Score Keeping

How the healing of Jesus feels so very unsafe.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

So so sorry about the Demotivation podcast yesterday. I cannot, even after much trying, figure out what happened. If God grants me any grace, I will corral Matt and do it again today, or worst case, tomorrow. In the meantime, casting about across the internet and all the different places it might take one, I was struck by a difficult line in the psalm this morning. ”You called upon me in troubles,” says God to his people, “and I delivered you, and I answered you in the thundercloud and tested you at the waters of strife.”

Goodness, I said to myself as the rest of the readings went by, that is the very opposite of the kind of deliverance I would like today. I have a lot on my plate. I have a lot of stuff I’m worried about. I have various and sundry problems that are beyond my ability to provide meaningful or satisfying solutions. To cry out to God for help and be answered “in the thundercloud” is bad enough. Worse yet is to be “tested at the waters of strife.”

The line stands out to me more particularly, though, because I have been chewing on the remarkable insights in this very helpful article by John Ehrett about a book that has long been on my list. “A popularization of an existing body of academic work,” he writes,

The Body Keeps the Score is the ur-text of ideas about human memory, identity, and experience that enjoy outsize cultural influence. Those who haven’t cracked the cover of the thick volume will still recognize its motifs: the importance of a sense of safety to psychological health, the possibility of interpreting one’s past experiences through the lens of trauma, the somatic effects of abuse that exceed cognitive recall, and so forth.

That, it seems to me, sums up the essential expectations of so many contemporary endeavors like parenting, or work culture, or going to church. “Safety” is the word of the hour. I am hearing it everywhere in every kind of conversation, and even sometimes saying it myself.

And what is so ironic about that word is that it has never actually been something within human grasp. How can you possibly be “safe” when there are so many bad things out there? More even than you can anticipate.

Just getting out of bed can be enough to injure you (I mean me). Opening my inbox and discovering a variety of unpleasant tasks and complicated relational issues frequently sends me into a tailspin. And then there are the many hours of having to teach my actual children to drive, which has been terrifying, to understate it. That’s before I consider the malign and wicked people out there who are bent on doing bad things on purpose, who hurt and destroy for their own pleasure.

Living in an “unsafe” world is intensified by the mysterious and troubling connection between the body and the mind. My body does, in some irritating sense, “keep score.” Whatever I think with my mind is not powerful enough to drag along my aging frame. For a small example, somehow in Covid, I think from wearing a mask, I learned to clench my teeth all the time. No matter how often I explain to myself that I needn’t clench my teeth, I am always doing it anyway. And that isn’t even a big thing.

Which is to say that I have been hoping to get a moment to read the book. Ehrett with brilliant clarity, however, points out that like so many things, you can’t just take a basically useful idea and shellac it over a crumbling theological framework and expect everything to turn out alright:

Given the sensitivity of the subject matter, many of these ideas have largely sidestepped careful theological scrutiny—an oversight perhaps attributable to the sharp disciplinary division between “systematic theology” and “pastoral theology” that prevails in many seminaries. In the coming years, that should change. The ideas and assumptions that underpin van der Kolk’s model of trauma should increasingly be engaged from a distinctively Christian perspective, one that does not simply apply a thin layer of “Christianese” but confronts the substance directly. At bottom, the language of trauma cannot be allowed to displace the church’s own distinctive speech, as if concepts like “sin” have become somehow inadequate to name the reality of destructive evil. Some Christians have called explicitly for such a displacement, and others have shifted their rhetorical emphases more subtly. They may do so with the best of intentions. But that path is a dangerous one nonetheless. [emphasis his—and mine]

Just to apply the badly steered rubber to the pothole-infested road, everything that Jesus says in the gospel for this morning is, if not actually traumatic, at least disturbing, the stirring up of strife and enmity that destroy the little peace and quiet that make human relationships bearable.

In the first place, Jesus goes up a mountain and calls to him the twelve in such a public way that both his family and the spiritual rulers of Israel justifiably take offense. He is, right under their noses, reconstituting the spiritual nation around himself. Who even does that? they cry. The answer is clear to them—Satan. Satan is the sort of person who wrecks everything on purpose.

Except that his own family, and Israel, and everybody had many generations worth of learning to live fairly peaceably, even “safely” with Satan of all people. You can do all sorts of things in the presence of that demon of light without feeling too bad about it. It’s very easy, of no trouble at all, to dwell in harmony with the great enemy of God who only wants you to be safe enough not to root out the deep bitter poison of evil, of rebellion, of unforgiveness, of hate.

As we lurch through the week and toward the dark, cruelty of Friday, it is incumbent on those Christians who look at Jesus as the most primary, central figure not only of their own lives, but of the cosmos, those people who would call him both “brother” and “Lord,” to admit to themselves that he is concerned for their safety in a different and more essential way than the devil and all his demons. Jesus’ project is one of total healing, of complete “wellness,” in the “all manner of things shall be well” rather than the “I don’t feel well right now and so I will do something trite to partially ease the pain.” He isn’t going to be satisfied until Satan has been forced out of your mind and heart, until there isn’t any more score to be kept, because he—Jesus—has won it all.

So anyway, have a nice day!