When forced to think about trauma, Christians, for good reason, think of Christ’s wounds. We take them (rightly) as proofs of his solidarity with us and prefigurations of our own healing. This is how Diane Langberg puts it in Suffering and the Heart of God:
When we look at the resurrected Christ, what do we see? Scars. Thomas put his hands in Jesus’s wounds… Scars are something people try to hide. Christ’s will endure for all eternity. The victory of Jesus Christ, his kingdom and his glory, come by way of the scars, by weakness, by suffering. Do you hear the hope in that for victims of trauma? Nothing you can do will make it as if that tragedy did not happen. Those who have been traumatized by abuse, violence, war, or earthquakes will never be the same. Lives are permanently altered. The message of the scars in the resurrected Christ is not that the resurrection takes the suffering away, but rather that the resurrection catches it up into God’s glory.
But this one image is not enough (indeed, the mistake is to imagine it as only one image among many). We require a panoply of images, fitted to the every-changing dynamics of our peculiar lives. Of course, your collection of images will be different from mine, and some of what I need today may not work tomorrow. Yet the image of Mary crushing the serpent’s head is essential for all of us, I believe. I’ve revisited it again and again during therapy and spiritual direction, and I’ve attempted to capture it, as we say, artistically. (Here’s the most recent attempt, which is dedicated to my daughter):
I can’t say all the reasons I’m drawn to this image, but I know this for sure: it holds together promise and threat, faith and self-confidence, belovedness and peril. The risen, enthroned Christ, marked (we should not say scarred) though he may be, lives with death behind him. We do not. Nevertheless, we can, like Mary, live with a sense of our own fearsome blessedness—with the Christ-child kicking in our womb and the serpent, though very much alive, firmly underfoot. We need healing, no doubt. And we can be confident that it will come with the coming of God. For now, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that healing looks less like an already-achieved victory and more like empowerment for the fight.
This: “We need healing, so we can be confident that it will come with the coming of God. For now, however, we should not lose sight of the fact that healing looks less like an already-achieved victory and more like empowerment for the fight.” Healing looks more like empowerment for the fight yes!
The night before my brother died I dreamed about shaking my fist at demons (the Wizard of Oz flying monkeys) shouting you are dead. I drew strength from that dream in the days, months, years that followed. (Some were pretty tough.)
My image is St George and the dragon because the horse figures in my healing...
What you say speaks to my fear I will fail in this fight.
This week I was studying 2 Kings 6, and I ended very much off topic and towards this serpentine topic.
Woe to the snake that meets the Theotokos—and those of us, who like her, make room in body for the life of Christ to be formed in us.
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Our Rabbis taught: In a certain place there was once a snake which used to injure people. They came and told R. Chanina ben Dosa. He said to them: Show me its hole. They showed him its hole, and he put his heel over the hole, and the snake came out and bit him, and it died. He put it on his shoulder and brought it to the Beit Midrash and said to the assembled: See, my sons, it is not the snake that kills, it is sin that kills! On that occasion, they said: Woe to the man whom a snake meets, but woe to the snake which R. Chanina ben Dosa meets.
https://www.sefaria.org/From_David_to_Destruction%2C_Elisha_and_the_Northern_Kingdom%2C_Elisha_and_the_Aramean_Army.9?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Also: https://www.sefaria.org/Berakhot.33a.8?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en