Healing The HealersExemplo

Depending on faith in trauma when theology falls short

As I write, the ripple effects of yet another mass tragedy are unfolding, this time in Pittsburgh, where the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue has taken eleven lives and brought profound grief to countless people in that region and to the wider Jewish community in America.

This event once again raises the stakes for faith leaders who seek to foster healing during trauma and its aftermath. Perhaps you’re daunted by the enormity of that task, especially as it beckons you above and beyond the demanding work that your calling entails in the first place. Our best competency may be to say we aren’t competent, even for a moment.

What can equip us with this sort of competency, the capacity to acknowledge what we lack? 

Indeed, our own experiences, communities and faith traditions can offer us ample resources to wrestle with our limits and still respond with presence and compassion in the midst of circumstances that can seem to surpass the worst we could imagine. 

The practices of our faith traditions allow us to acknowledge our finitude and fallibility and the very real and quite merciless presence of evil in the world. They also create space where we can learn to live with the silence of our questions, rather than reach for easy answers. They offer us familiar words and rituals that have comforted and strengthened others before us and that will continue to comfort and strengthen those who come after us. They teach us to cherish mystery, to believe that beyond the discomfort of the unknown there is still coherence and meaning. Our faith communities also foster solidarity, reassuring us that we are not alone in our suffering. 

When trauma and tragedy shatter that which we can easily take for granted, the human connections that emerge can and do begin the process of repairing what is broken – a sense of safety and belonging, permission to grieve and lament, an experience of unity with people we might never encounter otherwise. 

Where our cognitive, rational capacities fall profoundly short, the power of spirit can and will sustain us, connect us and stabilize us through the disorientation of trauma and the journey of recovery which follows.