Living With Trauma 22

I wrote in the last post, Gentle Reader, about an idealized divine love that very rarely seems to happen in real life, ironically, it is even less frequent in the Christian churches. Spain brought to the New World disease, bloodshed, theft, rape and pillage as well as wholesale genocide of the aboriginal peoples of what is now called Latin America and the extermination of the three great civilizations that were born of that region, the Aztec, the Maya and the Inca. They also brought Roman Catholicism. I mentioned that divine love is even more absent in the churches than in other places, which is rather a cruel twist. The church was allegedly founded by the Lord of Love, jesus Christ. So, one might ask, what happened How could something that began as something so beautiful wind up committing some of the ugliest crimes against humanity, no less horrific and gruesome than the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews, Gypsies, homosexiuals and the disabled, or the purges of Stalin or the Leap Forward and Great Cultural Revolution of Chairman Mao, all of which resulted in the slaughter of millions of innocent human lives? The church was a pawn of the Spanish Crown and had long ago been eviscerated of its spiritual essence. They no longer loved God and really had stopped loving God for over a millennium. This was inevitable when Constantine the Great in the Fourth Century made Christianity the state religion of the Roman Empire. Instead of the state becoming a vector for the church and the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the Living God was no longer welcome in the church and fled, leaving an empty shell for the state to fill with its violence, greed, arrogance and fear and lies. The aboriginal peoples of the Americas were so receptive to the Christian Gospel because they were already broken, crushed and traumatized. Since God is most welcome among the wounded and broken, he made his presence known to the indigenous people. Not for any virtue of the church but because those people were already destroyed and needy. Trauma opens the door to the Holy Spirit. This is the Divine Irony. To find our way to healing we must first be wounded and the wounding makes us receptive because we are made humble and weak. Love heals the trauma and trauma opens the door to love.