2019 Trauma and Spirituality

Speaker: Prof. Rosemary Chinnici

Prepared for UUA.org by: Lisa Presley, Reporter; Jone Johnson Lewis , Editor

UU Trauma Response Ministry (UUTRM), an affiliate organization of the UUA, exists to help congregations deal with crises and disasters within their congregations and the communities in which they live. The Rev. Aaron Payson, a member of the UUTRM Board, outlined what a crisis is: an event that disrupts a person's normal way of operating, and when the mechanisms that they use to cope no longer work. One of the key parts of life that is disrupted is our sense of spirituality.

Yet what is spirituality? Dr. Rosemary Chinnici, professor of pastoral theology at Starr King School for the Ministry, said that all writers agree that the word "spirituality" refers to some kind of experience outside of ourselves of wonder, awe, or the numinous. The word was coined by Rudolf Otto to mean the idea of the holy, a sense of awe inspiring wonder which we feel in certain situations. Some people refer to this otherness as "god," others as "transcendence," sometimes it's "nature," or any of a variety of other names.

Chinnici said that there are two ways that spirituality comes. The first is through personal experience, such as our response to the exquisite beauty before us. It can be felt as a warm tingle in our toes, to an ecstatic religious experience of being born again. Or, as Chinnici put it, "different strokes for different folks."

The other form of spirituality is collective spirituality—when we have a sense of awe and wonder together. There is something about being together, said Chinnici, that makes us feel there is a life beyond us. For UUs, she said, it might be the feeling when singing "Rank By Rank" together in the Service of the Living Tradition, or through water and flower communions.

What both forms are about, Chinnici said, is about meaning making. Yet during and after traumatic experience, we lose our ability to experience both the personal and communal forms of spirituality. We lose, as one theorist put it, our "maze ways." It was discovered that rats that learned mazes as a way to get cheese will starve to death when the maze is removed—they can't negotiate a different path. When we are in crisis, it is as if our mazes are taken away, and we don't know how to "feed ourselves spiritually." In face of trauma, our usual structures for understanding the deeper meaning disappear, and we lose the ability to feel awe or connection.

We also, Chinnici said, lose our sense of hope. We ask the question "why did this happen?" and we can end up collateral victims of whatever violence by not being able to answer the question. We lose a part of ourselves when this happens, since our sense of self is based on being able to make meaning.

The problem is that we don't feel comfortable saying "I don't know," said Chinnici, so responders make up things to say to make themselves feel better. By not being able to admit to lack of knowledge, people often say ludicrous things, and unintentionally end up offering "false" hope. We often try, she said, to avoid situations because we don't want to face them. Yet it is in embracing another's suffering and uttering the words "I am also lost, and I do not understand," that we enter into a communal experience—the waiting with another person in trauma, of being with them.

The act of communal spirituality, Chinnici said, is not in explanation, but in the act of being with another. By learning how to wait with others, and remember those who have waited with us, we then offer communal worship. She reminded people that Terry Anderson, who was held captive for seven years, said that it was his wife's "waiting" for him that kept him alive. Even though they had not been in touch, his knowledge that she was actively waiting is what he credits with saving his life.

It takes two to wait, Chinnici said. In her Roman Catholic religious order, she says that she knows she is not given the gift of faith, but instead the gift of hope. So the other Sisters wait for her in faith, while she waits for them in hope. We must enter into the abyss of not knowing, Chinnici concluded, and refuse to offer false hope, and instead offer hope in waiting with each other until we find words to mourn and weep together.

The Rev. Susan Suchocki Brown, president of UUTRM, said that is what UUTRM is about: waiting with congregations, and individuals in them. UUTRM offers that liberal presence, that liberal way of being, through pre-incident education, and through on-site and other forms of reaching out to congregations dealing with crises. It is UUTRM's job to help people come back to a "new normal" after incorporating the event that has occurred into their lives.

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