{"id":3026,"date":"2022-11-17T09:45:52","date_gmt":"2022-11-17T09:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/utusheffield.org.uk\/?p=3026"},"modified":"2022-11-17T09:45:52","modified_gmt":"2022-11-17T09:45:52","slug":"bearing-witness-in-an-age-of-shock-and-trauma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/utusheffield.org.uk\/2022\/11\/17\/bearing-witness-in-an-age-of-shock-and-trauma\/","title":{"rendered":"Bearing Witness in an Age of Shock and Trauma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Presented at the UTU AGM 12 November 2022<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Rev. Dr Rob Hoch<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Thank you for letting me share this afternoon. I’m going to talk for a few minutes about what it means to testify or bear witness as people of faith in an age of “shock trauma” \u2014 it seems like an apt, if unhappy, metaphor for our time. Numerous observers say that we are living in an age of trauma. We don’t really get how deep this goes. This realization dawned on me during an elementary school presentation on trauma. The presenter said that when a child watches an act of violence, say the planes slamming into the Twin Towers of 9-11, it doesn’t make a distinction between the historical event and the subsequent replays of that event. To the child watching, it is one and the same, as if the planes keep slamming into the towers ad nauseum<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While adults may be capable of making those distinctions, the developing mind may not. Maybe the normalisation of trauma contributes to sense that we’re toughened to it, numb \u2014 or indifferent to shock, the other half of trauma. Webster’s defines shock as a “sudden or violent mental or emotional disturbance. (2) : a disturbance in the equilibrium or permanence of something. : something that causes such disturbance. the loss came as a shock.” By all rights, we should feel confusion and disorientation, but often we feel nothing in particular.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Or do we? Today, trauma scholars tell us that painful experiences are not merely temporal but wired into our physical being, even inheritable. A woman telling me about how her young son was killed years ago when a police vehicle struck him outside their home, said it was as if the police officer had kicked her in the stomach. She reflexively placed her hands over her womb, as if the trauma were located in this specific place of her physical being, the epicentre of shock. You don’t need to be a neurologist to recognize how multiple traumas contribute to collective anxiety, with a locus in the body itself.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Another dimension of this is the collective rather than the personal or individual. Edwin Friedman, author of Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0says we live in cultures of “chronically anxious systems” in which reactivity<\/em> \u2014 rather than reflection or awe \u2014\u00a0are the dominant modes of response. According to Friedman, knee-jerk reactions “seem to bypass the cerebral cortex and perpetuate a super-charged emotional atmosphere”.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Think Q-Anon (the conspiracy theory movement), hate speech, mass shootings, state sponsored rape, climate crisis, misinformation and disinformation as accelerants that bypass our cerebral cortex. Chronic anxiety is the result. Or, we might say fear \u2014”fight, flight, or freeze” \u2014 is the predominant agent of social action or inaction.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Fear is abundant. William Brown, an Old Testament scholar, says that this list isn’t simply a function of our overactive imaginations \u2014 we face real threats:<\/p>\n

\n

It has been said that 90% of our fears do not reflect reality, but I wonder whether this observation needs some significant updating. There are today plenty of good reasons to be afraid, and fear is a natural response to the world as we see it.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Our preaching has often treated fear with the conventional wisdom of that idea \u2014 that is “90% of our fears do not reflect reality.” Incidentally, as a person, I find a lot of wisdom in that conventional take on fear.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Having said that, those of us who live with sermons, either as listeners or as preachers, may need to revisit the way we treat fear. Today, we face existential threats to our existence. As people who think about God and faith, we also may need to revisit our theological understandings of fear in the biblical lexicon. How is the biblical thinking around “fear of God” distinct from the fear we see in secular society and how might a biblical and theological understanding also be an anti-dote to the fevers inflicted by “chronically anxious systems”?<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Brown, whom I cited a moment ago, points out that the concept of the “fear of the Lord” runs throughout the biblical narrative. Yet, in each case, the writers correlate fear with a surprising capacity to turn the worst powers of fear into surprising expressions of a flourishing life and community:<\/p>\n