Living With Trauma 23

Trauma opens the door to God. I suppose that would seem somewhat cruel to you, Gentle Reader, but let me offer you this little bit from Christianity For Dummies, the Aaron Edition. I recall listening to a spirituality and religion program on CBC Radio One, called Tapestry. A liberal minister from a "progressive" Christian denomination suggested that it's judgmental and unkind to assume that God is with you when he is also with everybody else. Yes, you know the typical reductionist kind of reasoning I'm getting at here. Well, fair enough. God is with all of us, with each one of us, because he made us, he loves us and he inhabits us. What the dear lady on the program omitted was the likelihood that it's a two-way street. This is a relationship. We have the option of being with God, or not being with God. This does not mean that he is going to give us special or privileged treatment, by the way, especially when you consider what happened to his own Son (who fortunately rose from the dead three days later) and his twelve apostles, each of whom was cruelly and savagely martyred. What I'm getting at is that God is with all of us, without fail. This does not mean that we are all with God. Richard Dawkins, anyone? Or any other fundamentalist atheist. Just try and suggest this God claptrap to any of those guys and see how far it gets you. This doesn't mean to say that God isn't with atheists, as well. Of course he is! But it ain't necessarily so that too many of the atheists are going to be with God, though in a way, they are, always will be, and can't help that as much as they must loathe the idea. But in terms of a relationship, no such relationship would exist between God and an atheist, nor anyone else not particularly interested in having the Almighty in their lives, because God is a God of relationship, based on choice and consent. Given that the world is full of folks who would prefer to be their own little gods than cede their lives to the one who made and sustains them, I would say that the frequency of this sort of relationship is still in short supply. This is basic Christianity 101. There are, of course, many explanations for this lopsided relationship with our maker. I subscribe to the idea that we all live in a fallen state from grace which has somehow alienated, or at least significantly distanced ourselves from our creator. Jesus came to heal the divide by offering himself as a sacrifice for our sins, hence his death on the cross. Christianity for dummies. And most liberal Christians (not all, since I also consider myself liberal, despite my theological orthodoxy), simply do not want to get it. Now where I tend to differ from a lot of theological conservatives (not the same thing as being orthodox, and this has nothing to do with the Orthodox Church, if you must know!)is that we are not expected to sign on a dotted line, nor even initial anything. There is no contract, no need to attend a revivalist meeting or an evangelistic rally and go flowing up to the front during the altar call to the dulcet strains of "Just As I Am" to kneel down and give your heart to Jesus or whatever you want to call it. I am thinking here, instead, of the carefully considered decision of committing our lives to the highest good. Whether this is the same thing as asking Jesus into our hearts or not, I would be the last to know. But I can't imagine Jesus going through all he went through just to have another lame-ass religion invented, this time in his name. And this is not to put down Christianity because there is the legitimate need to codify all the issues and events and history surrounding the life and teachings of Christ. I can only return to my own experience. On the advice of the Christians I met, given that I was already aware that God was calling and drawing me to himself, I gave my consent. I had no question that it was Jesus calling me to himself, and I still harbour no doubt. I cannot speak about your own experience, because, Gentle Reader, I am not you. But Jesus came to me when I was traumatized, already a survivor of child abuse and my parents' bitter divorce, I was seeking, open and humble. That is all that is required to open our lives to God, which is to say, love. When we are humbled, vulnerable, traumatized, we are also receptive to love because we really know our need, and there is God in his infinite love ready to come and heal our broken hearts. I know this runs contrary to the message of our age and the findings of psychiatrists and psychologists, pop or otherwise. For them it's all about self: self-esteem, self actualization, self-love, self everything. Which is to ignore the fact that we live among more than seven billion other human selves with whom we must live and coexist. As we allow our precious little god-self to be dethroned by the love and spirit of the Living God himself, then we will be empowered to bring healing to the trauma that marks our species and our earth. Failing that, we will each remain stranded in our own egoistic isolation and the only significant thing that we will all end up doing together will be in our collective drift downward into the hell of our own devising.