Menders and Religion

KEY POINTS

• Psychology shares the atttempt to understand the human response to trauma with age-old religion.
• Menders often find motivation, strength, and purpose through faith to respond to trauma's shattering of meaning and order in life.
• There is great diversity in the paths people take to find and utilize their faith in organizing their response to trauma.
• Relatively recently, religious texts are being read as teaching stories about individual and national resilience to trauma.

Religion and psychology, two complex universes of thought, overlap but never touch as fundamentally as they do in the domain of trauma. There, the confrontation of evil vs. good, and despair vs. hope, force them to speak to each other, sometimes paradoxically. Trauma poses existential challenges to a victim’s personal belief in divine order and benevolence.^[1

Yet, religion often helps victims recover from trauma^[3] and even live longer.[4] Meanwhile, when religious worldviews address evil in their theologies, the course to faith travels through psychological healing. People who respond to trauma by taking moral responsibility to address danger and injustice ("Menders") draw upon readily available human qualities, including their religious faith.

The Book of Job is a profound religious exploration of a man’s experience of evil and suffering. It has been read, interpreted, and performed over centuries within three world religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. In its prologue, “an adversary” wagers with God that if his pious servant suffered, he would curse God. God takes the bet, and Job is afflicted with a series of traumas described in the poetic, central part of the book. He loses his wealth and security as his herds and home are destroyed by fire. He suffers the death of his ten children as a house collapses on them. He develops boils from “the sole of his foot even unto his crown.” Job soon curses the day he was born.

Four friends arrive to soothe the traumatized Job. They weep and rend their clothes in empathy. However, their patience with his suffering soon grows short and they begin to offer diagnoses of his problem: insufficient faith in God, prior sins, unknown sins, stubborn behavior, empty words, etc. They also suggest a remedy: humbly declare faith again. But Job responds that he is innocent and deserves no suffering. He rebuffs their remedies: “Ye are all physicians of no value,” Job insists, “I desire to reason with God.”

But then, suddenly, in Chapter 38, the arguments come to a sudden stop with one of the most dramatic lines in scripture: “The Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind.” Thus begins a second dialogue between Job and God, in which God outlines his incomparable power and provenance over the world and Job pokes at the reasons for unexplained suffering.

Abruptly, in Chapter 48, Job capitulates. Perhaps satisfied that God spoke directly to him, he acknowledges God’s power: “But now mine eye seeth Thee; Wherefore I abhor my words, and repent, Seeing I am dust and ashes.” And, with that, Job, the “passionate rebel” stops wrestling with God over suffering and falls silent.^[5]

So, what do Job’s last words tell us? Nobel Laureate and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel reports that he struggled throughout his life to understand Job, particularly his last words. The dialogue creates a new, intimate and incongruent relationship with God in which God’s injustice to man is transferred to man’s justice. In Wiesel’s words, this achieves “a frightening victory”: now, man must take responsibility for suffering.

Wiesel also notes that, with Job’s paradoxical acquiescence, the trial of God ends without a verdict. It remains open, to be engaged with going forward by souls who must seek to challenge any suffering that has become acceptable.

In my own reading, as I seek to understand Menders, I imagine that openness points to the responsibilities and mysteries of suffering. These complexities are far different from the antiseptic word clinicians use to summarize the goal of PTSD treatment: “Closure.”

“And whoever is patient and forgives – indeed, that is of the matters [worthy] of resolve.” (Quran 42:43)

Read the full available article on Psychology Today

Reflection: Do you belive that religion can help people deal with trauma?

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