leg trails off the bed Like an unfinished sentence Fine freckles hold a constellation of second chances Her cowrie shell Where the unopened woman whispers… She used to recite it at poetry readings. I would sit drawing at my table as if I didn’t hear her, as if it weren’t me she was talking about, my body, my childish girl parts. I hated that poem. What did she think, I didn’t know what she was talking about?

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  view the present world as the only one, nor will he be like the unworldly who yearn for the future with an unconcern about the present. There is work to be done in the present. There is grief work to be done in the present that the future may come. There is mourning to be done for those who do not know of the deathliness of their situation. There is mourning to be done with those who know pain and suffering and lack the power or freedom to bring it to speech. The saying is a harsh one, for it sets this grief work as the precondition of joy. It announces that those who have not cared enough to grieve will not know joy. The mourning is a precondition in another way too. It is not a formal, external requirement but rather the only door and route to joy. Seen in that context, Jesus’ saying about weeping and laughing is not just a neat aphorism but a summary of the entire theology of the cross. Only that kind of anguished disengagement permits fruitful yearning, and only the public embrace of deathliness permits newness to come. We are at the edge of knowing this in our personal lives, for we understand a bit of the processes of grieving. [2] But we have yet to learn and apply it to the reality of society. And finally, we have yet to learn it about God, who grieves in ways hidden from us and who waits to rejoice until his promises are fully kept. 1 . At the level of individual personality, this is the argument of George Benson, Then Joy Breaks Through (New York: Seabury, 1972). He begins his last chapter in this way: “The transformation of all time and the Christian prototype of joy is the resurrection of Christ” (123). His entire book is about the meaning of the cross on the way to life. ↵ 2 . In a way that is enormously helpful and a bit deductive, I have been helped greatly by the research of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969). See my discussion of her paradigm in relation to the faith of Israel in “The Formfulness of Grief,” Interp 31 (1977): 263–75. See also idem, “Psalms of Disorientation,” in The Message of the Psalms: A Theological Commentary (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1984), 50–121. ↵

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  I think now of that July day at St. John the Divine in 2003 and am struck by how young John and I appeared to be, how well. In actual fact neither of us was in the least well: John had that spring and summer undergone a series of cardiac procedures, most recently the implantation of a pacemaker, the efficacy of which remained in question; I had three weeks before the wedding collapsed on the street and spent the several nights following in a Columbia Presbyterian ICU being transfused for an unexplained gastrointestinal bleed. “You’re just going to swallow a little camera,” they said in the ICU when they were trying to demonstrate to themselves what was causing the bleed. I recall resisting: since I had never in my life been able to swallow an aspirin it seemed unlikely that I could swallow a camera. “Of course you can, it’s only a little camera.” A pause. The attempt at briskness declined into wheedling: “It’s really a very little camera.” In the end I did swallow the very little camera, and the very little camera transmitted the desired images, which did not demonstrate what was causing the bleed but did demonstrate that with sufficient sedation anyone could swallow a very little camera. Similarly, in another less than entirely efficient use of high-tech medicine, John could hold a telephone to his heart, dial a number, and get a reading on the pacemaker, which proved, I was told, that at the given instant he dialed the number (although not necessarily before or after) the device was operating. Medicine, I have had reason since to notice more than once, remains an imperfect art. Yet all had seemed well when we were shaking the water off the leis onto the grass outside St. John the Divine on July 26 2003. Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended? The father of the bride dead at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her death? Twenty months during which she would be strong enough to walk unsupported for possibly a month in all? Twenty months during which she would spend weeks at a time in the intensive care units of four different hospitals?

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  The Prophetic Imagination after students read Kathleen O’Connor’s 2011 monograph on the book of Jeremiah. [2] O’Connor and Brueggemann enjoyed a long and happy time as colleagues at Columbia Theological Seminary, where I had the good fortune of being their student. Their relationship proved to be, over time, one of mutual support, stimulation, and evocation. O’Connor approaches Jeremiah in a way that is explicitly indebted to Brueggemann’s work, but she adds a thorough engagement with trauma and disaster studies. The latter field of inquiry emerged as a robust and distinct area of scholarship only in the last decade of the twentieth century, so it is astonishing that Brueggemann’s reflections on grief and mourning in this book (first published in 1978) align so extensively with recent research. One might reasonably read The Prophetic Imagination first, and then O’Connor, since she engages his book and supplements it with attention to a new field of inquiry. But in my experience, more is learned by reading O’Connor first because her presentation of the theoretical work and practical experiences gained by those who study and treat the effects of trauma and disaster provide a background against which the depth and implications of Brueggemann’s claims can be better appreciated. For example, Brueggemann attends to the numbness, denial, and the powerful deadening hold by which the dominant, royal consciousness perpetuates its status quo. Students are more prepared to understand this social reality after they have considered how these same symptoms manifest in, for example, the psychological responses that typically appear and function as coping mechanisms in victims of domestic abuse. And Brueggemann’s description of the positive social and political potential of narrating painful experiences and expressing grief is even clearer after reading about the essential role that they play in therapeutic treatment. The second reason why I think that The Prophetic Imagination has required four decades of ongoing articulation is because the problematic features that this book diagnoses in the social situation have not faded into the past, and because the prophetic program of criticizing and energizing that the book advocates retains similar relevance and vitality. First, among the many factors that differentiate what Brueggemann calls the royal situation from the prophetic

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and your wound is grievous. There is none to uphold your cause, no medicine for your wound, no healing for you. (Jer 30:12-13) There can be only death. And then the imagery is pressed to its extremity: Is Ephraim my dear son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against him, I do remember him still. (Jer 31:20) Yahweh is grieving and will not turn loose. The language permits the words of Jeremiah to transcend the person of the prophet. This grief will not be dismissed as the idiosyncrasy of Jeremiah, for it is nothing less than God’s grief over his

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  Maggie told us that during her EMDR session she had vividly remembered her father’s rape when she was seven—remembered it from inside her child’s body. She could feel physically how small she was; she could feel her father’s huge body on top of her and could smell the alcohol on his breath. And yet, she told us, even as she relived the incident she was able to observe it from the point of view of her twenty-nine-year-old self. She burst into tears: “I was such a little girl. How could a huge man do this to a little girl?” She cried for a while and then said: “It’s over now. I now know what happened. It wasn’t my fault. I was a little girl and there was nothing I could do to keep him from molesting me.” I was astounded. I had been looking for a long time for a way to help people revisit their traumatic past without becoming retraumatized. It seemed that Maggie had had an experience as lifelike as a flashback and yet had not been hijacked by it. Could EMDR make it safe for people to access the imprints of trauma? Could it then transform them into memories of events that had happened far in the past? Maggie had a few more EMDR sessions and remained in our group long enough for us to see how she changed. She was much less angry, but she kept that sardonic sense of humor that I enjoyed so much. A few months later she got involved with a very different kind of man than she’d ever been attracted to before. She left the group, announcing that she’d resolved her trauma, and I decided it was time for me to get trained in EMDR. EMDR: First ExposuresLike many scientific advances, EMDR originated with a chance observation. One day in 1987 psychologist Francine Shapiro was walking through a park, preoccupied with some painful memories, when she noticed that rapid eye movements produced a dramatic relief from her distress. How could a major treatment modality grow from such a brief experience? How is it possible that such a simple process had not been noted before? Initially skeptical about her observation she subjected her method to years of experimentation and research, gradually building it into a standardized procedure that could be taught and tested in controlled studies.[1]

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  We cannot assume (though sadly some Western Christians have) that we are now mandated to live the Christian version of a modern Western “good life.” Things were not meant to be like that: not that we seek suffering, but that, if we are acting as image-bearers, as the royal priesthood, there will be many times when we exercise this ministry, celebrating the victory of Jesus through tears and tiredness, through grief and the groaning of the Spirit. This work of intercession and stewardship extends outward into all areas of life. It calls some to a life of contemplation and quiet intercession, others to move onto a rough housing estate to work with homeless kids and drug addicts, others to study (whether the Bible or modern textbooks of economics, land management, and so on) and to work at the highest levels to bring fresh wisdom into God’s world. The revolution of the cross sets us free to be the royal priesthood, and the only thing stopping us is our lack of vision and our failure to realize that this was why the Messiah died in the first place. For this reason we must not only reaffirm the traditional teaching about the impact of the cross upon our personal lives. We must go farther. It isn’t just that “now that we are forgiven, we ought not to return to the sins of which we have formerly repented,” though that is true and is reaffirmed many times in scripture (see, for instance, 2 Cor. 12:19–21). It is, rather, that we have a vocation to pursue a calling that is far richer than simply telling other people to repent and believe in Jesus, so that they can go to heaven, and trying to behave ourselves while we do it. Telling people to believe in Jesus is always good, of course, whatever the deficiencies of the way we do it, but such words will mean what they are meant to mean when they are heard within the context of the church’s overall royal and priestly vocation to be working for signs of new creation in the wider world, signs that the victory of the cross and the forgiveness of sins are a reality. That is why I argued in Surprised by Hope that evangelism needs to be flanked with new-creation work in the realms of justice and beauty.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  EpilogueAfter our session, Adam returned to the Polish town where he was born in search of any knowledge about his real mother, who had died during his birth. The Nazis had not destroyed the tombstone, and Adam replaced it with a new memorial stone because his heart “was so touched by knowing about her existence.” Vince: A Frozen ShoulderThe collision between the two contrary processes, one of excitation and the other of inhibition, which were difficult to accommodate simultaneously, or too unusual in duration or intensity, or both, causes a breakdown of equilibrium. —Ivan Pavlov It is not uncommon, particularly for a fireman, to be reluctant to see a psychotherapist—a “mind doctor.” This is especially true for a problem that is “obviously” physical. Vince was seeing a physical therapist for a frozen right shoulder. This disability was making it impossible for him to function in his job as a fireman. Treatment was not going well: after several sessions he was still barely able to move his arm from his trunk by more than a few inches. The consulting orthopedist had advised surgery: an operation in which the arm is “manipulated” (yanked violently) under general anesthesia in an attempt to free it. Such a surgery requires extensive and painful rehabilitation and often doesn’t improve the situation very much. Since there was no apparent physical injury, the therapist, in the hope of avoiding the difficult procedure, referred him to me. The symptoms had begun a couple of months before our appointment. He was working in his garage and picked up a starter motor to put into his car. As he lifted it, he felt “a twinge of something” in his arm. The next day his shoulder felt tight and sore. Over time, the pain became more acute, and his range of motion progressively worsened, becoming chronic. Not surprisingly, Vince attributed his shoulder “strain” to working on his car. This is somewhat like the person who reaches down and picks up a piece of paper, only to have their back go into spasm. Common sense, and the clinical observation of most chiropractors and massage therapists dictates that this was already a back primed—“an accident waiting to happen.” Vince is obviously confused about seeing a “mind doctor,” and he is reluctant to engage with me. Sensing this, I reassure him that I will not be asking him personal questions, but would just focus on helping him get rid of his symptoms. “Yeah,” he says, “my body sure is broke.” I ask him to show me how far he can move it before it starts to hurt. He moves it a few of inches and then looks up at me: “That’s about it.” “OK, now I want you to move it the same way, but much slower, like this.” I show him with my arm. “Huh,” he replies as he glances at his arm. He is clearly surprised that he could move it a few inches farther without the pain.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  The images kept coming: “I have pictures of a bulldozer flattening the house I grew up in. It’s over!” Then Kathy started on a different track: “I am thinking about how much I like Jeffrey [a boy in one of her classes]. Thinking that he might not want to hang out with me. Thinking I can’t handle it. I have never been someone’s girlfriend before and I don’t know how.” I asked her what she thought she needed to know and began the next sequence. “Now, there is a person who just wants to be with me—it is too simple. I don’t know how to just be myself around men. I am petrified.” As she tracked my finger, Kathy started to sob. When I stopped, she told me: “I had an image of Jeffrey and me sitting in the coffeehouse. My father comes in the door. He starts screaming at the top of his lungs and he is wielding an ax; he says, ‘I told you that you belong to me.’ He puts me on top of the table— then he rapes me, and then he rapes Jeffrey.” She was crying hard now. “How can you be open with somebody when you have visions of your dad raping you and then raping us both?” I wanted to comfort her, but I knew it was more important to keep her associations moving. I asked her to focus on what she felt in her body: “I feel it in my forearms, in my shoulders, and my right chest. I just want to be held.” We continued the EMDR and when we stopped, Kathy looked relaxed. “I heard Jeffrey say it’s okay, that he was sent here to take care of me. And that it was not anything that I did and that he just wants to be with me for my sake.” Again I asked what she felt in her body. “I feel really peaceful. A little bit shaky— like when you’re using new muscles. Some relief. Jeffrey knows all this already. I feel like I’m alive and that it is all over. But I am afraid that my father has another little girl, and that makes me very, very sad. I want to save her.” But as we continued the trauma returned, together with other thoughts and images: “I need to throw up.…I have intrusions of lots of smells— bad cologne, alcohol, vomit.” A few minutes later Kathy was crying profusely: “I really feel my mom here now. It feels like she wants me to forgive her. I have the sense that the same thing happened to her— she is apologizing to me over and over. She’s telling me that this happened to her— that it was my grandfather. She’s also telling me that my grandmother is really sorry for not being there to protect me.” I kept asking her to take deep breaths and stay with whatever was coming up.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  The grieving of Israel—perhaps self-pity and surely complaint but never resignation—is the beginning of criticism. It is made clear that things are not as they should be, not as they were promised, and not as they must be and will be. Bringing hurt to public expression is an important first step in the dismantling criticism that permits a new reality, theological and social, to emerge. That cry which begins history is acknowledged by Yahweh as history gathers power: I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians. (Exod 3:7-8) And now, behold, the cry of the people of Israel has come to me, and I have seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them. Come, I will send you. (3:9-10) That cry which is the primal criticism is articulated again in Exod 8:12. Moses and Aaron now know that serious intervention and intercession must be made to Yahweh the God of freedom and not to the no-gods of Egypt. In 5:8 and 15 there is still a cry to Pharaoh, still a looking to the empire for help and relief: “Therefore they cry, ‘Let us go and offer sacrifice to our God.’ . . . Then the foremen of the people of Israel came and cried to Pharaoh. . . .” By the middle of the plague cycle Israel has disengaged from the empire, cries no more to it, expects nothing of it, acknowledges it in no way, knows it cannot keep its promises, and knows that nothing is either owed it or expected of it. That is the ultimate criticism which leads to dismantling. In the narrative, criticism moves and builds. The grieving cry learns to turn away from false listeners and turn toward the one who can help. Prophetic criticism, as Dorothee Soelle has suggested, [13] consists in mobilizing people to their real restless grief and in nurturing them away from cry-hearers who are inept at listening and indifferent in response. Surely history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.

• From In an Unspoken Voice (2010)

  I don’t understand … Hmm,” she intones, becoming curious as she goes along. After a few minutes, her legs begin to tremble again. The shaking intensifies and spreads—this time, with little jerks into her shoulders. A deep spontaneous breath emerges, and tears stream from her eyes. Miriam reaches out tentatively with her arms and quickly pulls them back. After another breath she speaks as if to her first husband: “Evan, I’m holding on to you. You’re in my guts. I won’t open to Henry … I just keep holding on to you.” She starts to cry, but then continues, “I think I’m mad at you. I can’t believe I’m saying it, but I’m mad at you for leaving. You left me alone. I hate that you died.” She clenches her hands and yells: “I hate you! I hate you! … Don’t leave me, damn it! … I hate you!” She begins to cry again, this time sobbing deeply. When she starts to talk, I suggest that she should “maybe just let things settle.” “Yeah, I think you’re right … There’s something I’m trying to get away from.” Some time passes, and Miriam cries gently, her legs trembling softly. “I haven’t opened to Henry. I’ve been pushing him away. No wonder we’re always in conflict. And when he tries to get physical, I just want to push him away … I felt guilty about that.” Her hands make a pushing movement again. Gradually, her movements become softer: her hands open out into a supine position, and she gently brings them toward her chest in a gesture of reaching and taking into the heart a tentative embrace. I don’t say anything, and Miriam continues, “I needed to protect myself … I felt so hurt and guilty.” “And how do you feel inside now?” I ask to keep her in the moment. “Well, actually I feel really good.” “And how do you know that?” “Well, it’s mostly that I feel a lot of space inside myself.” “Where do you feel that?” “I feel that in my belly and chest … My head feels like it’s got more room too, but mostly my belly and chest, they feel really open … It feels like a cool breeze is in my body. My legs feel really powerful, and I have a lot of … I feel shy to say it … I feel warm and tingling in my, in my … vagina … It feels like I really want Henry.” She pauses. “I did what I had to do then,” she went on, “but it’s time to let go. I was so afraid of my hurt … but even more afraid of my anger. It’s like, if I felt what I felt, I might hurt Henry somehow … It doesn’t make sense logically, but that’s what was all twisted up inside of me.”

• From The Day the Revolution Began (2016)

  First, it would not be much of an exaggeration to say that Jesus of Nazareth grew up under the shadow of the cross. (Crucifixion, by the way, was not a punishment used by the Jews, except for the Hasmonean monarch Alexander Jannaeus, who in 88 BC had eight hundred Pharisees crucified for resisting his rule. The incident is mentioned with horror in the Qumran commentary on the book of Nahum.) Immediately after the death of Herod the Great in 4 BC there was a serious attempt at revolt in Galilee led by Judas ben Hezekiah. Josephus describes this as the most serious incident of its kind between Pompey’s conquest of Palestine in 63 BC and the fall of the Temple in AD 70 (Josephus Apion 1.34; Antiquities 17.271f.; War 2.56). Varus, the Roman general in charge in the province of Syria at the time, did what the Romans did best: he crushed the rebellion brutally and crucified around two thousand of the rebels. The Galilee of Jesus’s boyhood, then, knew all about Roman crosses (Antiquities 17.286–98; War 2.66–79). When I was growing up, all the local towns and villages had their own war memorials from World Wars I and II. I knew many families (including my own) who had lost one, two, or more members in those conflicts, and we solemnly remembered them year after year. In ancient Galilee, even without stone memorials to the rebels who had died, the towns and villages in which Jesus announced God’s kingdom would have had similar memories of people known, loved, and lost to Roman brutality. When he told his followers to pick up their own crosses and follow him, they would not have heard this as a metaphor. The next time that Roman crosses littered the landscape Jesus knew so well came two generations later. The Roman general Vespasian and his son Titus closed in on Jerusalem at the end of the war of AD 66–70. As they overran the surrounding countryside and laid siege to the holy city itself, they crucified so many Jews outside the walls that they ran out of timber and had to fetch some from farther afield. Josephus says that he walked past these crucifixions and, finding three of his friends among them, had them taken down from their crosses. One survived; the others died, their corpses rotting and providing food for the birds and the dogs. The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth, most likely in AD 33, is poised historically in between these two large-scale crucifixions.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  and the rich he has sent empty away. (Luke 1:51-53) [2] The birth of Jesus brings a harsh end to a Herodian reality that seemed ordained forever, and it created a new historical situation for marginal people that none in their despair could have anticipated. While the Lucan version celebrates the emerging newness, the Matthean version places grief at the center of the narrative. The newness does not come without anguish, pain, and tears. The tears are for the last desperate destructiveness by the king to save himself. And they are for the victims of that ending because the king will not die alone; he will take with him those he can who appear to be the ones who threaten him. The beginning in Jesus does not come without harsh ending, for that which is ending never ends graciously. The Announcement of the Kingdom Herod had reasoned correctly. The coming of Jesus meant the abrupt end of things as they were. Two texts are commonly cited as programmatic for the preaching of Jesus. In Mark 1:15 he announces the coming of the kingdom. But surely implicit in the announcement is the counterpart that present kingdoms will end and be displaced. In Luke 4:18-19 he announces that a new age was beginning, but that announcement carries within it a harsh criticism of all those powers and agents of the present order. [3] His message was to the poor, but others kept them poor and benefited from their poverty. He addressed the captives (which means bonded slaves), but others surely wanted that arrangement unchanged. He named the oppressed, but there are never oppressed without oppressors. His ministry carried out the threat implicit in these two fundamental announcements. The ministry of Jesus is, of course, criticism that leads to radical dismantling. And as is characteristic, the guardians and profiteers of the present stability are acutely sensitive to any change that may question or challenge the present arrangement. Very early Jesus is correctly perceived as a clear and present danger to that order, and this is the problem with the promissory newness of the gospel: it never promises without threatening, it never begins without ending something, it never gives gifts without also assessing harsh costs. Jesus’ radical criticism may be summarized in several representative actions. Forgiveness. Jesus’ readiness to forgive sin (Mark 2:1-11), which evoked amazement (v. 12), also appeared to be blasphemy, that is to say, a threat to the present religious sanctions. At one level the danger is that Jesus stood in the role of God (v. 7) and therefore claimed too much; but we should not miss the radical criticism of society contained in the act. Hannah Arendt had discerned that this was Jesus’ most endangering action because if a society does not have an apparatus for forgiveness, then its members are fated to live forever with the consequences of any violation. [4] Thus the refusal to forgive sin (or the

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  At this first session we explained the purpose of the radioactive oxygen the participants would be breathing: As any part of the brain became more or less metabolically active, its rate of oxygen consumption would immediately change, which would be picked up by the scanner. We would monitor their blood pressure and heart rate throughout the procedure, so that these physiological signs could be compared with brain activity. Several days later the participants came to the imaging lab. Marsha, a forty-year-old schoolteacher from a suburb outside of Boston, was the first volunteer to be scanned. Her script took her back to the day, thirteen years earlier, when she picked up her five-year-old daughter, Melissa, from day camp. As they drove off, Marsha heard a persistent beeping, indicating that Melissa’s seatbelt was not properly fastened. When Marsha reached over to adjust the belt, she ran a red light. Another car smashed into hers from the right, instantly killing her daughter. In the ambulance on the way to the emergency room, the seven-month-old fetus Marsha was carrying also died. Overnight Marsha had changed from a cheerful woman who was the life of the party into a haunted and depressed person filled with self-blame. She moved from classroom teaching into school administration, because working directly with children had become intolerable—as for many parents who have lost children, their happy laughter had become a powerful trigger. Even hiding behind her paperwork she could barely make it through the day. In a futile attempt to keep her feelings at bay, she coped by working day and night. I was standing outside the scanner as Marsha underwent the procedure and could follow her physiological reactions on a monitor. The moment we turned on the tape recorder, her heart started to race, and her blood pressure jumped. Simply hearing the script activated the same physiological responses that had occurred during the accident thirteen years earlier. After the recorded script concluded and Marsha’s heart rate and blood pressure returned to normal, we played her second script: getting out of bed and brushing her teeth. This time her heart rate and blood pressure did not change. [image "Diagram showing brain scans labeled (A), (B), and (C). Scan (A) highlights the right limbic area with bright activation. Scan (B) shows heightened activation in the visual cortex. Scan (C) indicates decreased activation in Broca’s area, the brain’s speech center." file=image_rsrc775.jpg] Picturing the brain on trauma. Bright spots in (A) the limbic brain, and (B) the visual cortex, show heightened activation. In drawing (C) the brain’s speech center shows markedly decreased activation. As she emerged from the scanner, Marsha looked defeated, drawn out, and frozen. Her breathing was shallow, her eyes were opened wide, and her shoulders were hunched—the very image of vulnerability and defenselessness. We tried to comfort her, but I wondered if whatever we discovered would be worth the price of her distress.

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  grief and lamentation, as urged and practiced by the prophets, begin the dismantling of royal reality. Expressed suffering is the beginning of counterpower. See G. Müller-Fahrenholz, “Overcoming Apathy,” EcRev 27 (1975) 48–56. He follows the study of A. Mitscherlich in noting the inability of Germans to grieve over the Nazi period. Such an observation coincides with the findings of Lifton. The argument of Müller-Fahrenholz agrees with the point made here, that without grief there will not be the overcoming of apathy and the embrace of new tasks. On pathos as a prerequisite for protest, see James L. Crenshaw, “The Human Dilemma and Literature of Dissent,” in Tradition and Theology in the Old Testament, 235–37; Walter Brueggemann, “A Shape for Old Testament Theology, II: Embrace of Pain,” CBQ 47 (1985): 395–415. 9 . Compare William L. Holladay, “The Background of Jeremiah’s Self- Understanding: Moses, Samuel, and Psalm 22,” JBL 83 (1964): 153–64. Less directly, see Sheldon Blank, “The Prophet as Paradigm,” in Essays in Old Testament Ethics: J. Philip Hyatt, in Memoriam , ed. J. L. Crenshaw and J. T. Willis (New York: Ktav, 1974), 111–30. On grief as definitional for the tradition of Jeremiah, see Peter Weter, “Leiden und Leidenerfahung im Buch Jeremia,” ZTK 74 (1977): 123–50. 10 . On the Lord’s passion borne by Jeremiah, see Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Prophets (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), chap. 6. 11 . Compare Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics I/2, trans. G. W. Bromiley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), sec. 14. Much of his argument concerns the freedom of God and the royal penchant to deny time for some “eternal now.” Against that, biblical faith lives in God’s times, times of recollection and expectation. 12 . On Jeremiah’s remarkable use of this metaphor, see the statement of James Muilenburg, “The Terminology of Adversity in Jeremiah,” in Translating and Understanding the Old Testament: Essays in Honor of Herbert Gordon May , ed. H. T. Frank and W. L. Reed (New York: Abingdon, 1970), 42–63. 13 . See the delicate interpretation of Phyllis Trible, “The Gift of the Poem: A Rhetorical Study of Jeremiah 31:15-22,” Andover Newton Quarterly 17

• From Blue Nights (2011)

  The initial such notice was sudden, the ringing telephone you wish you had never answered, the news no one wants to get: someone to whom I had been close since her childhood, Natasha Richardson, had fallen on a ski slope outside Quebec (spring break, a family vacation, a bunny slope, this was never supposed to happen to her) and by the time she noticed that she did not feel entirely well she was dying, the victim of an epidural hematoma, a traumatic brain injury. She was the daughter of Vanessa Redgrave and Tony Richardson, who was one of our closest friends in Los Angeles. The first time I ever saw her she had been maybe thirteen or fourteen, not yet entirely comfortable in her own skin, an uncertain but determined adolescent with a little too much makeup and startlingly white stockings. She had come from London to visit her father at his house on Kings Road in Hollywood, an eccentrically leveled structure that had belonged to Linda Lovelace, the star of Deep Throat. Tony had bought the house and proceeded to fill it with light and parrots and whippets. When Tasha arrived from London he had brought her to dinner with us at La Scala. The dinner had not been planned as a party for her arrival but there had happened to be many people her father and we knew at La Scala that night and her father had made it feel like one. She had been pleased. A few years later Quintana had been at the same uncertain age and Tasha, by then seventeen, was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc, the village her father had invented, an entertainment of his own, a director’s conceit, in the hills of the Var above Saint-Tropez. To say that Tasha was spending the summer at Le Nid du Duc fails to adequately suggest the situation. In fact, by the time John and I arrived in France that summer, Tasha was running Le Nid du Duc, the seventeen-year-old chatelaine of what amounted to a summer-long house party for a floating thirty people. Tasha was managing the provisioning of the several houses that made up the compound. Tasha was cooking and serving, entirely unaided, three meals a day for the basic thirty as well as for anyone else who happened up the hill and had a drink and waited for the long tables under the lime trees to be set—not only cooking and serving but, as Tony noted in his memoir The Long-Distance Runner, “completely unfazed when told that there’d be an extra twenty for lunch.”

• From White Oleander (1999)

  The one in the black curls, red lips like those chattering windup teeth? She’s come to exploit my martyrdom. I don’t begrudge her. There’s more than enough for everyone. I stood in the doorway, watching the clouds rise from the mountains. They would not let her out. She killed a man, he was only thirty-two. Why should it matter that she was a poet, a jailhouse Plath? A man was dead because of her. He wasn’t perfect, he was selfish, a flawed person, so what. She would do it again, next time with even less reason. Look at what she did to Claire. I could not believe any attorney would consider representing her. No, she was making this up. Trying to snare me, trip me up, stuff me back in her sack. It wasn’t going to work, not anymore. I had freed myself from her strange womb, I would not be lured back. Let her wrap her new children in fantasy, conspire with them under the ficuses in the visitors yard. I knew exactly what there was to be frightened about. They had no idea there were snakes in the ivy. IN FOURTH-PERIOD American history at Marshall High School, we were studying the Civil War. In the overcrowded classroom, students sat on windowsills and the bookcases in the back. The heat in the classroom wasn’t working and Mr. Delgado wore a thick green sweater someone knitted for him. He wrote on the board, backhand, the word Gettysburg, as I tried to capture the rough weave of the sweater and his awkward stance on my lined notebook paper. Then I turned to my history book, open on the desk, with its photograph of the great battlefield. I’d examined it at home under a magnifying glass. You couldn’t see it without the glass, but the bodies in the photograph had no shoes, no guns, no uniforms. They lay on the short grass in their socks and their white eyes gazed at the clouded-over sky and you couldn’t tell which side they were on. The landscape ended behind a row of trees in the distance like a stage. The war had moved on, there was nothing left but the dead. In three days of battle, 150,000 men fought at Gettysburg. There were fifty thousand casualties. I struggled with the enormity of that. One in three dead, wounded, or missing. Like a giant hole ripped in the fabric of existence. Claire died, Barry died, but seven thousand died at Gettysburg. How could God watch them pass without weeping? How could he have allowed the sun to rise on Gettysburg? I remembered my mother and I once visited a battlefield in France. We took a train north, a long ride. My mother wore blue, there was a woman with thick black hair and a man in a worn leather jacket with us. We ate ham and oranges on the train. There were stains inside the oranges, they were bleeding.

• From The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma (2014)

  From time to time he would interrupt the process by explaining why his parents couldn’t have done any better than they had, their being Holocaust survivors and all that implied. Again I suggested he find the protective parts that were interrupting the witnessing of the boy’s pain and request that they move temporarily to another room. And each time he was able to return to his grief. I asked Peter to tell the boy that he now understood how bad the experience had been. He sat in a long, sad silence. Then I asked him to show the boy that he cared about him. After some coaxing he put his arms around the boy. I was surprised that this seemingly harsh and callous man knew exactly how to take care of him. Then, after some time, I urged Peter to go back into the scene and take the boy away with him. Peter imagined himself confronting his dad as a grown man, telling him: “If you ever mess with that boy again, I’ll come and kill you.” He then, in his imagination, took the child to a beautiful campground he knew, where the boy could play and frolic with ponies while he watched over him. Our work was not done. After his wife rescinded her threat of divorce, some of his old habits returned, and we had to revisit that isolated boy from time to time to make sure that Peter’s wounded parts were taken care of, especially when he felt hurt by something that happened at home or on the job. This is the stage IFS calls “unburdening,” and it corresponds to nursing those exiled parts back to health. With each new unburdening Peter’s once-scathing inner critic relaxed, as little by little it became more like a mentor than a judge, and he began to repair his relationships with his family and colleagues. He also stopped suffering from tension headaches. One day he told me that he’d spent his adulthood trying to let go of his past, and he remarked how ironic it was that he had to get closer to it in order to let it go. Chapter 18Filling In the Holes: Creating Structures The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind. —William James It is not that something different is seen, but that one sees differently. It is as though the spatial act of seeing were changed by a new dimension. —Carl Jung

• From The Prophetic Imagination (1978)

  Aaron stretched out his hand with his rod, and struck the dust of the earth, and there came gnats on man and beast; all the dust of the earth became gnats throughout all the land of Egypt. The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not! (Exod 8:17-18) The Egyptian empire could not! The gods of Egypt could not! The scientists of the regime could not! The imperial religion was dead! The politics of oppression had failed! That is the ultimate criticism, that the assured and alleged power of the dominant culture is now shown to be fraudulent. Criticism is not carping and denouncing. It is asserting that false claims to authority and power cannot keep their promises, which they could not in the face of the free God. It is only a matter of time until they are dead on the seashore. But the criticism has another dimension. Plastaras [10] has seen that the narrative of liberation begins with the grieving complaint of Israel: And the people of Israel groaned under their bondage, and cried out for help, and their cry under bondage came up to God. And God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant. . . . And God saw the people of Israel, and God knew their condition. (Exod 2:23-25) I will urge later that the real criticism begins in the capacity to grieve because that is the most visceral announcement that things are not right. Only in the empire are we pressed and urged and invited to pretend that things are all right— either in the dean’s office or in our marriage or in the hospital room. And as long as the empire can keep the pretense alive that things are all right, there will be no real grieving and no serious criticism. But think what happens if the Exodus is the primal scream that permits the beginning of history. [11] In the verb “cry out” ( za’ak ) there is a bit of ambiguity because on the one hand it is a cry of misery and wretchedness with some self- pity, while it also functions for the official filing of a legal complaint. The mournful one is the plaintiff. As Erhard Gerstenberger has observed, [12] it is characteristic of Israel to complain rather than lament; that is, Israel does not voice resignation but instead expresses a militant sense of being wronged with the powerful expectation that it will be heard and answered. Thus the history of Israel begins on the day when its people no longer address the Egyptian gods who will not listen and cannot answer. The life of freedom and justice comes when they risk the freedom of the free God against the regime.