Trauma and Glory
Monday, April 14 2008, 12:17 AM EDT
Mused by: CMcCoy
Trauma and Glory
by Clint McCoy
Most years April marks the end of Mud Month and the beginning of spring where I live, a time of transition and beauty. April memories can take on a more ominous tone however as the world greens up on one hand, and blood flows on the other. This Sunday, while visiting the new Newseum in Washington DC, which displays inside and out the daily front pages from newspapers from around the country and the world, I could not help but be taken by the newspapers from a variety of college and university cities with front page articles remembering April 16, 2007 when thirty-three students and faculty lost their lives at Virginia Tech University due to gun violence.
April brings other dates to mind when guns figured prominently in national horror. This year we remembered April 4 as the 40th anniversary of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. April 19 is remarkably an anniversary date of the US Government’s assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco, and the FBI attack at Ruby Ridge. Although the form of killing went beyond the use of guns, April 19 is also the anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing. April 20, 1999 carries the weight of the shootings at Columbine High School in Denver. Half way home from a mission trip to Africa, I saw for the first time on British television children running for safety, and listened from abroad as my country mourned the killings of children at hands of their classmates. Memphis, Oklahoma City, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Columbine: all bring the memory of loss due to violence to mind.
In Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding (Kumarian Press, Inc., p. 45, 70), Lisa Schirch describes the ways specific events take on enormous symbolic meaning for cultural groups. It forms their identity; it is seared into collective memory. Borrowing on the work of Vamik Volkan, she refers to these events as “chosen traumas.”
Visit the Newseum’s 4th floor, which is dedicated entirely to the memory and reporting of the 9-11 terror attacks, and you cannot help but understand the enormity of that trauma not only for the United States, but for the world. Although it can be argued that our government has squandered much of the world’s good will at the time the front page of virtually every newspaper in the world spoke at the time with alarm about the power of terrorism’s diabolical nature. Schirch, in Ritual and Symbol in Peacebuilding, pushes us. She asks whether we might do a new thing: whether we might view history with an eye towards transformation. As ritual helps to connect the past with the present, she wonders whether it is possible to reframe trauma by establishing a positive reference to it. Might it be, she wonders, that someday there could be a global conference every September 11, celebrating the dawn of a new era of relationships between Muslim and Christian people, bringing a glorious good to the memory of 9-11 (p. 70) which had once been understood only as traumatic?
The Christian paradigm for understanding this kind of transformation is the redemptive liturgy that takes us from Maundy Thursday through Good Friday to Easter morning. The brightest and best betray and deny the very best God offers. Handed over by those who loved him, eventually a victim of mob violence by the crowd that cried out for his death, he was hung on a cross after undergoing torturous indignities. But on Sunday God raised him from the dead; God’s glory had brought life from death. Trauma turned to glory.
As important as remembering traumatic moments is for our identify and our capacity to work through grief, we can also look for the glory that might be revealed as unimaginable surprise: transforming what is sad or hurtful, or even evil, into something remembered because of the good that has been born from it. When that happens, then we see the hand of God at work.
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