I’ve sat with this book for a couple months beyond when I started reading it. So many things have occurred since I opened Rambo’s Spirit and Trauma. I’d like to conclude thinking about the book in a different way than I originally envisioned.

Rather than capturing her final chapter in a review that summarizes and suggests directions of thinking, I want to lift how the final chapter, “Remaining in Love,” may provide angles into the ethics of things. I’m thinking of differences her theology of remaining can make in the moment–in my moment.

I’m sitting at my desk, swirling in the day with notifications about health and sickness and, among other things, the coronavirus and recovering in the evening by balancing my beautiful boys’s needs, one of my last courses in the PhD program, attendance to my martial practice, and trying to sleep.

How does remaining as a theology work? In what ways might pneumatology impose or, better, invite us to a way of being in the swirling world of political fighting (and is this the normal political process now?), sickness and recovery, death, life, play, love?

Rambo suggests that involving the spirit in the life of remaining has direct meaning for time. Witness and proclamation impact views of time because reality links us “to another time” and not only this moment we’re in.

She notes that preoccupation with violence and death, both in our narratives and biblical reflection, as well as how we sit with life. In sitting with life, we sit and watch and rehearse death.

Rambo turns us to love and in doing so challenges this emphasis of what overwhelms our “vision of flourishing” and her work turns us to a “move to life,” even as that move has its own blind spots.

I suggest that the following may be particular ways to stay with the middle that Rambo discusses, ways that I’m sitting with her book and the gifts of it, ways I’m with it today. I’m not trying to explicate as much as integrate. I may be, simply, rambling, which is not different than any other post, I suppose.

First, I think slowing down becomes a way to engage in the middle time. Rambo’s work offers a theological articulation for changing my relationship with time. She settles in theologically and provides a theological bridge to endorsing the Spirit’s activity in different time zones.

Second, revisiting biblical reflection and theological sources for their resonance with this middle material feels real. The Bible says many things and much of theological scholarship deals with the words in it. But Rambo’s trauma lens requires an imaginative reappraisal of what’s not there. The middle, the unseen, the unspoken, and the unuttered–what’s there?

Third, remaining in love has an orienting purpose. Remaining connotes a way to honor the weird reality of being in-between, being with the Spirit even without the assurance of more victorious moments like resurrection or finishing or accomplishing or succeeding. Getting through it would relate to these finishing words, right? But remaining relates more to the prior moment, the more troublesome moment. Again, there’s the time part, but there’s the present element of being in that now which is stabilizing.