Abstract
Once again Shelly Rambo makes us rethink familiar biblical texts. In her first book, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining (Westminster John Knox, 2010), she urged us to think seriously about Holy Saturday, the day traditionally overlooked during Holy Week. Rambo encouraged us to sit with Holy Saturday—to contemplate the trauma of the crucifixion and how it relates to the trauma in our own lives. She challenged us to pause and to recognize its significance, rather than to rush to celebration of Easter Sunday and resurrection.
In Resurrecting Wounds Rambo calls us to task again. This time she reframes and retells the story of the risen Lord’s encounter with Thomas in the Upper Room (John 20:19–28), using Caravaggio’s painting (“The Incredulity of Saint Thomas”) as a visual reference. Throughout Christian history, the disciple named Thomas has been saddled with a descriptive epithet, as “doubting.” Traditional interpretations of the story chastise Thomas for his demand that he see and touch before he believes. His concluding exclamation (“My Lord and my God!”) has been read as a sign that he has overcome his doubt. Rambo notes that in John Calvin’s reading of the story, for example, Jesus’s wounds disappear after Thomas confesses his faith, as if they are no longer necessary. Calvin emphasizes that the process of faith is nurtured by the hearing of the word, rather than by touching. Hearing takes precedence over touching.
Rambo invites us to reconsider the events in the Upper Room, and Thomas’s interaction with Jesus in particular, through the lens of touching wounds and to note the implications for our conceptions of the cross and resurrection. She prompts reflection on the ways in which attitudes like Calvin’s contribute to denial, dismissal, and suppression of the scars we carry from our own trauma, both individually and collectively. As we focus on Jesus’s invitation to touch, feel and see the wounds on his resurrected body, we can envision a different way to respond to individual and societal wounds.
One of the most notable features of the book is Rambo’s dedication of an entire chapter (“Surfacing Wounds: Christian Theology and Resurrecting Histories in the Age of Ferguson”) to the hidden wounds of racism that live under the collective skin of America. Using Wendell Berry, Melissa Harris-Perry, James Cone, Delores Williams, and Willie Jennings as touchstones, Rambo masterfully engages the writings of each to enrich our understanding of how touching, feeling, and exposing wounds can inform our interpretation of the text and ways in which we are to live as people of faith. She offers a rich and thickly layered presentation of racism as a hidden wound that must be surfaced and worked through; unhealed wounds of the past persist and resurface in the present if they are never fully reckoned with. Thus, rather than covering over the wounds or trying to make them disappear, Rambo urges direct engagement with them, noting that: “The Upper Room provides narrative components to speak to the return of wounds in the present. It attests to the haunting of history and to the work of inscribing that history otherwise. Approaching the Thomas story with an eye to the dissonance and its affective dimensions, this ancient story might open to alternative ways of theologically narrating the wounds of race” (p. 75).
Rambo also introduces Michael Rothberg’s insightful diagnosis of how traumas are represented and remembered. Histories of suffering, he contends, often compete for attention within the public sphere, jockeying for space in the marketplace of memory. Indeed, memory often works according to a zero-sum game; only some histories are recognized. Thus, for example, remembering Jewish suffering (represented in the Holocaust) means closing off one’s view of other historical traumas such as the history of slavery. For those who wonder why their history is often missing in public discourse, this diagnosis rings true. Historical traumas compete for memorializing space, and this competition model pits suffering victims against each other. While each experience of suffering is unique, Rothberg warns that it can lead to the creation of a “hierarchy of suffering” (p. 95). Remembering one group’s trauma often entails diminishing and forgetting another group’s trauma.
How do people reconfigure their lives and find new meaning and purpose, particularly when wounds are invisible? Rambo provides one example in her description of Healing Circles created by the Warrior’s Journey Home, a non-profit dedicated to creating safe spaces for veterans and Stronghearts. Stronghearts are civilian members who support soldiers who have returned home and commit themselves to listening to the stories of war that are spoken within the circle, withholding judgment. In such groups, veterans find a space in which to tell their stories, to be listened to with a compassionate heart, and to find spiritual healing and soul repair from the invisible wounds of war. These circles are unique because family members are invited to participate as Stronghearts. As they listen to the stories of their veterans, the Stronghearts become aware of the traumas they have sustained. The invisible internal wounds are referred to as razor blades that reside in bodies, spirits, emotions, and thoughts. Drawing them out is a delicate and painful process that entails trying to make the pain bearable so that it will not be forced deeper inside. At the moment the pain is released into the circle through their stories, transformative healing takes place.
Rambo helps readers appreciate the ways in which Christian faith can create space for recognizing wounds. It has symbols that both acknowledge their presence and convey the potential for healing. She offers a much-needed re-interpretation of the resurrection for all who have experienced trauma, permitting them to see themselves as people who are living resurrected lives. Every time someone recovers from trauma in the midst of ongoing life is a resurrection moment. In sum, by placing orthodox Christian perspectives and post-modern Christian critiques in conversation with each other through the lens of the exchange between Jesus and Thomas in the Upper Room, Rambo has provided a vocabulary, theology, and practice for ministry with an often-neglected population—those who have suffered trauma—enabling Christian faith to speak of healing that can take place.
Rambo pushes the theological envelope in order to give us space to breathe, rest, and heal. Her writing is so delicately constructed that even the most resistant reader will be forced to stop and consider her groundbreaking interpretation of the encounter between Jesus and Thomas and the reality of wounds. Both this book, as well as her earlier one (Spirit and Trauma), should be required reading for seminarians, clergy, counselors and others who minister to people navigating the aftermath of trauma.