Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining – By Shelly Rambo

Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, Shelly Rambo,Lousiville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2010 (ISBN: 978-0-664-23503-1), xiv + 186 pp., Pb $25.00

Reviewed by Amy CarrWestern Illinois University, USA

In Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining, Shelly Rambo sets forth atheological perspective that is attentive to and consonant with a post-traumatic subjectivity. Mindful of the way that past traumas still troublethe present lives of survivors, Rambo retrieves and develops a strain ofChristian witnessing that is neither proclamation of clearly good news,nor self-sacrificial imitation of Jesus’ suffering, but an ambiguous tes-timony to what remains after every trauma – a remaining that bears theindelible marks of wounding, but also of persisting in a love at oncedivine and human. Drawing especially on literary theorist CathyCaruth’s account of trauma’s disruptive effects on our individual andcollective narrated identities (Chapter 1), Rambo develops the notion ofwitnessing as ‘remaining’ by reading two Christian resources throughthe lens of trauma studies: the Christian tradition of Holy Saturday, theday in the ‘middle’ between Jesus’ death and resurrection, as evoked byAdrienne von Speyr and Hans Urs von Balthasar (Chapter 2); and theJohannine depictions of Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple aswitnesses after Jesus’ death (Chapter 3). Rambo perceives a fragiledivine Spirit emerging in this middle space between death and life, aSpirit she depicts as resonant with Catherine Keller’s portrait of Spiritmoving in and across the tehomic or chaotic ‘deep’ of creation (Chapter4). She concludes by tracking signs of a witnessing Spirit of remainingin post-Katrina narratives by members of a Baptist church in NewOrleans (Chapter 5). Throughout her constructive sketch of a redemp-tion attuned to surviving trauma, Rambo names ways that dominantChristian accounts of redemption tend to elide trauma and its after-effects by focusing upon Jesus’ death and/or resurrection as a defini-tive medium of salvation. She suggests that we would do well tofine-tune more hesitant, subtle accounts of redemption, accounts lessprone to fantasy or denial about the nature of our lives in the aftermathof traumatic histories: ‘The gloss of redemption is, perhaps, the greatestenemy to those who survive trauma; it provides a promise often unac-companied by forms of life that can deliver on that promise’ (p. 165).

Interestingly, by attending with such a steady gaze to the lingeringeffects of trauma within the ambiguous experience of surviving it, an expe-rience that muddles the boundaries of life and death, Rambo bypassesrecent Christian debates about sacrificial atonement by way of the cross.By emphasizing how trauma fails to resolve into full healing, she not

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only avoids the risk of portraying suffering itself as redemptive, butalso shirks some familiar polemical reactions to sacrificial accounts ofatonement – reactions that name as redemptive only Jesus’ resurrectionor his life praxis and ministry. Although her portrayal of what it meansto witness trauma certainly falls in line with the Johannine Jesus’own commanded practices to remain in love (commandments utteredduring Jesus’ ministry and after his death), Rambo’s reading of John’sgospel stresses its elusive mystical announcement of a remaining love,not Paul’s bold announcements of the risen Christ’s victory over death,or Mark’s eschatological excitement about the in-breaking reign of God.In avoiding talk of atonement or a definitive salvation, Rambo echoessomething of the tragic sensibility of Kathleen Sands and Sharon Welch1

who – with Keller – voice wariness about a grandly utopic imaginationthat might promote or tolerate apocalyptic violence, or might promptescape from messy struggles for justice amid conflict and moral uncer-tainty. But Rambo prefers to steer away from both a ‘tragic’ and a‘triumphant’ reading of the ‘divine story’, in favor of a ‘story of divineremaining, the story of love that survives’ through ‘a way of being in thedepths’ transformatively (p. 172).

Both the insights and the underdeveloped dimensions of Rambo’stheology flow from her unwavering gaze upon the ambiguous experi-ence of trauma’s survival, of living after a traumatic event that altersforever one’s former sense of the world (an event she thus calls ‘death’,whether or not it involved a physical death). In Rambo’s own account,traumatic survival is ambiguous for at least two reasons, one regardingthe nature of trauma, the second concerning God’s presence in and aftertrauma. First, because trauma involves response to an event so horren-dous that it cannot be integrated or comprehended, the traumatizingevent tends to repeat itself in individual or collective lives in ways thatare often at best half-understood; consequently, even when testimonyaims to remember rather than repeat an ‘original’ trauma, that remem-brance can only be oblique and partial, for the trauma has shatteredformer frameworks for making sense of the world. Second, in the livesof survivors of traumatizing events, something persists after the traumathat is neither the totalizing absence of death, nor a victorious new lifeunmarked by what has gone before, but a noticed ‘death-in-life’ (p. 139).The act of noticing the survivor as trauma survivor is a practice ofwitnessing love, a practice that participates in the Spirit’s own love. Notsimply death, not yet resurrection, survival thus involves a ‘middle’voice of ‘remaining’ in a liminal space betwixt and between the death ofa safe secure world and the uncertain birth of a new, more trustworthyworld.

1 Kathleen Sands, Evil and Tragedy in Feminist Theology (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress,1990); Sharon Welch, A Feminist Ethic of Risk (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1990).

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Although Rambo does not reflect on it extensively,2 the subject who iswitnessing this post-traumatic remaining is also ambiguous: simulta-neously (it seems) the survivor herself, those accompanying and wit-nessing her stammering account of her trauma, and God present asSpirit – who seems both a prod to the testifying and the gesture oftestifying (and surviving) itself. Herein may lie for Rambo the seed ofwhatever redemption is possible in witnessing to a post-traumatic‘remaining’: the sense of participating in a gossamer relational bondamid and across trauma and its jarring effects, the sense of being seenor heard in horror and so being able intersubjectively to imagine afuture – albeit to imagine hesitantly, not boldly and sure-footedly.

That said, Rambo might milk much more theological significance outof her association among three kinds of post-traumatic boundary-crossing: one between death and life, another between the persons ofsurvivor and witness, and a third (perhaps) between the divine andthe human. Although Rambo herself employs a discourse of narrative(p. 17) rather than subjectivity, in her telling of the story of redemptivewitnessing, the inchoate boundaries between dying and living aftertrauma seem to bleed over into another kind of confusion, a lack ofclarity about who is witnessing and who is experiencing trauma and itssurvival. Indeed, at times it seems that what persists is trauma, ricochet-ing from the past into the present and foreclosing a future. Is whatpersists a hypostasis of trauma’s dynamic disruption of any linearnarrative of suffering to redemption? It is only the apposition of ‘love’that clarifies that the subject of ‘remaining’ for Rambo is not simply theperpetually undoing energy of trauma itself, but some sort of subsis-tence within a benevolent relationship. Undoubtedly such ambiguity ofsubject is welcomingly evoked by Rambo when she speaks of surviv-ing trauma: the trauma survives, and so do the traumatized and/ortheir witnesses. But by associating the Spirit of God intimately withthis ambiguity, does Rambo suggest that Spirit – as ‘pneumatologicalresidue’ (p. 79) – is a name for the epiphenomenon of both the experi-ence of undergoing trauma, and the experience of enduring in andbeyond it? In other words, is the God in Rambo’s witnessing of remain-ing a Feuerbachian projection of the tenuous human experience ofwitnessing trauma’s survival?

Rambo’s perceptive readings of Holy Saturday and of the Johanninegospels both allay and aggravate this worry – a worry at least to a moreorthodox Christian theology. Rambo herself may care less about faith-fulness to some sort of Christological orthodoxy than she does aboutfaithfully bearing witness to trauma without occluding it in some grandnarrative bent toward resurrection, a resurrection she often regards as

2 Rambo does ask, with Balthasar: who and what remains in the descent into hell (p. 61)?



inherently triumphalist and trauma-denying. But insofar as orthodoxy isnot an oppressive closing of theological options so much as a richnetwork of interlocking doctrinal concepts that can be variously inhab-ited and animated, Rambo might find her own account of a Christianwitness to remaining better developed if she were to reflect moreforthrightly about both ends of the space she still calls ‘middle’. Heraccount of witness from the middle at once relies on (pp. 11–12) andpotentially jettisons (pp. 109, 121) what she calls a binary oppositionbetween death and life, cross and resurrection. No wonder then that sheis drawn to Holy Saturday as the time in between Good Friday andEaster, a day traditionally associated with Jesus’ descent to hell. Ramboappreciates Speyr and Balthasar’s renderings of Jesus’ descent into hellas not a heroic act of releasing captives held there, but a passive act ofbecoming a captive in hell, extending Jesus’ forsakenness on the crossinto timeless torment. This vision of hell feeds upon Speyr’s annualvisionary participation in the events of Holy Week, which generatedimages of a ‘weary love’ (pp. 62, 72) and of a tentative transformationdepicted as an unsecured thread or rope moving partially across, thenmysteriously upward out of the depths of the abyss (pp. 76–77). Ramboregrets that such poetic accounts of Holy Saturday were later trumped byBalthasar and Speyr’s christocentric framings of this elusive experienceof sheer persistence. Those christocentric framings point not only back-ward to the trauma of Jesus’ death on a cross, but forward to Jesus’resurrection from death, his departure from hell. What is then lost,Rambo reckons, is the ‘pneumatological witness’ (p. 98) in hell itself (pp.62, 68); the tendril of Spirit in a forbidding place is displaced by thedecisive resurrection of Jesus. That resurrection too readily elides theexperience of trauma and its surviving, as evidenced by the frequentpressure on the traumatized to move on, to forgive or forget, to get a newlife. Might it not be possible, though, to remember that Jesus’ resurrec-tion is the first fruits of a redemptive transformation we have not yet livedinto fully, but that horizons the lives of those who bear witness to therisen one? It is not only past trauma that intrudes upon the present; so toofor Christians does this strange story of an executed rabbi’s resurrection.

And this is precisely, and oddly, what Rambo herself elides in hermarvelous close readings of Mary Magdalene’s and the beloved disci-ple’s witnesses to the post-traumatic presence of Jesus. While drawingthick lines of connection between the alterations of time, communica-tion ability, and somatic experiences in trauma survivors – and thealterations of time, language ability, and bodily space in the witnesses toJesus’ resurrection, Rambo neglects to name how the latter distortionsmight also reflect not trauma, but an uncomprehending wonder beforeone who is risen and transfigured. Or is she perhaps implying thatMary Magdalene and the beloved disciple’s encounters with the risenJesus are traumatic encounters?



Her neglect of the question – is resurrection itself a traumatizingevent in the Johannine gospel? – leaves me wondering if Rambo isimplicitly suggesting that Mary Magdalene and the beloved disciple’sencounters with Jesus are actually Spirit-induced residual effects of thetrauma of losing Jesus, more visionary imaginings that enable their ownsurvival than actual encounters with a resurrected person. If this is so,might not the ‘living wound’ of a dead Jesus suffice as a testimony toremaining ‘in the aftermath of death’ (p. 82)? Yet Rambo’s creativeinterpretation of the death spirit Jesus ‘hands over’ (paradidonai)’ (p. 98)on the cross opens a path to a fuller theological reflection on the middleas middle, on Holy Saturday as a vital but not solo space for the spirit ofremaining in love – a traverse in the space of hell, before the subsequentsending of the Holy Spirit, before Pentecost. In the story of Jesus’handing over of his death spirit to an undetermined other, Ramboperceives an acknowledgement of trauma’s own perpetuation, in mani-fold and indefinable ways, into the present lives of post-trauma survi-vors. After Jesus hands over his death spirit, the scene shifts to thewitnesses who behold that traumatic death. But it is here that applyingonly a lens of trauma tempts us to reduce the subsequent resurrectionaccounts to the status of survivors’ efforts to speak and comprehendtheir own persistence in the face of loss.

We do not need trauma theory to articulate the peculiar breakdownof ordinary time, embodiment, and speech in the face of what tran-scends our comprehension – something that wonder before a resurrec-tion can be said to do, too, if in a key quite unlike trauma. But if weemploy only trauma theory to a gospel reading, it is hard to avoidconflating the effects of trauma with the effects of encountering resur-rection. Post death and post resurrection, the disciples’ confusingemotional mix of grief and wonder should not be equated with merewonder about the sheer fact of surviving loss. There is a vaster eschato-logical hope catching its breath here. The entirety of a Christian journeyentails a helical passage that witnesses to the death, the abyss of hell,and resurrection. This larger Christian testimony suggests that insofaras God in Christ remains perpetually in Holy Saturday, always accom-panying in the Spirit those locked in hell, God does so not only as apost-traumatic Spirit of remaining in love, but also as one who raisesfrom death and hell those who are united with Christ.

Union with Christ cannot bypass a sojourn in the abyss – as survi-vor or as witness to trauma – and Rambo’s lens of trauma enriches aChristian testimony to that sojourn. But the abyss is not without rela-tionship to a world before and a world after, a reworlding that mayindeed be partial and at times non-existent, so far as we can see now.A reworlding that stands in the light of an eschatological hunch is aworld being birthed not only through remaining in love in the abyss,but also in a new heavens and a new earth that we cannot yet affirm



in sobriety – only in a wild affirmation encountering us from beyond.Trauma survivors are not immune to this radical resurrection-basedhope. Indeed, even as Rambo attends to the strand of post-Katrinatestimonies that voice the sense that ‘“after that storm” is always here’(p. 143), she acknowledges that expressions of a counterfactual hopein divine redemption were present among post-Katrina survivors aswell.

While Rambo states that she does ‘not dismiss the fact that there issomething to profess or imitate in relationship to the death and resur-rection’ (p. 40), she theorizes very little about the relationship betweenthis grand Christian narrative and a witness from the ‘middle’ ofsurviving trauma. Instead, she tends to presuppose death and life/resurrection as binary oppositions around which trauma’s truthsappear as a surplus or excess in the gaps made visible by a deconstruc-tive reading of survival texts, like the gospel narratives (pp. 11–12). Instraining for language to describe the way trauma haunts survivors,Rambo has opted to describe the aftermath of trauma as a persistence of‘death’ in ‘life’, choosing an opposition she must deconstruct to gesturetoward the dynamics of trauma – and an opposition that tends toconflate ‘life’ with ‘resurrection’ in a way the gospel narratives them-selves do not. Where Rambo does affirm resurrection, she equates itwith the human capacity to imagine: ‘In the pneumatology that I havedescribed, resurrection is not guaranteed life, but life that must bewitnessed into being. The practice of imagining life in new ways and innew forms is an essential aspect of witness’ (p. 168). More commonly,however, she moves away from a formal binary framework of deathand life/resurrection to ask repeatedly what it might mean to readredemption from the middle alone, ‘without the assurance of lifeahead’ (p. 108).

What would it be like if Rambo abandoned talk of ‘the middle’ andarticulated a simpler, sober narrative of surviving trauma, while depict-ing Spirit as that which is, enables, or accompanies the humanexperience of survival, in all its ambiguity? Then there would be noresurrection to elide in the name of avoiding an elision of trauma and itseffects. Another theologian who has long reflected about trauma, FloraKeshgegian, challenges us to work with a metaphor of God as theenergy for life itself, enabling or constituting all of our relational inter-connections in morally ambiguous ways.3 Such a view of God makes nopretensions to promoting a pure healing or a complete redemption; butwonder and awe remain, as does taking responsibility for our capacityfor both disabling harm and healing witness.

3 Flora Keshgegian, God Reflected: Metaphors for Life (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008),pp. 147–168.



While I do not fully follow Keshgegian’s path myself, it is one thatmay be more consistent with some (not all) of Rambo’s theologicalimpulses, and one worthy of further theological development in itsown right insofar as it speaks to one set of intuitions about the divine.It may also befit a theologian steeped in conversation with Caruth’scombination of literary and trauma theory, especially her portrayal oftrauma as a window on an almost metaphysical claim about the natureof human history as bedeviled by past traumas. In her modifiedFreudian purview, redemption from trauma involves a witnessedacknowledgment (as opposed to a compulsive repetition) of trauma’spersistence into the present – a way of renarrating our identities thathears our traumatized stories into speech, however fragmented thetelling and however tentative the healing. Such a humble account ofsurvival accords well with a depiction of God as witnessing breath: ‘Itis not the Spirit of life, creatively and actively moving in the world; itis the breath of love witnessing through its passing to what remains’(p. 125).

But if Rambo’s discourse about a ‘middle space’ reflects more than aninitial effort to carve out in a Christian space a testimony to trauma andits survival, then more must be said about the posterior as well as theanterior to that middle space – about the place of the resurrection aswell as trauma or death. Can we avoid eliding trauma and avoid elidingresurrection? Or must we pick our elisions? Is it possible to testify to thewhole of the Triduum, from Maundy Thursday to Easter by way ofdeath and hell? To do so, more must be said about the incarnation, notonly about Jesus as a prototypical victim whose spirit persists in, as,and beyond his death. Divine and human subjectivity, while interwo-ven somehow in the Spirit, would need to reference a wider Christiannarrative than cross and Holy Saturday, and grapple with an ever-stammering effort to witness and articulate the workings of a moredistinctly Triune God.

Perhaps our range of choices regarding an adequate theological tes-timony to trauma is shaped at heart by the place – if any – given toeschatological, utopic thinking that swims in images of divine purity,perfection, and an ultimate absolute redemption rooted in a resur-rection from the dead. Rambo, like Keller, voices a suspicion thatsuch patterns of thought generate oppressive hierarchical distinctionsbetween divine power and creaturely power and parallel hierarchicaldualisms between creatures themselves, some of whom are deemedmore pure or more in God’s image than others (pp. 115–116). Thisassumption that divine and human power are somehow in competitiondoes not accord with another widespread construal of the Christiantradition’s picture of divine providence, in which creation is gifted intoexistence and continuously upheld by God, so that a non-competitiverelationship exists between divine and creaturely power – each



operating in its own plane, the creaturely plane dependent upon thedivine for all of its operations.4 While a discussion of divine providencein creation might take us too far afield, I mention these contrastingviews of divine power only to note that affirming absolutes related toGod – absolute power, purity, perfection – need not necessarily elidetrauma or its survival in the messy ambiguous circumstances of ourearthly lives. Rather, some of us are drawn to telling the stories of ourlives in relationship to a transcendent purity that cannot be destroyed byour fragmented lives, however sullied or interrupted by trauma or sin.Simone Weil is oft-cited for her profound depiction of affliction, butalongside her acute description of the afflicted’s sense of forsakenness,doom, and inner grotesqueness,5 Weil also attested to liturgical andother forms of attention to purity in God, an exposure to perfect puritythat she believed to be healing.6 Whether ambivalence about suchvisions of divine purity or perfection is expressed as a debate over theplace of Platonic idealism in a monotheistic imagination, or a debateabout the place of eschatological, apocalyptic, or paradisiacal thoughtin the living out of biblical (or Qur’anic) legacies, ambivalence about thepotential dangers of discourse about a full eschatological redemptionshould not blind us to the fact that many trauma survivors do find theirbearings by imagining their lives caught up somehow in a grand nar-rative that culminates in resurrection, the dramatic inauguration of anew life that includes a release from trauma’s hold on their lives –however visible the scars remain. For Christians, the transformativepower of resurrection may be tied to the incarnation’s juxtaposition ofdivine purity with the mud of our sin-soaked and traumatized lives, asGod in Jesus sojourns to hell as at once an inviolable and vulnerablefellow captive of the abyss. While some theologians may choose to relaxthe paradox of divine purity and creaturely vulnerability expressed inthe idea of incarnation by qualifying divine power or holiness, theirs isnot the only viable path to testifying to the truth of trauma withoutaverting our gaze. Indeed, Jewish and Christian traditions of lamentoffer yet another approach to bearing witness full-force to trauma andits effects, without closing the whole of human experience withintrauma’s own space–time horizon, or reducing the momentum of ourlives to the ripples trauma leaves in its wake. While we may be able totrace voices of biblical lament that end with one who remains towitness, we can also trace wholehearted lament juxtaposed sharply

4 Kathryn Tanner articulates this perspective on God and creation, tracing it throughAugustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin. See her God and Creation in Christian Theology(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2004).5 Simone Weil, ‘The Love of God and Affliction’, in Waiting for God (New York: Perennial,2001), pp. 67–82.6 Weil, ‘Forms of the Implicit Love of God’, ibid., pp. 83–142.



alongside eschatological imagery of God’s return to Zion, the return ofthe messiah, a coming time of feasting and well-being.

Rambo offers a far richer reflection than most about the significanceof witness and accompaniment in surviving trauma. Her trauma-sensitive readings of Holy Saturday and of the Johannine gospelsshould carry weight and echo in subsequent Christian thought abouthow to bear witness theologically to trauma and its surviving. My owntheological proclivities lead me to a landscape she does not hereexplore – the unsettling experiences of God that can also follow in thewake of trauma, bound up with a spiritual state of distrust and innerabhorrence that can seem peculiarly providential. But many will reso-nate with Rambo’s own focus upon God as elusive but loving Spirit,a Spirit who persists in trauma’s surviving. It remains to be seenif Rambo will develop a fuller Christian account of this witnessing‘middle Spirit’ in relationship to a larger narrative of death and resur-rection, or if she will explore what redemption might look like if themiddle were to become the whole, if trauma and its surviving were toinfuse the scene of theological imagination without remainder.

Response to Amy CarrBy Shelly RamboBoston University School of Theology, USA

I am deeply appreciative of Amy Carr’s careful reading of Spirit andTrauma and of her insightful points of critique and development. Giventhe focus of her own scholarship, she knows how difficult and yet hownecessary it is to provide theological reflection on trauma. Her scholarlycourage and sensitivity to these issues, especially in relationship to thewritings of Simone Weil, make her a generous and formidable conver-sation partner.

She has aptly, and attentively, identified the scope of my project. Myconcern, as Carr notes, is with thinking about how the gospel textsnarrate the ‘divine story’ and how the theological tradition of Chris-tianity has conceptualized redemption from these texts. Where has theemphasis been placed and what has been elided? Holy Saturday pro-vided me with a theologically rich site from which to address theexperience of trauma, and the language and images of the descentresonate with the experience of trauma. Carr is right that I have focusedmy approach on narrative instead of on accounts of traumatic subjec-tivity. Instead of asking ‘what happens to the human subject’, I amasking how the textual and liturgical narration of the story of redemp-tion are challenged and reshaped, given what we know about trauma.By way of response, I want to focus my response on two key issues:resurrection and redemption.



Remaining and Resurrection

In my attempts to save Holy Saturday from elisions, Carr charges that Ihave, as a consequence, elided resurrection. In my vision of remaining,she believes that I have reduced resurrection to another phase of trau-matic loss and survival. I take this critique very seriously. Carr’s com-ments touch a nerve, both because she identifies limitations in thewritten project and because she forecasts the challenges at the heart mycurrent research.

In Spirit and Trauma, I provide accounts of Mary, the beloved disciple,and Peter, but I do not take up the narrative of Thomas in the latter halfof John 20. Here, the resurrected Christ appears with wounds. What isthe promise of resurrection wounds? Although Carr, in her openingcomments, acknowledges that I present a vision of ‘remaining thatbears the indelible marks of wounding’ (p. 1), I have not pondered thesignificance of these christological marks. They provide a challenge tovisions of resurrection (and to eschatology), but also provide a route tothe myriad of issues that Carr has raised. The Christian tradition, whilelargely indebted to Pauline descriptions of resurrection and his escha-tological vision, could benefit from a more prolonged reflection on thesignificance of the resurrection wounds in the Gospel of John.

But simply to say that resurrection is my next project is not sufficientto respond to the insights that Carr raises here. If I am hearing correctly,she is questioning whether I offer a vision of life resurrected or trans-figured. Is there hope and promise in a theology of remaining? Have Iaccounted for the ‘uncomprehending wonder’ that the disciples expe-rience ‘before one who is risen and transfigured?’ My propensity tolinger and to wait, and to withhold resurrection from those who willclaim it too easily, too comfortably, does leave me open to Carr’s cri-tiques. As she notes, I have an ‘unwavering gaze upon the ambiguousexperience of traumatic survival’. This is an accurate assessment of mycommitments in writing the book, and responses that I have receivedsuggest that simply naming this ambiguous experience – and giving ittheological significance – is healing. But is it sufficient, and does it dojustice to the whole narrative of Christianity?

Does trauma remain? Yes.7 I am saying that something of traumaremains, given what I understand about the nature of trauma. And yetthat is not all that remains. In the abyss, love remains. This is a pro-foundly Johannine affirmation, but it is also at the core of orthodoxChristian theology, especially in respect to articulations of the Holy

7 Although I think that trauma can cease to have a hold on the lives of trauma survivors,I do not want to maintain the position that it does not go away. This places me on latterside of the ongoing debate between Dominic LaCapra and Cathy Caruth about whetheryou can ‘work through’ trauma.



Spirit. I do think trauma remains, but, in its handing over, it is not whatit was before. This transformation in the abyss is a particular moment inthe divine story that I am attempting to name, as a pneumatologicallydistinctive moment in which divine love persists in the abyss. The‘pneumatological residue’ is not the same thing as the trauma thatremains. Perhaps the language of persistence and remaining does nothave enough levity or agency to signal a transformation. Perhaps thepostmodern-inflected terms (residue and remainder) work against mytheological proposal here. I am, as Carr notes, reaching for a moresubtle account of redemption that resists a redemptive gloss. But it maybe, as Carr suggests, so subtle that it fails to register any transformation.In Heart of the World, von Balthasar offers images that allow for thesubtlety that I seek, by evoking images of a weary drop and a faintglimmer. It is not easy for the witnesses to identify how this transfor-mation is taking place, but there is no denying that something is takingplace.

Theologian Serene Jones, author of Trauma and Grace, presses me insimilar ways, as she argues that the notion of grace provides what mynotion of love does not – a distinctive divine in-breaking that enactstransformation. In speaking about divine presence as love, I am empha-sizing the continuous presence of God’s Spirit, instead of a radicalin-breaking. I am attempting to describe a distinctive movement andmanifestation of that Spirit that is difficult to narrate and often goes‘under the radar’. But this movement does not solely arise from withinus. It is not absent of transcendence. The Spirit cannot be simply con-flated with the human spirit.

I am consistent with orthodox Christian theology in speaking ofGod’s Spirit as love. The Spirit of God, the Spirit of love, pulses throughthe universe and cannot be extinguished. I think our task is to make thatlove visible, to witness it, when it is least visible. I do not think that we,on our own, generate the love, but I do think that the work of witness,sanctifying work, is partnering work. We know what this work is aboutbecause we see it in the life and ministry of Jesus, and, in this ‘handingover’, we are powered to do the same. We give form to that love; wegive it definition, not, as Balthasar claimed, by christic imitation butthrough pneumatological witness. I want to recover the Spirit’s salvificrole in bringing about life. I speak about the marks of the Spirit in termsof witnessing to the undertow and of sensing life. These are briefsections at the end of the book that I wish I had expanded and thatcould be interpreted as the ‘fruits of the Spirit’ reshaped through thelens of trauma.

Carr is rightly concerned that my desire for a more subtle, andnon-triumphant, vision of resurrection renders resurrection merely amoment on the spectrum of traumatic survival. Does the language ofremaining need to be expanded so as not to imply that the picture



of ‘after’ is just a continuation of trauma? Yes. However, I am notconvinced that I go so far as to ‘conflate’ the effects of trauma withresurrection or to ‘reduce the momentum of our lives to the ripplestrauma leaves in its wake’. Perhaps more articulation of divine love andthe fruits of the Spirit need to be more explicitly taken up in respect toresurrection. I am not among those who offer a transcendent purity,although I am captivated by what she offers in the final paragraphs ofher review. It is clear that these reflections express her distinctive theo-logical contributions, and I would welcome hearing more about the‘paradox of divine purity and creaturely vulnerability’.

Redemption

I want to return to Carr’s brief comment about the tragic sensibilities ofSpirit and Trauma. She notes that despite echoes of the tragic sensibilityI ‘prefer to steer away from both a “tragic” and “triumphant” reading ofthe divine story, in favor of a story of divine remaining’. This is not amajor point in Carr’s review, but attending to it does link me to some ofher concerns about the nature of resurrection. What kind of story are wetelling?

In the last chapter, I state that I am rethinking redemption in light ofthis new frame of remaining. I claim to be moving away from thelanguage of redemption (p. 145), but I am not able to say what I ammoving toward. I probe whether redemptive frameworks for interpret-ing the Christian story have ceased to function in light of what we knowabout trauma, but I was not prepared – perhaps not bold enough – todeclare them dead. Questioning the viability of the redemptive narra-tive is not a distinctively Christian venture; it is one that Elie Wieselwrestles with in relationship to Judaism.

Carr names tragedy as the alternative to a redemptive reading, butthe route that I am taking here is not clear. Is the story of divineremaining that I offer a tragic story or a redemptive one? I claim to berewriting redemption in light of trauma, but I stop short of saying thatwe need to abandon a redemptive framework altogether. While I sharetragic sensibilities, I am not clearly stating whether this story is, and canbe, redemptive. I think this touches on some of Carr’s concerns aboutwhat I offer as resurrection; at heart is the question of whether I believethat persons can find redemption in this story. Ultimately, I hear this inher comments about whether or not I am concerned with Christianorthodoxy.

There is a renaissance of tragedy within the North American context,especially in relationship to addressing war trauma. Projects such asTheater of War feature readings of ancient Greek tragedies for mixedaudiences of veterans and civilians. Within the context of a theaterperformance, veterans hear aspects of their experiences named by



characters such as Sophocles’ Ajax. Within this larger story, truths thatwould otherwise go unnamed can be witnessed. It is difficult to delin-eate the layers of witness, but it is a powerful and transformativeexperience. As an audience member, my longing was for the narrativeof Christianity to function in that way. Sometimes it does. But manytimes not. The power of the tragic story, as opposed to a redemptiveone, is that it speaks to a world in which cosmic forces are at play andthe individual, as actor within them, cannot escape wounding or moralstruggle. This vocabulary is resonating on a variety of levels; it is speak-ing powerfully to our current situation.

But what type of story is remaining? Carr’s comments remind me thatperhaps there are not just two ways of framing these events. The lan-guage of remaining is intentionally resonant with survival literature,and I cast the Johannine vocabulary in this light. Elie Wiesel notes thatthe twentieth century gives birth to a new genre of literature – testi-mony. And here is where I point to something I have not resolved in thefinal chapter of the book and that I was not fully able to work through.Witnessing the collapse of the redemptive narrative, am I also witness-ing the rise of testimony as a distinctive form of theology? Is ‘witness’a distinctive genre for theology, providing a third way between tragedyand redemption? Rebecca Chopp offered a brief but influential piecethat forecasted the implications of the rise of witness and testimonialliteratures, calling for ‘poetics’ as a new genre for theology.

My attraction to novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is thatthey present visions of a world after its collapse. The frameworksemployed within the former world are rendered bare within the razedcontexts of a postdisaster world. He sets the stage for what I think ispressing work for theologians. I am not invested in the demise of theredemptive framework; but I am not willing to save it at all costs. AndI believe that we are at a time in our history and our world in whichplumbing the depths of our assertions, even at the expense of losingthem, is necessary. I do not see this as an abandonment of faith but,rather, consistent with what I understand faith to be. Losing somethingto find it again. Richard Kearney speaks of this movement more elo-quently than I in his book Anatheism. He describes faith as a wager andas a ‘return’ after something has been lost. Perhaps I am describing, inmy language of remaining, a postredemption narrative, but the ‘post’ isa return after a death. Is this at odds with orthodox Christian theology?I do not think so. In letting go of frameworks that are no longer con-gruent for narrating our lives, we can rediscover them. This requires apneumatological wager. A resurrection?



Documents

Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining – By Shelly Rambo