Proper 17, 2023
Matthew 16.21-28
Psychology was the bad guy.
Since we are spiritual beings, anything having to do with how we think or feel was a spiritual matter, and psychology denied that reality, replacing God with the self as the center of one’s life. Psychology was self-help, self-centered, self-serving. It was all about making a person feel good, glossing over the problem of sin and replacing it with feel-good messages about how I’m ok you’re ok.
At least, that is what I was raised to believe.
In explicit and implicit ways, I was taught to distrust psychology and therapy. They were tools of the devil, promoting new-age thinking. They led to a distorted view of the self and didn’t take into account the spirit self and the problems that sin caused. Secular psychology was to be avoided at all costs.
This was reiterated by my experience of going to a psychologist around the age of thirteen. We talked and walked in the garden outside his practice. He gave me a tape—yes, a cassette tape because that’s what we had—that was filled with mindfulness techniques (although I didn’t know what it was called back then). I resisted listening to the tape. I didn’t trust it. It was meditation, and the only meditation I was sure that was good was setting your mind on scripture, contemplating God, and/or prayer. Any other meditation was an infiltration of eastern beliefs which were equated with witchcraft and demon worship.
Ya, it was a lot.
I never gave therapy a try because I was raised to fear it. I was raised to burry my emotions (like a man) and only deal with them in a “spiritual” context, maybe with some pastoral counseling. Emotions were spiritual issues, not physical ones—a topic for another essay—and they were always linked to sin and holiness. They were a barometer that the Holy Spirit used to keep us in check about our relationship with God.
This is a highly problematic (and flat out wrong) understanding of emotions and feelings. Feelings are information. They are your body responding to its surroundings, trying to make sense of the world around and inside each one of us. Sometimes, that interior world can be disrupted in a volatile, long-lasting way. That inner life that we have, the way we think and subsequently the way we feel and emote, can be hijacked and twisted, causing us pain far past the specific event, even causing us to relive the event when we are triggered. This is Trauma.
Trauma affects the whole person. Events that disrupt our nervous system, our psychological systems, and our ability to regulate our emotions. Trauma can create almost a knee jerk reaction when someone hits a trigger, sending them into panic, rage, tears, anxiety, and more.
Trauma occurs when some sort of distressing event happens to us. There are big “T” Traumas like sexual abuse, physical abuse, horrific car accidents, childhood neglect, and much more. Big “T” traumas stem from big events, things that shake your life, your core, your person.
But there are also little “t” traumas that happen. These are the more distressing things in life that leave us with emotional wounds, but perhaps do not affect us as much as a big “T” Trauma would.
Here’s the thing, I have experienced big “T” Traumas in my life. The first was my mom’s death when I was two. This left an indelible mark on me and my emotional life. There are other things: the horrific bullying I experienced throughout elementary school. The Trauma of abandonment at the hands of the church. The list can go on, but let’s say that I know what little “t” trauma and big “T” trauma are.
It’s hard to call some things Trauma. I didn’t realize my mom’s death was a Traumatic event until I was in my 30’s. By then, I had gotten over my aversion to psychology and had embraced therapy. It was my therapist, Betsy, that told me, and helped me accept, that my mom’s death (among other things) was a Traumatic event that happened to me.
Once we name things as Trauma (and even trauma) we can start addressing the wounds inflicted and slowly begin to heal.
So, Trauma (and trauma) exists. People all around us—ourselves must be included in this as well—experience Trauma (and trauma). We never know what has happened to someone, what their history is, what Trauma they might currently be going through. This is why we treat people kindly, with respect and love. The injunction of Jesus to “love your neighbor” is an injunction to treat people gently because they are wounded, just as we are.
But now we have a problem.
Jesus—as if telling us to love our neighbor wasn’t complicatedly simple enough—tells us to die to ourselves, take up our cross, and follow him. How can we die to ourselves when you need self-love and self-compassion to heal from the wounds of Trauma? Is self-care at odds with discipleship to Jesus? What about when we need to draw boundaries in life? Aren’t boundaries, standing up for yourself, the exact opposite of dying to yourself?
Growing up with the fear of psychology, I would have said that we need to die to self by sacrificing self-love and self-care and boundaries. We should give ourselves away completely, just as Jesus did—although in practice we didn’t exactly do that.
But I don’t think Jesus is calling us away from self-love in this passage.
Jesus says his famous words in direct response to Peter’s tempting—yes, Peter tempted Jesus—to abandon God’s way of the kingdom.
Jesus begins to tell the disciples what it means to be the Messiah. Peter just confessed that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the living God, and now Jesus needs the disciples to understand what that means.
What it is not is a coming in power. What it is not is the overthrowel of Rome. What it is not is an establishment of an earthly throne from which to rule. It is a journey to Jerusalem where Jesus must suffer and die.
Peter doesn’t get it. Peter is convinced that the son of the living God shouldn’t suffer and die. That’s not the way a messiah acts.
See, the temptation here is the exact same as it was for Jesus in the wilderness and in Gethsemane: to abandon the calling to suffer and die and instead become a messiah out of might and power. To wrest control of the world systems away from the dictators, emperors, and adversaries by violence and force, and to establish a Pax Christos—the peace of Christ—by domination.
Jesus could have done this. It was his right, his might, his power to wield. He could have called legions of angels down and forced surrender or destruction of his enemies. He could have taken the throne from Rome and established his own empire… but he didn’t because that way is contrary to the nature of God.
Our God is a god of compassion, humility, and solidarity. If Jesus had begun brandishing might, we would be serving a very different God, one that was worthy of fear but not worship.
See, Jesus came to show us that God is a God of kenosis, of self-emptying, self-donation, self-giving. Jesus isn’t an aberration in the nature of God, a new way of God being God. Jesus shows us the same God that is both the ground of reality and the revelatory someone who has been calling us, wooing us, moving towards us since creation. Jesus is God. God is Jesus. For Jesus to do anything other than suffer and die at the hands of the systems of the world—religious and political—would be a betrayal of the very nature of God.
Jesus suffered and died while giving forgiveness and peace. The world systems couldn’t get him to play their game, to be a god in their fashion, to resort to power, violence, and ego to dominate.
That is the temptation that Jesus rebukes Peter for. Setting your mind on the things of God is to see that kenosis is the way forward, the way to break the cycles of power, betrayal, oppression, and suffering.
And now we can see what Jesus is calling us to with the call to die to ourselves, pick up our cross, and follow him. Jesus is calling us to buck the systems of the world, of violence, of power and oppression. The very systems that cause Trauma are what Jesus is calling us away from.
Jesus isn’t saying not to care about yourself, not to have boundaries, not to love yourself. In fact, he is calling us to the highest level of self-love: liberation from the world’s systems so we can flourish. What is it if we gain the whole world, but forfeit our lives to this continuing cycle of violence, abuse, oppression, and greed?
Picking up your cross is accepting that this is going to hurt, this little death to our ego, to our desire for vengeance and retribution. It’s not about counting yourself as dead. If anything, it is about walking the road to resurrection, to a new way of being alive.
The cross is trauma informed, which is exactly why it is not about domination, oppression, vengeance, and power. Jesus will never ask those who are hurt, broken open, struggling with PTSD to not care about themselves. In fact, Jesus is calling those of us who are able to stand in the gap for the people who are wounded, to shield them, to help them, to give them ourselves—self-donation and self-emptying into these people who need more than they have.
The call to discipleship isn’t abandoning ourselves for some aesthetically bare life that requires nothing enjoyable or any way of caring for ourselves other than basic bread and water. Denying yourself is denying the way we have learned to think in this capitalistic, violent empire. We have inherited—generational trauma—ways of thinking that are actually death if we follow them to their conclusion. Denying ourselves is denying those traumas to control us. The cross, kenosis, offers us another way to live, a way that is counter to the logic of the system’s of the world around us.
But this new way of living is freedom, is peace, is healing, is love—of self and others.
Psychology isn’t the enemy. In fact, self-compassion and mindfulness can be tools to help us die to ourselves, to the systems of the world we have inherited. The answer isn’t to make ourselves small, deny ourselves love, and become doormats for anyone to abuse. The answer is a new way of living that allows us to heal and thrive.
That is the best answer to trauma I can think of.
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