I’m slowly reading Dr. Shelly Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining and because I am not reading it for “school” and because I miss blogging, I’m going to reflect as I read.

Rambo’s work is a pastoral theology, the broad discipline I study, and this book is a sweet nexus of my interests in trauma studies, healing, and Spirit. She is working to claim the middle space between death and life and aiming to clarify how trauma can prevent persons from identifying with death or life. Trauma, horrendous and inexplicable, leads to a kind of middle existence where death has not come and life hasn’t either.

In the introduction, Rambo describes her book as an attempt to listen to the experiences of persons impacted by Hurricane Katrina and to show how trauma continues, how it doesn’t end, and how “trauma is the study of what remains” (p. 15). She works to construct a theology of Spirit that has meaning in the midst of unending trauma.

Drawing upon traditional Christian stories of the resurrection, that chief event most Christians cling to in order to point to how God redeems all, and death, the clear event where life stops, Rambo is offering a mild protest of these polar moments. This is reading of her at this early point. These two moments are, seemingly, too clear and clean. They both occur, bringing what they bring. They are though, for Rambo, vapid when it comes to the experience of trauma precisely because trauma resists falling into the clear, clean episodic instantiations of death and life. Trauma spills beyond hard borders.

Something happens between life and death, in the middle as Rambo writes. It is this middle-space, this “middle discourse,” this in-between that Rambo seems to want to discuss. She says – and rightly in my view – that Christians (and not them only) tend to rely on turning suffering into glory but without appreciating trauma’s “dislocation, its distance, and its fragmentation” (p. 8). I am looking forward to the book because of this. There is something quite rewarding about a resurrection and its sure and definitive perspective. There is also something missing, isn’t it? There is pain and death but it’s hardly appreciated. Rambo says that the accounts of redemption are insufficient. They are weakened by there plain disregard for the dislocating experience of trauma. Ah, the promise of this.

Rambo will work with the language of the gospels in the book, using the three days of Jesus’s death, entombment, and resurrection, and she will land in that middle space, that Saturday, that day where most preachers sleep in their sermons. In some ways, I think my ministry is postured for this middle, this Saturdayed experience of human existence, so I’ve already found a partner in Rambo in the introduction.

The book will outline a hermeneutical lens with trauma as the lens. Think of eyeglasses, tools I live with in order to see. Trauma will be the lens through which Rambo sees redemption. She’ll work to show us how Spirit presents (or is present) in the shattered. This arrests me right away and is frightening because it requires an openness to time in a way that’s largely unacknowledged. Is the Spirit present and active in the minutes and hours of unending emotional disaster?

I think of the time when Jesus died for example. I’ve gone to too many Good Friday services and an equal number of too many Easter Sunday services where the middle space stretched into silence. It is as if Saturday is either nonexistent or that it’s meant to be a bridge we walk over but don’t talk about. Can anyone get to Sunday without that middle space? We cannot. I am angling as I read to learn how to complicate the steps between Friday and Sunday. Maybe people arrive at church too quickly. Maybe we need the slow down as we trek through the soul-dark day before Sunday. And we may be tutored by Rambo on how to see trauma as a lens whereby we interpret again the experience of what’s left when trauma occurs.

While Rambo does not frame her book within Pentecostal studies, I cannot help but read the book as I am, a variously hyphenated Christian who happily introduces himself in ecumenical and academic religious gatherings as a black Bapticostal from the South side ordained to pastor in a denomination of historically Swedish immigrants. Try to box me if you dare!

I am looking forward to the book. I already hear the Spirit’s rumblings in the early words. So far, the Spirit is resisting the easy approach to do anything other than witness what real. I want to read this through once in a week but I’ll write posts about each chapter over the next 2 or 3.