Story makes life intelligible. Without plot, the experiences of our life crumble into events. Events do not mean anything. Only stories carry meaning, and for that, they need a plot. But how can we discern plot in the midst of our lives as we live them? For plot requires a sequence of beginning, middle, and end. Tragedy and comedy might look the same in the beginning and even the middle; but their differing plots tell dramatically different stories.

For example, Homer’s Odyssey and Aeschylus’s Agamemnon are about warriors returning home from the trauma of war. They both face homecoming obstacles, and they both face internal moral obstacles. But the meaning of their lives diverge. Odysseus figures successful homecoming (comedy), while Agamemnon figures failed homecoming (tragedy).

Our personal stories have not reached their end, in the historical sense at least. So we are always writing our stories, projecting the end, and inferring meaning in the past and present based on that projected future. I want to talk briefly about one of humanity’s fundamental strategies for that narrative effort: figura, aka figures, figural representation, figural reading.

Figural Writers/Readers

We figure our lives when we say “my story is like that story,” or “I am like that person.” Examples abound, especially in contexts of traumatic suffering, because trauma interrupts narrative plot.

• Augustine responded to the fall of Rome through the meta-figure of biblical/redemptive history (The City of God).

• Julian of Norwich responded to near death illness with the figure of Christ’s passion on the cross (Revelations of Divine Love).

• Dante responded to ecclesiastical conflicts and forced exile from his home country of Florence through the figures of hell, purgatory, and heaven (The Divine Comedy).

• Theresa of Avila responded to the Spanish Inquisition and monastic reforms with the figure of her Interior Castle.

• John of the Cross responded to imprisonment by religious leaders through the figures of the Song of Songs (The Spiritual Canticle).

• John Bunyan responded to imprisonment by religious leaders through the figure of Christian pilgrimage to heaven (Pilgrim’s Progress).

• African Americans responded to oppression and enslavement through the figure of Israel’s exodus from Egypt (“Go Down, Moses”; “Wade in the Water”; “Oh Mary Don’t You Weep”).

• Dietrich Bonhoeffer responded to Nazi imprisonment through the figure of Christ in the Psalms (Letters and Papers from Prison).

• Many Jews responded to the Holocaust through the figure of Job (Night, by Elie Weisel).

In my own post-traumatic context after spiritual abuse, I found two contemporary figural writers. In The Lord is My Courage, plots spiritual abuse and healing through the figure of the Shepherd of Psalm 23. Similarly, uses the figures of the Bride and Groom in the Song of Songs to reimagine healing in The Hope in Our Scars. These books are filled with symbolic imagery, which has a unique healing power. Their biblical centerpieces of Psalm 23 and the Song of Songs also have a storied, figural shape.

“Unlike metaphor or allegory [or symbols], [figures] do not represent or stand in for ideas on their own. Rather, they gather the stories to which they refer into a coherent narrative of fulfilment, which is gestured at rather than made explicit, requiring the reader to do the work of tying them together.”1

We might say a figure is a storied symbol. Figures give form to present experience that otherwise is formless, whether because the ending is unknown, or because we feel catapulted out of the story entirely. That form restores plot to our lives—reorientation to life with a future we can’t otherwise see.

Figural Consolation

In a fascinating study of figural consolation in medieval writers influenced by Augustine, Chad David Schrock explains:

“Figural interpretation describes one way that ostracized individuals or cultures align themselves with and define themselves by other figures: a community that spans not only space but time. Figural readers encounter this diachronic community through texts and participate in it by interpreting and performing what they have read.”2

That is dense academic prose. In everyday language we say things like “finding ourselves in an another story.”

Paul put it most succinctly: “To live is Christ.” Our story is Jesus’ story.

All of this might seem like common sense, and hopefully common experience. But I’ve been asking some questions about figuralism, questions that I hope are not too abstract:

Who makes these connections? The common exhortation to “find” your story in Jesus’ story implies you are the actor. Additionally, what is it that you are finding? A connection that is already there? Or a connection that comes to exist in and through your act of finding? Is the connection even a “thing” of substance, or is it the same as a fictional trope, the way Harry Potter’s sacrificial death figures the death of Jesus?

These aren’t theoretical questions. I’m wondering what happens when Christians read Scripture and recognize a biblical figure in their personal experience/story/event. Who is doing the figuring? The Christian? Jesus? Both? Let’s reread that quote from Schrock and focus on the verbs:

“Figural interpretation describes one way that ostracized individuals or cultures align themselves with and define themselves by other figures: a community that spans not only space but time. Figural readers encounter this diachronic community through texts and participate in it by interpreting and performing what they have read.”

Figural reading is not pure imagination. There is a real community to be encountered and “figured out.” While the emphasis here is still on the activity of the reader, it is a real encounter.

Additionally, there is both a backward and a forward movement. We participate through interpretation. This happens when spiritual abused Christians read Jesus’ words about religious persecution in John 15-16 and say, “That’s me. Me too.”

Mark Stibbe explains,

“In Jesus’ story, the opponents were Jews who wanted to put him to death. The disciples who continue Jesus’ mission will find that the same kind of antagonism will await them...However, the disciples are to be comforted with the knowledge that this antagonism is a sign that their story is truly reflective of his own story. ‘If they persecuted me, they will persecute you also’ (15.20).”3

That is the backward, or even present-oriented perspective. Figural reading doesn’t stop there, though. We participate in the figural community—Jesus, his first disciples, the later community of the Fourth Gospel, us today—by performing what we read.

I’m interested in what that “performance” looks like, specifically in the context of trauma. I’ll return to that question in a second post in the form of a parable. For now, I want to mention one of my favorite ironies of language: the phrase “figure out” originates from mathematics. It meant “work the equation.” But as Kevin Vanhoozer observes, there is a “figural” sense to that phrase. The invitation of figural reading is, like the child who said “tolle lege” to Augustine, “to read and ‘go figure.’”4

Quote from Ephraim Radner

Question

Does this idea of figuralism resonate with your experience of reading Scripture? How does that list of figural readers in history strike you?

This week I’m writing in reverse, so to speak. I want to introduce you to my wife, . Although her story is a main reason I write and connect online, Kristen hasn’t been a part of that online community. She is a strictly “in real life” person. Which I love about her. The “real” and the “life” in that sentence are freighted with meaning. She doesn’t do half-hearted sort-of connection. She wants life and she wants real, and she goes all out in giving it—in real life, not online or through the telephone.

This “real life” characteristic has caused a fair bit of pain ever the past four years or so. The best way I know to explain it is by comparison to George MacDonald.

Before I proceed, please know that Kristen is aware that I’m aware of the irony in using a dead white guy to elevate my wife’s voice. I tried not to say more about MacDonald in this post than I say about Kristen. Love of context is the bane of my writing. I just love what G.K. Chesterton said about George MacDonald, because it gave me the words to name what’s true about Kristen:

She is a woman with something to say.

A Lively Old Soul

Like the title of MacDonald’s book Diary of an Old Soul, Kristen is an old soul who has zero interest in modern forms of mass communication. As Chesterton explains, MacDonald became a writer more by necessity than choice.

Chesterton compared MacDonald to ancient sages like Socrates or John the Baptist—men who never wrote a single thing, and yet are still remembered today for their “logia or great passionate maxims, the proverbs of philosophy.”1 Such works were oral first, delivered to live auditors in real time and only later written by disciples. So the sage, according to Chesterton, is “the sayer of things. He is not the poet, for he does not sing; he is not the prose writer, for generally he cannot write. The things he produces form an artistic class by themselves.”2

Here is what Chesterton says directly about MacDonald as “a sayer of things”:

“George Macdonald was in the same way not a born writer; he was a born maker of spontaneous texts.”

“He also would have very much preferred to walk about the streets of some Greek or Eastern village with a long white beard, simply saying what he had to say.”

“We only remember his novels, as we only remember Whitman’s poetry, by certain bursts of an astonishing sagacity often uttered in five words.”

“Macdonald was not so much a man of letters, then, as a man with something to say.”3

Again, that is one of the best ways I know to describe my best friend Kristen:

She Is A Woman With Something To Say

Like MacDonald, she would much prefer to walk the streets with you and simply say what she has to say as you share life together. But that possibility was ripped away from her multiple times, as it was MacDonald. He was forced out of his first parish for preaching too close to the line of orthodoxy. Kristen got kicked out by evangelical employers for walking too close to the line of exposing corruption. Those sound like different situations, but MacDonald was—in part at least—pushed into his alternative views by witnessing preachers care so much about being right that they whipped boys and girls for wrong answers to the Westminster Shorter Catechism.4 In other words, he came to believe in the infinite largeness of God’s love because he saw the small, hard hearts of those who claimed to proclaim that love.

MacDonald was forced to find other ways of saying what he had to say, primarily as a novelist. Kristen feels similarly about her choice to enter the online world of social media. She isn’t after fame or influence or reaching the masses.

But she has something to say. And she’s saying it in video, 3 minutes a day or less (see links below).

It’s not my place to tell you what Kristen has to say. She’s still figuring that out as she goes. In general, it will include elements of her story (a part of which many of you already know), lessons from her story, and general thoughts on life and faith. She will also say a fair number of random things, funny things, and she will sometimes drop the phone mid-video. Mostly, you’re getting the same first-take Kristen that our family gets every day.

As a “first-take-sayer-of-things” (not a bad description for a sage, btw), these videos are not edited. She isn’t making a bunch and then picking the best one. The only occasional “editing” is for time to keep them under 3 minutes. The video below is a great place to start, both because of what she says, and also to see how funny she is! In another timeline I’m sure Kristen is a standup comedian.

Go to whatever media you prefer for video content (including Substack—yes, we should have room for speakers in our predominantly writer community), subscribe, and give her a listen! I promise you will be edified, challenged, comforted—and you will most certainly laugh out loud.

https://substack.com/@kristenhann (since she is posting daily videos, on Substack these are only going to Notes, not through email newsletters).

https://www.instagram.com/kristenmhann

https://www.threads.com/@kristenmhann

https://www.tiktok.com/@kristen_hann

https://www.youtube.com/@kristenmhann

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61588311680032

Quote from George MacDonald5

Ah God! my heart is not the same 
As any heart beside;
Nor is my sorrow or my blame, 
My tenderness or pride.

My story too, thou knowest, God, 
Is different from the rest;
Thou knowest—none but thee—the load
With which my heart is pressed.

Hence I to thee such love can bring,
As other none can do;
Hence I to thee a song can sing
Which must be, shall be new.

Subscribe to Kristen’s Substack

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I don’t have much to say about the complementarian/egalitarian debate. What I have to say in this Substack might seem to contradict that, so I want to give a brief preface. I believe the question of who can be ordained and teach from the pulpit is a non-starter. We only ask it because 2,000 years of church history has privileged Paul and ignored John. As I explored at length in my series Clericalism and Women in Ephesus, there were different ecclesiologies in the NT church. Regardless of how we interpret Paul, there is no way to read the Johannine works and conclude that a) ordination was practiced, and b) only men were ordained. The man born blind is the only human teacher in the Gospel of John (9:34), and 1 John couldn’t be more explicit that every Christian can teach based on the teaching ministry of the Holy Spirit (1 John 2:18-21, 26-27).

That said, ’ comprehensive article from yesterday prompted me to flesh out something I’ve only explored briefly in note form: Mary Magdalene reverses the role of Adam in the creation garden.

For many, 1 Timothy 2:13-14 is the second most convincing argument for male-only ordination and pastors/elders. The first, of course, is Paul’s command in 1 Timothy 2:12: “It isn’t appropriate for a woman to teach, nor to overwhelm a man, but to be [learning] in silence” (, The Second Testament). If it couldn’t be clearer than that—so the argument goes—the case is closed in vv. 13-14 which “ground” the command in creation history: Adam was first, while Eve was second; Eve was deceived, while Adam was not deceived.

I’m not here to exegete Paul.1 What I want to say takes a different angle: Paul’s command to Timothy can’t be timeless, because the Second Adam came into the new creation garden and changed everything.

Which Garden is Foundational?

While much of the NT builds theologically on the foundation of Genesis 1-3, I believe John gets the credit for being the most comprehensive in echoing the creation garden. We often miss this, though, because of phrases like “Garden of Gethsemane” that we use a lot around this time of year with Easter approaching. While Matthew and Mark reference Gethsemane as the place where Jesus prayed before his arrest and crucifixion (Matt 26:36; Mark 14:32), only John mentions a garden in his passion narrative (kēpos, 18:1, 26; 19:41 [2x]). It would take too much time to trace all of the Genesis imagery sprouting up from those garden references. One more explicit echo, relatively speaking, is Mary Magdalene thinking Jesus was the “gardener” (kēpouros, 20:15). This calls to mind Jewish understanding of Adam as a gardener (see Gen 2:15). But there are many, many more!

Melissa Fields’ summary is spot on:

“John never pens Eve’s name nor even mentions Eden. Yet, from the first words he writes, John evokes Genesis and reveals his new creation theme in Christ. To understand the reversal of Eden in the Fourth Gospel, scholars must appreciate John’s new Genesis.”2

Not only scholars, all Christians “must appreciate John’s new Genesis.”

John is not simply reifying the creation garden. The new creation garden changes everything, including who is first in it. Whereas Adam was “formed first” in the first garden (1 Tim 2:13), “Mary’s being first reverses the order of entry into the Garden of Eden” (John 20:1).3 Given the abundant allusions to Eden, we are invited to question the import of Mary being first. The answer comes with seeing additional allusions to male roles in the OT.

Mary “saw two angels in white sitting where Jesus’s body had been lying, one at the head and the other at the feet” (20:12). The angels on either side resemble the angelic cherubim flanking the mercy seat on the ark of the covenant (Ex 25:18-19; 37:7-9).

“This symbolism presents Mary as one who dares to enter into the holy of holies, an act reserved for the [male] high priest, for it is only within the holy of holies that the ark can be seen. In the dispensation of this new creation Mary now assumes that priestly role.”4

The connection to the holy of holies is amplified by the Second Temple book of Jubilees which explicitly connected Eden with Jerusalem5:

“And he knew that the Garden of Eden is the holy of holies, and the dwelling of the Lord, and Mount Sinai the center of the desert, and Mount Zion the center of the navel of the earth” (Jubilees 8:19).

Whereas Eve’s presence in the garden of Genesis 2 is potentially overshadowed by her absence from God’s commission to Adam “to work [the garden] and watch over it” (Gen 2:15), Mary’s presence in the new creation garden cannot be overlooked. As is widely known, the command to “work and watch over” the garden is temple imagery used for priests serving and watching over the tabernacle/temple. So it is significant that Mary gets the first commission which is then shared to all disciples (20:21). Might this even be a mirror image of the shared commission of Genesis 1:28 which is then portrayed as given first to Adam in Genesis 2:15? After all, “the last will be first, and the first last” (Matt 20:16).

As a priest of the new temple-household of God, Mary is unafraid of the angels, unlike the women in the Synoptics.6 And like Moses, she hears the voice of YHWH himself from above the mercy seat (Ex 25:22).

If this holy of holies allusion suggests that Mary hears the voice of Jesus like Moses heard the voice of YHWH, it is fitting that she proclaims the message of the risen I AM. Part of Jewish expectation for the Messiah recalled Deuteronomy 18 and the promise of the Moses-like prophet:

“The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him…Then the Lord said to me…’I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their brothers. I will put my words in his mouth, and he will tell them everything I command him.’” (Deut 18:15, 17-18).

This promise is echoed previously in John 4:19 and 6:14. While John is clearly presenting Jesus as that prophet-Messiah, and while we might assume the naturalness of their shared maleness, what about female Mary?

The Moses-like Apostle to the Apostles

God’s commission to Moses was apostolic, in the sense of the Greek word for sending, apostellō:

“God replied to Moses, ‘I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you.” (apestalken, Ex 3:14; see Ex 3:10, 13, 15; 4:13, 28; 5:22; 7:16).

While I’m not aware of any complementarian argument linking Moses and Adam7, the general complementarian consensus is that male leaders were the normative rule in Israel. So perhaps Moses as the sent prophet of God flows naturally from male Adam created first.

But Mary was first in the garden. Mary saw the holy of holies. She told her brothers everything the I AM commanded her. All of those things were true of men in the OT.

Johannine Reckoning

Complementarian interpretations of 1 Timothy 2:12-15 must recon with John. But they don’t. We have a John-shaped hole in the church. Or rather—because that assumes male-only authorship which I deny—we have a Fourth-Gospel-shaped hole.

I’m hesitant to keep sounding that drum. But when a recent list of resources for this issue and a list of overlooked biblical considerations from The Alliance for Mission and Renewal completely overlook the Fourth Gospel, I feel compelled to pick up my sticks and drum some more.

Quote from Melissa Fields

“The first to draw close to Him after His resurrection is none other than Mary Magdalene. Her encounter with Christ dramatizes the reversal of Eve’s exile and the restoration of the female imago Dei.”8

“[A]ll of the Johannine women can be classified as antitypes of Eve and that this classification signals Edenic reversals in the age of new creation. These reversals exemplify the dynamic nature of the female imago Dei, which must be considered in the complementarian-egalitarian debate. For far too long, biblical womanhood has been defined based on the misrepresentation of the female imago Dei as a static motif bound by fallen creation. I assert that John envisions a restored creation in which men and women work together as ambassadors of dominion in the kingdom of God. Although the eschatological new creation both “is,” and “is to come,” Christian men and women have been restored to their calling as equal image-bearers of God.”9

Question

What do you think? Should the ancient practice of letting scripture interpret scripture lead to us letting the Pauline “Adam first text” of 1 Timothy 2:12-15 trump the Johannine “Mary first text” of John 20:1-18? Or is it possible that we struggle to understand John’s narrative ecclesiology and so take the easy way out through the didactic ecclesiology of Paul?

Melissa Fields gives a brilliant call for further biblical/theological research along those lines:

“future studies could also compare Paul’s use of Genesis (and references to Adam and Eve, in particular) to John’s understanding of the restored imago Dei. Scholars such as Philip B. Payne have grappled extensively with Paul’s texts that seem to impose limitations on women, but a focused comparison of Johannine and Pauline ideals concerning the feminine might still yield novel research outcomes that could impact future discussions concerning complementarianism and egalitarianism.”10

Words Become Flesh

That’s it. That’s how I do therapy—just three words.

Those three words. But not just that sentence. Because they can be reversed: flesh becomes words.1 Here are some additional thoughts about those three words, in aphoristic form. That is, my thoughts, rather than the thinking of the thoughts.

Words can become flesh.

If words can become flesh, then words are edible. If words are edible, words are digestible. The real question is, can words be defecated? Vomited? Refluxed? If so, then counselors and therapists are gastroenterologists: they treat word indigestion, verbal constipation, logos diarrhea, and ISS (irritable semiotic syndrome).

We are verbivores. We eat words. Good words. Bad words. True and false words. Words with nutrition and words with malnutrition. Even words that choke and poison. But there is no Heimlich maneuver for words. No stomach pumping. Once ingested, they must be digested. If nature doesn’t take its course, home remedies are the only treatment: praying, talking, walking, watching, listening, writing, creating, meditating, reading, feeling, serving, receiving, believing.

We learned that flesh can become words the moment we learned to say, “Owie.”

Flesh can become words, just as Jesus said “Eat my flesh,” and “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life.”

So you are what you eat.

You are what you eat—unless of course what you eat causes reflux. In that case, you are not what you eat but what you cannot eat.

Spiritual therapy always works through, in, and on the body.

If biblical counseling can’t be described as physical, it isn’t biblical.

I want to be biblical, so maybe I should start calling myself a physical therapist.

Quote from Jorden Brady Loewen

“In the same way our bodies maintain life via proteins, vitamins, and minerals, they need narrative in the mode of stories, thoughts, and imagination. Along with material nourishment, language and narrative establish a gateway into the physiological system of homeostasis, or body regulation.”2

Question

What helps you digest and metabolize words, whether those be the words on a page (ie Bible), from another human, or the words in your head?

For a more reflections on the physicality of language and digesting life, see these posts:

There are increasing numbers of helpers, providers, and organizations offering more hands-on, practical resources for spiritual abuse, and I am so thankful for that. I take a lot of my cues for religious trauma healing from the Gospel of John, which is more imaginative, symbolic, story-driven, and theological. But practical guides and imaginative visions are complementary. So, in honor of spiritual abuse awareness month, I wrote a three-part series looking at John through the lens of Diane Langberg’s three elements of trauma healing: talking, tears, and time.1

I’m going to use those three as a guide to show similar means of healing from religious trauma in the Gospel of John. As Langberg is a trauma specialist, and already has many great books on healing from trauma, I don’t aim to say anything new or better.2 Instead, my hope is to provide imaginative Scriptural grounding for the healing path. If Paul’s letters to Timothy and Titus are the Pastoral Epistles, John is the Pastoral Gospel. I trust you will see why by the end, and hope you will be encouraged to return again and again to John’s Gospel and the Pastor to whom he testifies.

As I am reading John in light of Langberg, one might complain that I am just finding what I’m looking for. However, these elements of talking, tears, and time are truly there in the text. Sometimes we just need the right glasses to see what’s there.

Here is Langberg’s summary:

“Recovery involves a reversal of the experience of trauma. Trauma brings silence because it feels like there are no words to really describe what happened. Trauma brings emotional darkness and aloneness because it feels like no one cares and no one could possibly understand. Trauma makes time stand still because we get so lost in what happened we cannot see forward and we lose hope. There are three main things that must occur to reverse this and bring about recovery. All three must happen. Just one of them will not be enough. The three things are: talking, tears, and time.”3

The Divine Word, Human Words, and Trauma

Jesus’ words are powerful, and they amount for about 75% of the Gospel of John. If you use a red-letter Bible, there is hardly a page that isn’t full of those red words. The obvious exceptions are 1) the prologue and John the Baptist’s ministry (1:1-37), and 2) when Jesus is crucified and buried (19:31-20:10). We don’t expect the Word of God to be speaking during those parts of the narrative. But ch. 9 is an unexpected variation from this centering of the words of the divine Word. In this narrative the Word of God becomes silent, as the man he healed is made to face religious wolves who throw him out and scatter him like the sheep of Ezekiel 34. When telling the good news about Jesus, why would John include a story where Jesus is largely absent?

One possible answer is that John’s audience lived that man’s story. Following scholars like J. Louis Martyn, Raymond Brown, and most recently Martinus de Boer4, I believe John’s repeated emphasis on religious persecution and fear of religious authorities suggests that the blind man epitomizes the experience of John’s audience. Demonstrating that position is a topic for another time.5 What’s important here is to imagine being a Jewish Christian suffering from the trauma of religious abuse and the loss of faith community (cf John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2).6

The narrative of John 9 speaks to this dilemma, but indirectly—by example and symbol. I know of no other Gospel narrative that so features a character other than Jesus (once Jesus has been born, of course). After the man’s healing, Jesus is noticeably absent. Standing alone, without even his family to support him, he faces off with religious leaders who are obvious and explicit in their rejection of his voice: “You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach us?” (9:34). But John the evangelist allows this man, an anonymous beggar from the margins of society, to stand in for Jesus and teach his audience about the Gospel’s central questions on the origin and identity of the Son of God (9:17, 25, 30-33). Indeed, aside from the Father (8:28), Son (6:59 et al), and Spirit (14:26), this man is the only character in John who teaches.

Re-telling, from Victim to Survivor

As I’ve read, and re-read, and re-read this story, it looks more and more like a therapeutic trauma narrative of a survivor who has re-told his story many times. I imagine the story we have in John 9 is different from the first time that man told his story. Of course, that’s a hunch that can’t be proved. But given that isolation is the heart of trauma, we might wonder if his initial storytelling resembled the fractured narratives of trauma survivors. For survivors further along the healing path, the story that was initially told in fear and trembling grows into a story told with safety, strength, and conviction. And that is the story we have in John 9.

We’ll get to the second element (tears) next week, but Langberg combines talking and tears and says this:

“Expressing emotions, finding words for them, is also a way of gaining mastery over them. In both talking and tears the victim is staring down the trauma as one might stare down an enemy and say, “I will speak of you; you will not silence me.”7

It’s almost as if Langberg, a psychologist and trauma specialist, is in sync with Bible scholar Colleen Conway, who writes that the healed man

“acts much like Jesus does in his encounters with the authorities [ie by presuming to teach them]. This may also explain the authorities’ final action. They drive him out of their presence because they cannot tolerate the truth which he has so forthrightly spoken—he reminds them too much of Jesus.”8

Conway puts it even more strongly: “the man effectively stands in for Jesus in combating the opposing dark forces in the Gospel.”9 It is thus less strange that the healed blind man is given the second most amount of spoken testimony to Jesus in the Fourth Gospel.10 Like the divine Word, this religious abuse survivor speaks, and his words are powerful.

I imagine it must have been powerfully healing for John’s spiritually traumatized audience to hear this story over and over again. It is the story of the triumphal voice of a religious trauma survivor, and shows what is possible when talking is combined with tears and time. Whether you care for survivors or bear the scars of religious wounds yourself (or both), I encourage you to read and re-read this story to see for yourself how the Spirit has testified to the power of talking and using your voice—using language and words to speak the unspeakable.

Quote from Diane Langberg

Scattered & Found

If you’re looking for a place to heal and connect with other survivors, you might be interested in my support group, Scattered & Found. You can find more info at the link below. If you know someone who might benefit, would you consider forwarding this to them? Here’s what one member said about this group:

“The time spent in this group is precious. I found the community, support, and discussions in this group healing. Reading through the book of John together and sharing stories and perspectives created a safe space for personal growth.”

Question

Do you have someone who will listen to your story and help you put the pieces together? If you sense the need for more professional help, I would love to speak with you. You can reach me via my counseling website, www.aaronjhann.com.

I haven’t gotten any closer to hopping on Instagram or TikTok. However, while going for a short walk with Toto, Bilbo, and Norbert, I thought about my wife’s amazing animal intuition. She has uncanny ability to pick dogs from the animal shelter. We have had four dogs over the past ten years, each of them adopted from the SPCA (Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals). Each time Kristen showed me a picture of the dog on the SPCA website, and each time I said, “No way, you want us to get *that* dog?” Actually, with Toto I said, “That’s not a dog. That’s a muppet.” I could not believe I was looking at a picture of a real dog. But each time Kristen was right. Her vision rewarded our family with a beautiful animal that brought love and delight (not to mention—dogs being dogs—the occasional annoyance and anger and angst).

I thought I would show the before and after pictures of all our dogs as a testament to imaginative vision. Kristen is exemplary in this regard—seeing positive potential and possibility where it can’t be physically seen. As Professor Lupin said of Lilly Potter in The Prisoner of Azkaban, “She had a way of seeing the beauty in others, even, and perhaps most especially, when that person couldn’t see it in themselves.” It’s an ability I want to develop.1

I didn’t intend this week’s Substack to have a New Year’s theme, but feel free to take it that way if it helps. As you look ahead to 2026, do you see the picture on the top, or the picture on the bottom? As Pam Beesly famously said, they’re the same picture.

Dorothy Elizabeth

(Adopted December, 2016; went to live on a farm in Ohio December 2019)

Toto Chesterton (Adopted November 2018)

Bilbo Baggins (Adopted December, 2022)

Norbert Hagrid (Adopted June, 2025)

In 2019 we lived on campus at Wheaton College and could only get approval for one dog as an emotional support animal. Sadly, Toto got chosen over Dorothy. As far as we know, Dorothy has been living out her days on a farm in Ohio. That leaves us with Toto, Bilbo, and Hagrid. Bilbo is the ringleader and loves to herd the other two around in the backyard. Toto is less like his namesake and more like the Cowardly Lion. And Norbert is pretty much the perfect name, because he is a gentle giant who doesn’t know his own strength.

This last picture was a complete surprise. Thank God for cellphones and always having a camera in pocket!

Question

Who helps you see what you struggle to see on your own? How do you remain open to possibility and surprise?

Forgiveness isn’t theoretical. If Desmond Tutu was right with the title of his book No Future Without Forgiveness, then the rebuilding of time that I wrote about during Advent requires that I forgive if I want a future.

Last week’s article, Remembering the Future through Forgiveness, is one of the more radical things I’ve written. I suggested a translation and interpretation of John 20:23 regarding the “forgiveness of sins” that I’ve never seen. While I’ve gotten used to the radical places this radical gospel takes me—whether that be gender/anthropology, ecclesiology, christology, and hermeneutics—that always makes me a little nervous (am I a heretic?!). Feeling not only nervous but unsettled, I continued pondering this passage on forgiveness. It is frustratingly hard to understand, both doctrinally and practically, but I see much hope in Jesus’ words for the never-ending onslaught of ecclesial injustice.

Thou Shalt Not Command Forgiveness

Here’s the dilemma: I don’t think we—Christians generally, the church historically—understand what Jesus meant when he said,

“Whose sins you release have been released to them; whose you grab, have been grabbed” (The Second Testament, ).

We’re so familiar with what the Synoptic Jesus and the apostles say about forgiveness that we assume we know what the Johannine Jesus says here.

For example, in a book on forgiveness L. Gregory Jones makes a mistake repeated throughout interpretive history: “[the] communities of disciples…are authorized and obligated to forgive in God’s name.”2 For this claim Jones cites Matt 16:19, Matt 18:18 and John 20:23. These texts have been conflated for millennia. Matt 16:19 doesn’t mention forgiveness; Matt 18:18 doesn’t mention forgiveness (though the following parable of “the unforgiving servant” does; John 20:23 does mention forgiveness, but it’s not a command! Also, John’s word for “grab” does not occur in those Matthew passages.

There is no way to read John 20:23 and hear Jesus say Christians are “obligated to forgive in God’s name.”

But that’s exactly what victims of injustice are told:

Don’t be bitter; forgive.

Jesus forgave him, so you should forgive him.

Jesus forgave you, so you should forgive her.

We have forgiven him, so you should, too.

Does the Bible say things like that? Of course: “And be kind and compassionate to one another, forgiving one another, just as God also forgave you in Christ” (Eph 4:32). However, Paul was writing to a specific group of Christians, for whom that command was appropriate. The Johannine Jesus does not issue a command to forgive.3 I’m sending out another reflection on this verse because, from what I can tell, no one talks about it this way. That lack of imperative was designed for John’s audience.

The temple/synagogue authorities issued a command to excommunicate the man born blind (John 9:34). Can you imagine those religious leaders then telling the victim of their abuse that God commanded him to forgive them?

The Johannine community was subjected to abuse, threats of death, betrayal, and the complete loss of their social-religious lives. Abuse destroys agency. Obligating forgiveness is complicit with that destruction. Jesus doesn’t do that. He did not command these disciples to forgive their religious abusers. He leaves the decision up to them. This first word should be in bold, all caps, and red letters:

“IF you forgive.”

Agency restored.

Jesus’ words are liberty, not law.

With the out-breathing of the Spirit (John 20:22), it really is possible to let go of the sins of oppressors. Hearing that as promise and possibility honors the normal human reaction from Martin Luther I quoted at the beginning: “No article of faith is harder to believe than the article which states, ‘I believe in the forgiveness of sins.’”4

As I pointed out last week from Thomas’ reaction, “forgiveness after abuse and trauma can also trigger a powerful ‘I will never believe.’ The wall of painful memory is too high to climb. Faith might admit forgiveness is on the other side of the wall, but it cannot be seen.”5

I believe it is crucial here to see Jesus speaking to all of his disciples. Letting go of sins is impossible for the individual victim. But it is possible with community.

Breathing Forgiveness

Whether from exegetical intention or Spirit-led insight or just plain coincidence, the sequence of the last five articles of the Apostles’ Creed has a surprising degree of symmetry with John 20:

I believe in the Holy Ghost (John 20:22)

I believe in the holy catholic church: the communion of saints (John 20:19, 26)

The forgiveness of sins (John 20:23)

The resurrection of the body (all of John 20)

And the life everlasting. Amen. (John 20:31)

Just as there is no church without the Spirit, there is no forgiveness without the communion of saints.6

And that’s why I struggle to believe in the forgiveness of sins. Because the sins I might forgive cut me off from community.

I don’t know yet what “releasing sins” really means. I made a first attempt last week, but it will take community to figure this out: “Whenever that one comes, the Truth-Spirit, he will make a path for you [all] in all the Truth” (John 16:13, The Second Testament).

While talking with a friend yesterday I had an epiphany about this passage in John 20. Notice this sequence:

1. Jesus breathed on them

2. And said, “Receive the Holy Spirit/Breath”

3. “If you release anyones sins, they have been released”

Have you ever held on to something emotionally, come to a point of letting it go, and taken a deep breath in followed by a long sigh of relief?

Spiritual Discipline Trauma

In 2021 I experience revolutionary growth and healing through embodied mindfulness practices like breath prayer and the Wheel of Awareness. It’s hard to describe the quality of my prayer life in a few words, but the quantity tells some of the story. I was regularly spending 30 minutes a day in silent meditation. No reading. No words or long prayers. Just attending to God and the present moment. Spiritual growth and nervous system growth.

It’s also hard to describe that season because it coincided with the early fissures of the eventual earthquake of church abuse. Gradually, the meditation became harder and harder. I stopped altogether during a seemingly-never-ending-process of moving and transitions. It wasn’t until early 2023 that I realized why it was so hard to meditate. The trauma embedded in my body at the same time I was experiencing richly embodied connection with God. Mindfulness in the present became portkeys to the past. Not consciously or visually; the past was more apparent in the difficulty, the resistance to what before was routine and pleasant.

I’ve worked with a therapist on this, but my prayer and meditation has not been the same since. Where before I could comfortably sit in silence for thirty-plus minutes, now I’m lucky if I last three. I hesitate to admit this, because I regularly coach clients through these kinds of practices. I feel shame for not practicing what I preach.

The Communion of Breath and Letting Go

But maybe forgiveness—and the difficulty of believing in forgiveness—is part of the problem/solution. As mentioned in the second Advent essay Figuring Out My Life, my spiritual abuse support group sits together in silence for five minutes each meeting. I vary my mental attention during that time—sometimes using different versions of the Jesus Prayer7, or shifting focus through the five senses, or doing a body scan. But underneath those different mental activities I am always breathing. Not just breathing, but mindfully breathing—breathing with intention and attention.

There is something special in doing this with others.

Jesus breathed, said “Receive [plural] the Holy Breath,” and said, “If you [plural] release the sins of any, they are released.” Maybe “releasing sins” isn’t just forgiveness in the traditional sense, but also releasing the effects of sin among fellow wounded saints.

Breathing out the toxins.

Breathing out the pollution.

Breathing out the bacteria.

Whether or not I have “forgiven” the sins of spiritual abuse, I don’t know. But I think I am letting them go, and I am letting go of the hold they have on my body and soul. With each exhale, there is also the inhale: “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The Spirit/Breath-filled community of fellow survivors is helping me believe the unbelievable:

Eternal life, time rebuilt, is here, now, even and especially in five communal minutes that seem to last forever (in the best sense!).

I wish I could do more practical unpacking of the second half of John 20:23. Instead, I’ll leave you with a quote, and a brief suggestion: the much-maligned online discourse of spiritual abuse survivors might be a faithful enactment of Jesus’ invitation to hold/arrest/retain sinners.

Quote from Craig Koester

“Holding fast means holding people to account. If there is no accountability, there is no need for forgiveness. If people are not held responsible, then forgiveness can be taken to mean simply accepting sin…To “retain” sins in a Johannine sense involves exposing sin, identifying sin, and holding people to account for sin…Retaining can startle people into seeing the truth about themselves so that they recognize the need for change and hear the call to faith and life…The Spirit continues to confront the world’s sin after Jesus’ resurrection (16:8-11)... The disciples, who receive the Spirit, are also called to challenge the patterns of sin at work in the world. Forgiveness or release from sins is mentioned first in Jesus’ commission to the disciples, since this is the goal of their work. The Father sent Jesus to bring release from sin (1:29; 3:17), and Jesus sends his followers to bring this message to the world. Yet retaining sins by holding people to account is the essential corollary to this, since forgiveness without accountability lets sin continue unchallenged.”8

Question

What do you think, am I a heretic? Do you see how John 20:23 could revolutionize how we advocate for abuse survivors? How survivors navigate the healing journey?

Leave a comment

This final essay in the Advent of Time is longer because I haven’t had time to make it shorter. For survivors of spiritual abuse and for their caregivers and advocates, I think the length and exegetical detours are worthwhile. Here’s the TL;DR: In order to stop time from being arrested after abuse, the church can either let go of the abuser’s sins (in the case of true repentance), or the church can arrest the sinner. In both options, the church comes alongside survivors. Forgiveness is not an individual burden. The church can help repair and rebuild time for survivors.

“If life is deprived of every form of meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.”1

I quoted that line from Byung-Chul Han in part 2 of this series The Advent of Time. The first stages of healing non-time and non-closure are given in the timely death of Jesus and in the eighth day (see part 3). There is an additional element required for closure so that time to be rebuilt after trauma: sending away sin. Notably, that also occurs on the eight day of reconstructed time.

“I Believe in the Forgiveness of Sins”

“Doubting” Thomas gets such a bad rap. I insist on calling him Traumatized Thomas. Still, he does say “I will never believe” (20:25). But what does he refuse to believe?

We focus on the contrastive “but” in v. 25: “the other disciples were telling him, “We’ve seen the Lord!” But he said to them...“I will never believe.” We assume his doubt only extends to his rabbi being alive after crucifixion.

There is, however, another contrastive “but” in v. 24 that comes first: “But Thomas (called ‘Twin’)...was not with them when Jesus came.” At the risk of over-reading, I’m interested in that “but Thomas.” It follows immediately after Jesus statement about forgiveness of sins (v. 23). Was that also a challenge for Thomas’ faith?

Thomas, like so many of John’s characters, is a representative figure. His characterization resonates with a specific group of John’s audience: those who hadn’t seen the risen Jesus (20:29). The Christians of the late first century Johannine community suffered institutional spiritual abuse. It’s challenging to believing in Jesus as the risen Messiah without physically seeing him. But forgiveness after abuse and trauma can also trigger a powerful “I will never believe.”

The wall of painful memory is too high to climb. Faith might admit forgiveness is on the other side of the wall, but it cannot be seen. That obstacle is also caught up with the fracturing of time which is trauma. But that’s just why Jesus offers forgiveness.

“Forgiveness, as an emphatic act, is a ‘power’ which consists in the ability to let time begin anew, and thus it frees the acting subject from the past, from a temporal burden which tries to pin it down forever.”2

As I put it in Figuring Out My Life, the resurrection of Jesus is pregnant with time. This is more obvious with the eighth day, but the timeliness of Jesus’ risen life also includes forgiveness.3

Let Time Begin Anew

Jesus comes back for Thomas on the eighth day, the eschatological day of the new creation. He shows Thomas his scars. He does this, not just to convince Thomas that he’s alive, not just to show him solidarity—yes, for those reasons, too—but also to jump-start time. We would see this more easily if we “let John be John.”4

By their very nature, scars incorporate the shifting nature of traumatic time:

“the scarred skin surface can be be understood as a trope that entails and evokes a multilayered and convoluted temporality of the past, present, and also the future, insofar as the body continues to carry these marks of disruption.”5

Like the scars of Jesus, forgiveness acknowledges the evil of an oppressive religious system. Indeed, there is some parallelism with forgiveness following “peace be with you” in v. 21, and “put your finger here in my scars” following Jesus’ second “peace be with you” in v. 26. Just as forgiveness acknowledges the wrongfulness of sin, “The scars are also the tokens of recognition that acknowledge the past wounds.”6

Acknowledgement of the past wounds is coupled with the possibility of a new future. Scars look backward as well as forward. Which is just what forgiveness does as well.

“The scarred body [of Jesus]...never obliterates the violence of the cross but also never ceases to put forward the attempt to bring closure to the wounded past.”7

What sin? Whose sin?

The Gospel of John is a story about Jesus that is tailor-made for spiritual abuse survivors. In that tailor-made story, Jesus talks about sin very differently than in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. The most obvious differences are:

• Jesus only talks about forgiveness once (20:23).

• He only talks about forgiveness after his death and resurrection.

• He never commands his followers to forgive.

The less obvious difference: aside from 20:23, sin is a feature of “the world,” not Jesus’ followers.

This is typical of literary trauma narratives and stories from socially exiled groups. In John the reality of sin is always associated with perpetrators. The Johannine Jesus never talks about sin outside of his dealings with “the Jews,” who are a representative figure for “the world” of religious persecutors. Sin doesn’t come up at the Cana wedding, with the woman of Samaria, the royal official of Capernaum, with Lazarus and Martha and Mary, etc. There are no parables or dialogues about sin and forgiveness. Whenever sin is mentioned, the religious oppressors are always in view.

I have a separate draft article that shows this by reviewing all of the mentions of “sin” in John. For the sake of time, let’s look at just one section in John 8 where “sin” occurs four times (8:21, 24, 34, 36).

We are used to reading statements like “everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin” (8:34) through a Pauline lens, like systematic theology. Ie, all humans sin, and therefore all humans are slaves of sin. But we must let John be John.

Jesus is in another one of his conflict show-downs with “the Jews.” It is the members of the oppressive system who are slaves of sin. The nature of the sin in context is not only unbelief but oppression. Here are the actions of “the Jews”:

• They persecute Jesus (5:16);

• They threaten anyone who talks about Jesus (7:13);

• They try to kill Jesus (7:19);

• They demonize Jesus (7:20);

• They try to violently seize Jesus (7:30);

• They try to arrest Jesus (7:32);

• They persist in wanting to seize Jesus (7:44);

• They pridefully and self-righteously judge dissenters (7:47-52);

• They contradict their claim to Abrahamic lineage with their murderous intentions (8:37, 40, 44);

• They demonize Jesus again (8:48, 52);

• They try to stone Jesus (8:59).

All of that violence, highlighted here but present throughout the Gospel, is what John means by “the sin of the world” which the Lamb of God takes away (1:29). “The way of the world is the way of violence and tribalism and domination.”8

When we get to the first and only mention of forgiveness of sins in John 20:23, all of the earlier narrative characterizations of sin lie behind it. This must influence our interpretation. How would John’s audience naturally understood Jesus’ words here? For oppressed and traumatized communities, sin is seen in the oppressor first and foremost. To do otherwise—to equalize (sin-leveling), or worse, to accuse the accuser—is to repeat the very dynamic of abuse.

Forgiveness, according to the Johannine Jesus, is only appropriate where evil and wrongdoing have been named. Not superficially. Not in a public “mistakes were made” apology. No, the naming must be thorough. Exhaustive and, in many cases, exhausting (ie the cross).

Additionally, forgiveness is only appropriate where the evil has been healed. Jesus doesn’t offer forgiveness from the cross with his wounds still open (cf Luke 23:34). Forgiveness, as a matter of closure, comes when the wounds have closed over—or at least started to close—with new skin.

What is forgiveness?

Forgiveness is a divine reality. But it is not a divine command. There is no “thou shalt forgive.” No “forgive seventy times seven.” Instead, it is a non-coercive invitation: “If you forgive.”9

With this invitation to forgive sins, the focus is not the sin of disciples but the sin of the oppressive world. That is what is being forgiven. That perspective might also lead us to a more nuanced translation of the Greek word here for forgiveness, aphiēmi.

Of the thirteen times John uses aphiēmi outside of 20:23, twelve of them are connected to themes of conflict, danger, and safety.10 Here are a few examples (translation of aphiēmi noted by italics):

• In contrast to the Father who “has not left me alone” (8:29), the wage-taker (ie hired hand) “leaves the sheep and runs away when he sees a wolf coming. The wolf then snatches and scatters them” (10:12);

• Jesus predicts that his disciples “will be scattered” and “will leave me alone” (16:32);

• To keep them from being scattered, Jesus does the opposite of the wage-taker when the wolves come: “if you’re looking for me, leave these [disciples] to go away” (18:8).

As David Ford puts it, many words in John have both a plain sense and a deep plain sense. Translating aphiēmi as “forgive” in 20:23 when all 14 prior uses are translated as “leave” obscures the deep plain sense: “if you leave / let go the sins of any, they are let go.”11

Arresting the World

This deep plain sense helps with the second half of v. 23 which so many translations bungle. Eg, the NIV has “if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven” (cf also CEB, CEV, ESV, NLT). But v. 23b uses a completely different word, krateō, which never means forgiveness! It literally reads “if you retain any, they are retained.” The main interpretive question is, what is being retained or held onto? If it’s “the sins of any,” then it could be translated “retain the sins of any,” which could mean “withholding forgiveness” (cf ESV).

Sandra Schneiders provides a helpful literal translation showing the parallel structure of v. 23 (a) and (b)12:

an tinōn                aphēte             tas hamartias        aphientai autois
Of whomever      you forgive    the sins                they are forgiven to them  

an tinōn                kratēte                                          kekrantēntai
Of whomever      you hold fast                               are held fast

Schneiders argues that the object of “hold fast” is the “whomever” individuals rather than the sins of those individuals. She also notes that “forgive” is aorist, “indicating a punctual act),” while “hold fast” is present, “indicating, as is very common in John, an ongoing active behavior.”13 Her conclusion is that the forgiven members of the community are, once forgiven, held fast continually within the community.

But this ignores the patterned usage of sin and aphiēme outlined above. When put in the context of oppression, violence, and protection against violence, krateō has a stable meaning: arrest. In a neutral/positive sense, one can krateō, ie “hold on to,” teaching and tradition.14 However, when people/beings are held on to, it is to restrain them with force, like the angel who held/retained “the dragon…and bound him for a thousand years” (Rev 20:2).

In Matthew and Mark, krateō is the main verb used for the arrest of Jesus.15 Surely it’s no accident that in John those who arrest Jesus are “the Jews” and the Romans, ie, “the world.” In John, arrest is the logical opposite of letting someone go (cf 11:48).

It is superb irony, so fitting of John, to hear Jesus saying, “If you let go of the sins of worldly evildoers, they are let go; if you arrest worldly evildoers, they are arrested.” Jesus is giving his followers permission to stop violent sinners from continuing to violate the sheep.

In order to stop time from being arrested after abuse, abusers need to be arrested.

I don’t mean the church should be wielding the power of the state. Although criminal arrest should happen to spiritual abusers far more often than it does (ie, clergy sexual abuse), the “arrest” of John 20:23 parallels the letting go of sin, so this is a spiritual/relational reality. Which is to say, communal. Both of the verbs in 20:23 are plural, addressed to the community as a whole. Johannine “arrest” should never look like abuse (cf John 18:10, 36), but I don’t think that precludes the use of social force.

Just imagine what the wage-taker of John 10:12 should have done instead of “leaving”—again, aphiēmi—the sheep to the wolf. The Good Shepherd’s “laying down his life” means that shepherds should risk their lives to protect the sheep, as explains. What is the most natural image of such life-risking protection if not fighting off the wolf?

That isn’t just a calling for pastors. It’s for all disciples. The healing of time offered in forgiveness and the scars of Jesus requires a community.

“A community whose members—the victims and the guilty—jointly acknowledge the existence of the rupture—to-that-point only remembered by the victim—serves to restart a process of living in the present for an unencumbered future.”16

Both (a) the communal act of letting go of sins—presumably in the case of a repentant sinner—and (b) the communal act of stopping the sinner from being able to continue harm involve acknowledgement of the harmful sin. Time remains frozen apart from that acknowledgement. In neither case is all of weight on the survivor(s). The church can help repair and rebuild time on their behalf.

Prager mentions acknowledgement by both victims and the guilty. John doesn’t seem to hold out much hope of that acknowledgement coming from the worldly religious system. But I believe there is an imagined acknowledgement. All throughout the Fourth Gospel, Jesus is relentless and ruthless in ascribing blame to the abusive leaders.

Imagining Repentance and Truth

In his masterful study of John through the lens of trauma, Edward Wong notes the common feature of imagined retribution in trauma narratives.

“Visions of retribution and progression are often intertwined. Trauma carriers oscillate between temporalities as they interrogate the past, present and future. They appropriate and reorient their present perceived reality of suffering by claiming the injury and demanding retribution while cathartically striving for an alternative, resilient future.”17

Commenting on the most famous verse in all the Bible, John 3:16, Wong notes that “what the text says and how it functions can be differentiated to some extent.”18 Read in light of the entire gospel narrative,

“God’s love and Jesus’ salvific mission presented in these texts are also retroactively wrapped in retributive visions of exclusion and subjugation. The text leads its post-Easter readers to the understanding that only those who continue to express their faith in the crucified Jesus will have “eternal life,” while the rest are subject to divine condemnation.”19

This is a challenging perspective. But when we see the condemnation of unbelievers in 3:18-20 in light of sin always referring to oppressive systems, “then Jesus’ words and the text’s claims make sense if unbelievers are perceived as part of the circle of perpetrators in a post-traumatic epoch.”20

Whether or not the abusers will tell the truth about their wrongs, while possible, is unlikely. Those who abuse power can’t see truth when it’s talking to them face-to-face (John 18:38). So acknowledging the truth is also unlikely. But that doesn’t mean there can be no acknowledgement and telling of the truth. It’s right there in the Word of God, narrated for survivors of spiritual injustice.

Conclusion: Communal Time Stitchers

That is what eucharist offers on the eighth day. Miraslov Volf suggests that Christians and churches should think of eucharist not only with reference to personal sin but also to being sinned against. Eucharist can be “a lens through which to view memories of wrongs suffered.”21 Survivors can partake communion in this way on their own. But they shouldn’t have to. The family of God must help stitch the wounds of religious abuse. “As the Father has sent me, even so am I sending you,” Jesus said (John 20:21). Jesus was sent to re-stitch time through his scars, and he sends his brothers and sisters to do the same.

Quote from Jeffrey Prager

Question

How might church assemblies acknowledge the injustice perpetrated against victims of abuse? Trevor Laurence, in his book Cursing with God, created a liturgy for a corporate service of imprecation in which worship focuses on Scripture’s imprecatory prayers for justice and judgment. Perhaps such liturgical worship has the power to enact what Jeffrey Prager describes above as the creation of redressive communities.

“If my theory’s right we’re running out of time, so if you’re planning on resurrecting any time soon, now, now is the time.”
Lucas, Stranger Things 5, “Chapter Two: The Vanishing of Holly Wheeler” 

Like clock work, this is the time of year that Christian resources for the liturgical calendar proliferate. It’s true—many Christians are edified in many ways through the rhythms of the church year. I don’t want to take away from that. I’m just a voice in the wilderness writing for those cast out by the controllers of the calendar. I believe Lucas Sinclair from Stranger Things is on to something: trauma survivors are running out of time, and what they need is resurrection time.

Here’s the TL;DR: Jesus replaces the annual cycle of religious time with the time of the eighth day. The liturgical calendar—and one’s corresponding experience of religious time—is all too easily corrupted through institutionalism and clericalism. The Johannine Jesus doesn’t redeem the calendar. He transcends it. And he invites his followers to feast on his transcendent time.

Call me a biblicist, but I can’t find the liturgical calendar anywhere in the Bible as a source of hope and life. Maybe it can be derived, like many other doctrines, by “good and necessary consequence” from Scripture (WCF 1.6). But if it is to be inferred anywhere, it would be the Gospel of John, “the most ‘liturgical’ of all the Gospels.”1 But the liturgical nature of John is subversive: the Johannine Jesus deconstructs the Jewish liturgical calendar. He offers a different kind of religious time to fearful and hurting disciples. After describing John as “the most liturgical,” Alexander Schmemann observes that “the risen Christ appears after eight days (John 20:26).” What’s going on with that connetion?

This is little known today. Church history might be partly to blame, for Protestants at least. Some Bible translations also share in the guilt. For example, the CSB, NIV, and NRSV say Jesus’ second appearance in John 20:26 happened “a week later.” But it literally reads “And after eight days the disciples were again inside.” Have you ever asked why John counts that period of time as eight days?

If you’re like me, the answer is “no.” You might wonder, though, why I’m bothering to ask the question. As with previous posts in this series, the goal in asking that question is utterly practical. But the journey to the answer is less direct. If you can stick with me, we’ll get to the practical—how survivors understand and experience time remade in the time-torn world of religious trauma.

The Eighth Day

Mary Coloe explains that “eight days later” puts this on the Sunday following the resurrection, “since the beginning and end day of a period of time are both counted. This deliberate time frame, “eight days later,” indicates that this scene is to be understood against the liturgical background of the community.”2 We must remember that the gospels are not just factual records but narratives framed for specific communities. If John was giving us bare history, 20:26 could read like 20:1: “On the next first day of the Sabbaths.”3 Instead, the “eight days later” is intentional. Coloe continues,

“In time the terminology of the “first day” shifted to the “eighth day” to reflect Christian belief that they were living in the new eschatological age. The “eighth day” terminology first appears in Christian literature in the Epistle of Barnabas (ca. 95-135 C.E.).4

Once I started looking, I was shocked to see that this “eighth day” theology is everywhere in the early church. Tertullian, writing around 198-220 AD, noted that “it was already well-known by pagans that Christians have ‘a festive day every eighth day.’”5 Later patristic writers like Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Augustine developed complex theologies of time using the eighth day both with reference to circumcision/baptism and to Sunday/The Lord’s Day.6 The eighth day was central to their Christian imagination.

Just one of these many references from Augustine will have to suffice. Notice how Augustine weaves time in this sermon from around 394, shortly after being ordained to the priesthood:

“It’s one thing, you see, while times still pass, to rest in the Lord, which is what the seventh day, that is the sabbath, signifies; quite another to transcend all times and to be intimately and endlessly united to the architect of all times, which is what is signified by the eighth day; this, by not recurring in the same cycle as the others, indicates that it bears the mark of eternity.”7

Notably, this theology of the eighth day would not exist without John. It doesn’t occur anywhere else in the NT. While there are seeds in the OT in the command to circumcise sons “at eight days old” (Gen 17:12), it isn’t explicit until 2 Enoch in the 1st century BC:

“And I appointed the eighth day also, that the eighth day should be the first-created after my work, and that the first seven revolve in the form of the seventh thousand, and that at the beginning of the eighth thousand there should be a time of not-counting, endless, with neither years nor months nor weeks nor days nor hours.”8

The Fathers used the eighth day as transcending this-worldly time similarly to what we see in Barnabas and 2 Enoch. But can we trace that concept to the NT witness of John? And is it even relevant to the spiritually wounded?

The Church’s Only Feast

In his book Introduction to Liturgical Theology, Orthodox theologian Alexander Schmemann explains that the early church “transposed” the Jewish year and kept the rhythm of time through annual festivals. In the fourth century this tradition developed with “the multiplication of festivals” caused by “the Church’s need to replace the pagan festivals, to carry out the new missionary task which was suddenly set before her.”9

Schmemann quotes Jean Daniélou to explain this:

“‘There was a need in the now Christian Empire,’ writes Daniélou, ‘to replace the old pagan festivals with Christian festivals which would answer the demand basic in every society for holidays celebrating the most important moments in natural life. Clearly this kind of festival was unknown to early Christianity. For it the end of time was felt to be at hand. Baptism introduced each person into the only Feast—the eternal Passover, the Eighth Day. There were no holidays—since everything had in fact become a holy day.’”10

Daniélou says Christians of the first century didn’t see need for the church calendar that developed later. That may be the case. What’s missing is why they didn’t need it.

The Johannine Jesus was physically present to the disciples on the “first day” and on the “eighth day.” On the eighth day Jesus shows up again for a specific individual who represented the original audience of John: Traumatized Thomas.

It is on the eighth day that later disciples struggling with faith after time-fracturing trauma can see Jesus by faith (John 20:29).

These Jewish Christians had lost the religious time which the annual festival cycle provided. Then the weekly time of Sabbath was violently torn away from them. Could that be why John’s Gospel creates distance from both the Jewish Sabbath (Saturday) and Christian Lord’s Day (the first day)?

Re-Imagining Time

Trauma operates by association. We remember the future based on the past. If past Sabbaths were marked by pain and fear, then future Sabbaths are tainted. The eighth day promises transcending the weekly rhythm of this age.

The practical import of the eighth day is as practical as imagination. Which is to say, infinitely practical.

Jesus “creates the world by naming anew…The voice that names enables us to imagine the world differently. . . .John is drawn to Jesus because Jesus possesses this imaginative power of naming, the power to define what is…John’s book is an extended naming of a re-imagined world, a new vision.”11

Because religious trauma associates pain with promise, names matter. Perhaps Sunday can be redeemed for spiritual abuse survivors by calling it the Eighth Day. After all, Sunday—ie ‘the venerable day of the Sun’—as a day of rest was a novelty institutionalized by Constantine.12

There is an “initial incomprehensibility” in “truly novel language” and “a new way of speaking.” But “a new vocabulary is a tool for doing something that couldn’t be envisioned earlier.” New vocabulary “wins our hearts not because it is more true than the old entrenched vocabulary but because given our needs, it is more compelling than the old.”13

My wife and I are returning to church during Advent. But Advent time isn’t what I’m finding healing. It’s eighth day time. It can’t be perceived or experienced in the rotations of the earth or the cycles around the sun. Nor is it something for which we must wait.

Time has already been raised and rebuilt in the risen Son: “Destroy this temple [ie time], and I will raise it up in three days.”

We no longer need to be hungry for time. “If anyone eats of this bread he will live forever” (John 6:51).

We eat eternity in the blood and bread of Jesus’ words. This is the celebration of the eighth day.

In other words, it’s a celebration of realized eschatology. Let’s make the eighth day great again. It’s more biblical than Advent and Christmas and Easter:

“In the mind of the early church these three [the ekklesia, the eucharist, and the eighth day] were so integrally interrelated as to be perceived as three aspects of a single experiential reality.”14

Quote from Alexander Schmemann

Next week for the final essay in this series, we’ll consider how Jesus’ scars realize this eschatological renewal of time. It’s not just that Jesus appears to Traumatized Thomas on the eighth day. We must also see and hear how Jesus appears on the eighth day.

Question

What do you think, should we bring back “the eighth day” to our Christian vocabulary? What might it do to our imagination of the rhythms of time to talk about going to church on the eighth day?

I’ve heard it said that life is not something we figure out. As we typically use it, the phrase “figure something out,” means getting answers, understanding, even certainty. But life is not about answers. At least not certain answers.

Our use of the phrase “figure it out” is actually ironic. It originates from the 19th century with sense of “figure” as numbers in arithmetic. So “figure it out” meant to do the calculation and get the answer. Literally. Somewhere along the line, this mathematical phrase got transferred to life more generally. Ironically, applying a mathematical exercise to life is a figural move. But we don’t tend to think in figural terms when trying to “figure something out.”

This happened when my wife saw a journal entry I left open by my bedside table. It was just a title that I didnt want to forget: “Figure it out,” and then “Figure out my life.” I can count on one hand the number of times she has written in one of my journals. As you can see in her red writing, Kristen took this in the common literalistic sense, indicating some kind of existential mid-life crisis, and therefore called for some encouragement.

But that’s not at all what I meant! It was an intentional play on words: “figure out my life” in the figural sense of finding my life—such as it is at age 40, in the year 2025/26—in the figures of Scripture and the Word himself.

Side note: if this was a real a mid-life crisis—let’s be honest, there’s plenty of time left for that to happen—Kristen would be a great person to turn to. As you can tell, she’s hilarious and full of hope, and I highly recommend her coaching services if you are in a mid-life crisis!

Figural Time

While most of us are probably not accustomed to this connection, figural/symbolic reading is inherently related to temporality and our experience of time. Ephraim Radner explores this at length in his frustratingly dense book Time and the Word: Figural Reading of the Christian Scriptures. His basic claim is that our modern historicist understanding of time—time that is strictly linear and calculable—gets in the way of the Bible’s figural nature. Radner argues that Scripture “is the shape of time itself” and “represents the patterns of recognizability by which all things exist.”1 Therefore, “our own experienced temporality is wrapped up in the engagement of this intrinsically and infinitely creative Word, whose forms [ie figures] gather us up into God’s life.”2

Last year I explored how Jesus deconstructed the oppressive liturgical system of his day. Radner observes that the “traditional Jewish reckoning of time...was marked by liturgical representations—perhaps framed by specific events [eg Exodus, desert wanderings, etc]—and then ordered according to Beginning or Ending (Creation and End).”3

However, that traditional time was forever changed with the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70: “the uniquely Jewish experience of exile/subjugation and persecution, with the loss of the Temple, ‘banished history’ and led to a ‘static’ view of time that was to reflect eternity in all important respects.”4 Objectively, for post-70 Jews—that is, both Judaistic and Christian Jews—the successive temporal rhythms of temple worship collapsed and came undone.

Time Destroyed at the Right Time

In light of that objective reality, there is some interesting etymology in Jesus’ command to the Jerusalem authorities, “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days” (John 2:19). While this connection doesn’t exist in any other language that I’m aware of, “temple” comes from the Latin templum and is associated with time. We can see this in the shared roots of “temple” and words like “temporal” and “temporary” (as well as “contemplate”; I’ll return to that one below). The root, temp, means “to stretch.” When we observe that Jesus’ word for “destroy” literally means “loosen,” we get a suggestive image: “loosen time—temporal stretching—and I will rebuild time in three days.”

If you think that’s taking too much poetic license, I would respond and say Jesus and John were the original poets, and poets might be their best interpreters. Check out this comment from poet David Herrstrom on the Jews’ request for a sign in John 2:18: “[Jesus] intentionally complicates the sign with time. Jesus’ body as temple collapses the present and future.”5

I might be saying something slightly different here, but Herrstrom appreciates that “destroy this temple” has temporal significance. We know Jesus is speaking figuratively; I’m just stretching the figure; or, I hope, following the sense of the figure itself.

According to Byung-Chul Han, Nietzsche’s historical/philosophical claim that God died necessarily entails the death of time, or existence in “non-time.”

“God functions like a stabilizer of time. He ensures a lasting, perennial present. Thus, God’s death punctuates time itself, deprives it of any theological, teleological, historical tension. The present moment shrinks to a fleeting point in time, devoid of heirs and free of goals.”6

The only protection against non-time—humanly speaking—is to die at the right time:

“Whoever cannot die at the right time must perish in non-time. Dying [at the right time] implies that a life comes to its proper end; it is a life’s conclusion. If life is deprived of every form of meaningful closure, it will be ended in non-time.”7

Spiritual abuse survivors know what it is like to be deprived of meaningful closure, to die a spiritual death without closure. It is the norm rather than the exception for Christian communities to refuse repair after institutional betrayal. Survivors have no hope of reconciliation with a community that says, in essence: “‘You were born entirely in sin, and are you trying to teach us?’ Then they threw him out” (John 9:34).8

Think of that lack of communal repair alongside this statement from Han:

“Only temporal forms of conclusion create duration—meaningful and fulfilled time—against a bad infinity.”9

I wonder if you resonate with that phrase, “a bad infinity.” It’s like Bill Murry in Groundhog Day. But imagine Groundhog Day on Sunday. Every Sunday in the time-fractured badlands of religious trauma is bad infinity.

Sunday again.

Maybe this Sunday will be different.

Maybe the endless, infinite loneliness will end. Maybe time will begin again.

But Sunday is the same. Just like any other day.

Non-time.

Where can survivors find hope in this “bad infinity”? They find it in the fact that Jesus died at the right time. Emphatically, as the Fourth Gospel repeats over and over again, Jesus—as the eternal-temporal temple of God—was only lifted up on the cross when his hour has arrived.10 Thus, what Han writes is true, even paradigmatically true, of Jesus:

“Death is deprived of its non-timeliness by being take into life and into the present as a shaping and consummating force.”11

Death was taken up into Jesus’ life for all time, for every present. This is why the resurrection of Jesus is pregnant with time.

[19] “Are you asking one another about what I said, ‘In a little while, you will not see me; again in a little while, you will see me’?…[21] When a woman is in labor, she has pain because her hour has come. But when she has given birth to a child, she no longer remembers the suffering because of the joy that a person has been born into the world. (John 16:19, 21)

Jesus was raised and appeared to the disciples “on the first day of the sabbaths” (20:1, ). Then he appeared again “eight days later” (20:26). There is a lot going on here which will get to in the next post, The Eighth Day. Next, I want to share some personal reflections riffing of a few more provocative quotes from Han.

Figuring Out When the Math Stops Mathing

Han differentiates contemplative thinking with calculation. Thinking

“often moves in roundabout ways…A special temporality and spatiality is intrinsic to thinking that rises above calculating…It often progresses discontinuously, while calculating follows a linear path.”12

The echo of the original mathematical sense of “figure it out” can’t be accidental. While calculating achieves direct answers through “the pure use of understanding,” contemplation attends to figures, and “Every form, every figure, is a detour…A melody is a detour…Thinking is also marked by a melody. Thinking that entirely lacks any circuitous character degenerates into calculating.”13

I just turned 40, and I’m trying to figure out my life. Not directly and explicitly; at least not anymore. There was a time when I was desperate for clear mathematical answers. This equals that. This person’s behavior plus that context equals this meaning. This event at the present time means God’s will for the future. But eventually the math stops mathing.

I had hoped to publish a book just over five years ago. I had a connection in the evangelical publishing world, and a meeting with two execs was in my near future. Then Covid. Then everything blew up. We moved. Then everything blew up again. Then we moved again. Now, related to some of those experiences, I wouldn’t go with that publisher even if they offered me a dream contract. (Thankfully that book manuscript was already finished, and it now exists—for free!—here).

From 2022-2024 I wrote a manuscript on healing from spiritual abuse in the Gospel of John. I worked hard submitting proposals to publishers and worked through the inevitable rejections. Then, earlier this year an editor at a traditional Christian publisher expressed interest and asked if I wanted to talk with him. I was beyond excited. Then for one reason or another the meeting never happened. There are some incredibly tenacious first-time authors out there who don’t know the word quit. I admire them, but I am not one of them. So I decided to let go of that pursuit, at least for a season. But the idea didn’t die. Or maybe it did, at least the publishing idea. And it died at just the right time.

The Enfleshed Book

A major goal of that book concept was to equip spiritual abuse survivors so they could read John on their own and find healing in the same Scriptures that were misused to abuse them. I could write about that directly and teach that and share encouraging meditations about that. But I didn’t—and still don’t—want to give pre-cooked meals for others to microwave. I wanted to equip survivors to go the grocery store themselves, feel the produce for freshness, chop up the ingredients, and smell the aromas as they cook their own meals from the food that Jesus uniquely provides for the spiritually wounded.

Unfortunately, some publishers don’t think this meets the unique needs of survivors. As one rejection notice put it, “so many who have suffered this abuse…aren’t ready for a deep dive into a text that has been used against them.” This is surely the case. But I also know there are many who desperately want to dive deep into the text that was used to harm them, but just don’t know how! I sit with them each week. But counseling is usually not the place for that deep dive and the lingering pace it requires. I don’t care if there’s a book with my name on it to provide that help, but I know there’s more help available than what one-on-one counseling can provide.

Knowing this, I started something new. Each week since the beginning of August I have met with a small group of spiritual abuse survivors to slowly read through the Fourth Gospel, one chapter each week. Tomorrow we’ll be in John 19, so it’s been 19 weeks. While it’s only one goal among many, I have been so encouraged to see these survivors learn and grow in their ability to read and interpret this Gospel for their own healing. The Spirit of Truth really does “guide you into all the truth” (John 16:13).

This week, the hour has arrived for Jesus to be crucified. The temple of Jesus’ body is going to be destroyed, literally “loosened,” and time is going to unravel with him.

But I believe Jesus has already been rebuilding time through this group. One part of our weekly meeting is a short period of silence. We started with one minute at week one and gradually worked up to five minutes over the next 17 weeks. When I designed these meetings I had no intention of associating that gradually increased silence with the reconstruction of time. But now I do, at least for myself.

This has been so much more fulfilling than any physical book could be. I get to witness the enfleshed Word take on flesh in the lives of these friends. And I have personally experienced the gift of Jesus’ time through this communal contemplation:

“Contemplative lingering gives time…When life regains its capacity for contemplation, it gains in time and space, in duration and vastness.”14

A Book for My Birthday

I do hope to publish that book on John. I might have more information on that soon, as I now have a meeting with that publisher just around the corner. Turns out it just took nine months to schedule! How’s that for the rebuilding of time. It has certainly been roundabout and circuitous. If that particular publisher doesn’t work out, I also have a contract offer from a hybrid publisher that I’m considering.

As a sort of joke to/with God, I prayed I would have some real publishing prospects by my 40th birthday. By joke I mean the #jokingnotjoking kind. That would make for a great birthday gift. But it’s truly in God’s hands and God’s timing. If I can echo Paul in 2 Corinthians 3 without blasphemy or ego, as the Corinthians were a letter of recommendation, and so no written recommendation letter was needed, this Scattered & Found group is the book I wanted to write, “written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on [paper] but on…human hearts” (2 Cor. 3:3).

If you’re reading this, Scattered & Found friends, thank you for the best birthday gift I never thought to ask for.

Quote from Robert Jenson

Question

What are you trying to figure out in your life right now? How might you look at things differently if you were “figuring” your life through the symbolic and typological figures of Scripture?

What is Advent? Advent is __________. How did your preacher fill in the blank last Sunday? My guess is something like, “Advent is waiting,” or a simple explanation, “Advent is the beginning of the church calendar.” I often think of Fleming Rutledge’s proclamation, “Every year, Advent begins in the dark.”1 My church used this quote from Karl Barth for their Advent devotional guide: “What other time or season can or will the church ever have but that of Advent?” All of those signal the centrality of time: waiting, beginning, calendar, season, night before day.

Why is this season so full of time? That probably sounds like an uninteresting theoretical question for philosophers and physicists. But I ask that question as a wounded healer who walks alongside spiritual abuse survivors. If you know trauma, then you know the importance of time. During Advent last year I explored the impact of religious trauma on the liturgical calendar. That was primarily a work of deconstruction, following the ways in which Jesus himself deconstructed the Jewish festal calendar which had become tainted by trauma.

As I came to see some months after that series, all of John can be traced through the motifs of deconstruction and reconstruction, flowing from this statement: “Destroy this temple [deconstruction], and I will raise it up [reconstruction] in three days” (John 2:19). Reconstruction will be my focus in this series. This first essay lays some foundation to understand the impact of trauma on how we experience time. But focusing on reconstruction, this post and all the rest will include personal testimony of how Jesus is rebuilding time for my family. As we’ll see, “rebuilding time” is not just a strange metaphor; it’s reality.

“Trauma destroys time.”2

I can’t seem to get away from the fracturing of time. It’s like the recurring rift between this world and the Upside Down. It returns with a vengeance every December with the coincidence of my birthday (December 5), Advent, and over three years of being unchurched.

Every Sunday around 9:27 AM my phone notifies me of my daily average screentime. While I’m not bothered by the data itself,3 the alert isn’t pain free. I don’t know when Apple started this weekly Sunday notification, but I first remember seeing it late 2020 / early 2021. Each Sunday morning, some time between 9:25-9:29 AM, I was either sitting in a pew or standing on stage with my guitar, waiting for the church service to begin at 9:30. During that 4-5 minute interval my phone would buzz to tell me my how much I used my phone that week. If it hadn’t been for my family’s unjust excommunication I probably wouldn’t think about the timing of those alerts. But I do. Today, those screentime notifications come with time-release capsules. Each alert transports me back. Or brings the past forward. I can’t tell which. Maybe both.

Now, when the clock strikes 9:27 AM on Sunday, I sit in a different pew in a different sanctuary. It’s three years in the future and over 1,000 miles away. But the phone buzzes, and it’s like a hologram projector superimposes that other sanctuary over this one. I see both at once. Just flashes for split seconds. But that’s the problem: the seconds have been split. Pulled apart. No longer flowing together.

Portkeys and Arches

Psychologist Robert Stolorow uses the portkeys from Harry Potter as a symbol for traumatic time:

“Harry Potter (Rowling, 2000) was a severely traumatized little boy, nearly killed by his parents’ murderer and left in the care of a family that mistreated him cruelly. In his posttraumatic adventures, Harry encountered “Portkeys” (Rowling, 2000, p. 70)—unobtrusive objects that transported him instantly to other places, obliterating the temporal duration ordinarily required for travel from one location in space to another.”4

Stolorow goes on:

“Experiences of trauma become freeze-framed into an eternal present in which one remains forever trapped, or to which one is condemned to be perpetually returned through the Portkeys supplied by life’s slings and arrows…[I]n the region of trauma all duration or stretching along collapses, past becomes present, and future loses all meaning other than endless repetition.”5

That iOS screentime notice should be a normal, unobtrusive object, like a mangy boot. It is relatively easy to stop noticing other notifications on my phone.6 But not this one. It’s the timing that makes it a portkey. Unlike other modes of magical travel, portkeys are scheduled. The screentime portkey just so happens to be scheduled for every Sunday.

It’s not the biggest obstacle I face in worshipping again among God’s people, but it is deeply symbolic. In the words of Jewish writer Hermon Wouk,

“in our religion [Sabbath/Sunday] is the keystone of the arch of symbol through which we pass to seek the great truths.”7

Sunday is the portkey and keystone of the arch through which Christians pass to redemptive memory in Word and Sacrament. Those means of grace are themselves temporal—symbols through which the Spirit teleports the eschatological new creation into the present based on the past work of Christ.

But all of that gets jumbled up by trauma.

“The present is distorted to incorporate the memory of an un-metabolized, or unprocessed past; a then folds in upon the now largely without awareness or distinction.”8

What is needed, according to Storolow, is “the jump-starting of timeliness, the overcoming of a pervasive and entrenched psychic commitment to the stoppage of time.”9

Jump-Starting Time

Like a dead battery that is lifeless yet full of potential for life, maybe Jesus can jump-start time for survivors. Advent is itself a celebration of the healing of time.

“‘The Word became flesh’ also means ‘the Word became time.’”

“If the Word of God had not become temporal it would not have become flesh. Becoming flesh, it clothed itself with time, the time of a man’s life… In this present, past and future, God creates from our lost time his time of grace—the time of his covenant with man…The incarnate Word of God is. But this means that it was and will be.”10

This is the first Advent since 2021 during which my wife and I have attended church regularly. In 2022 we were six months post-excommunication—churchless and living temporarily with family in a different state. Advent 2023 began just days after another Christian institutional trauma that resulted in an NDA. In 2024, our family was still too raw and exposed to sit in a sanctuary. This year, 2025, my wife and I have attended worship ten weeks in a row. That in itself is a miracle.

I walked into church two days ago, the first Sunday of Advent, with these thoughts on time simmering on the back burner. The pot had already been stirred by a quote from philosopher Byung-Chul Han which the preacher shared on our first visit. I bought Han’s book the next day because it was so intriguing. In The Disappearance of Rituals, Han defines rituals

“As symbolic techniques of making oneself at home in the world. They transform being-in-the-world into a being at home. They turn the world into a reliable place. They are to time what a home is to space: they render time habitable. They even make it accessible, like a house. They structure time, furnish it.”11

All those italics are original, but I would italicize the last three sentences about time. Han argues that we are in desperate need of ritual because “Today, time lacks a solid structure…Time that rushes off is not habitable.”12

This has been my experience living in the fallout of religious trauma. I haven’t found home in the liturgical calendar. The structure hasn’t felt safe. The stairs of holy-days creak under the weight of the past, threatening to crack open underneath us.

We’ve visited various churches here and there, but never with any continuity or repetition. According to Han,

“Rituals are characterized by repetition…Past and present are brought together in a living present. As a form of completion, repetition founds duration and intensity. It ensures that time lingers.”13

The Scent of Time

We don’t know if this church will be home. But we have been able to return, to repeat, to linger. I am sensing time return. Or as the title of another Han book puts it, I am smelling the scent of time. Like ancient Chinese incense clocks called hsiang yin,

“time does not flow or trickle away. Nothing is emptied. Rather, the scent of the incense fills the room, even turns time into space; it thus gives it a semblance of duration.”14

Han repeats and emphasizes that line about time and space: “Time becomes space.”15

Isn’t that what Barth said above? The eternal Word became flesh. Eternity—“God’s time”—became space. According to the wisdom of our forefathers and foremothers of the faith, we begin the liturgical year anew by remembering that Jesus is the Lord of time, able to fill out our time-fractured lives with the scent of his Spirit.

The scent of time came in a small but significant gift on Advent Sunday. While sitting back down in our pew after celebrating eucharist, I noticed a small orange string on the ground. I wondered if it was from Kristen, as she has cross-stitched every Sunday we’ve been here. As many do, we try to sit in roughly the same spot each week. This Sunday we tried to guess but were unsure if we were either one pew in front or behind from previous weeks. But that small thread confirmed we were in the same pew; if not every Sunday, at least one Sunday before.

Repetition. Duration. Lingering. A reminder, not of the traumatic past, but of the healing present.

As a wannabe poet, I’m prone to finding symbolic meaning in the mundane. There’s something about that orange thread. It’s the potential for the thread to stretch.

“Time actually means something ‘stretched’: the Latin word for time, tempus, derives from a root meaning to ‘stretch’ in space like a string.”16

Only time will tell, but here, in this season, I smell the hope of time. The string of our story is being stretched out from its jumbled mess on the floor and re-woven into the story of Father, Son, and Spirit. It’s not pure or unmixed. But for more and more each Sunday, I find Han’s words ring true:

“The time of the festival [ie Sunday, just as every Sabbath was a sort of festival] is a time standing still. It does not pass or run out. It thus makes lingering possible.”17

Lingering is possible because Jesus is rebuilding time. It’s slow work, like my wife’s cross-stitching. But with each stitch, the threads find a home.

I’m lingering now as I try to close out this essay. The snow is falling at its leisure outside my window. I’m aware of turning 40 on Friday, and can’t resist the temptation to connect that to these reflections on Advent and time. Don’t ask me yet how my 40th birthday connects. If I figure that out, I’ll let you know in my next post, titled Figuring Out My Life.

Quote from David Sten Herrstrom

Question

If you have wounds inflicted by the church in any form, how do you experience liturgical time? What does the church calendar mean to you?

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If you could successfully enforce one literary mandate, what would it be? Here’s mine: everyone should read The Golden Key by George MacDonald.

I occasionally suggest the book to my clients. I’m not sure how well I explain the recommendation, though. I don’t think many read it. After all, The Golden Key is a fairy tale, and those are for children. It was written over 150 years ago by an unfamiliar author.1 It hardly seems related to the real-life concerns of counseling.

If I’m going to keep recommending this book, I thought it might help to explain my recommendation in writing. However, that proved more difficult than I imagined.

Explaining symbolic narrative is like explaining a proverb or a parable: you might feel a boost of wisdom after a preacher explains why feeding an enemy heaps burning coals on his head (Prov 25:21-22), but wisdom is more caught than taught. You’ll get more protein from wisdom you capture yourself, while store-bought wisdom is like 70/30 ground beef—greasy flavor that the body quickly expels.

Some Key Questions

Hear are a few questions to knock on the door of why you should read The Golden Key:

Can stories heal? Can mystery illumine the unknown? Can symbols unlock the door to wisdom?

Philosophical Detour

We’re almost ready to open the door into The Golden Key itself. First, I want to explore the hallway outside and consider some philosophy. It’s a detour, but sometimes that’s the quickest way to the destination.

In his book The Disappearance of Ritual, philosopher Byung-Chul Han claims, “Today, the world is symbol-poor.”2 He describes symbols as things—whether objects, rituals, texts, etc.—that “stand still.”3 Not literally, of course. But there is a permanence to symbols and the manner in which we engage them:

“Symbolic perception, as recognition, is a perception of the permanent: the world is shorn of its contingency and acquires durability.”

This is so, I believe, because symbols mediate the real, and only reality has durability.

But there is a problem for us in our modern age:

“Symbolic perception is gradually being replaced by a serial perception that is incapable of producing the experience of duration. Serial perception, the constant registering of the new, does not linger. Rather, it rushes from one piece of information to the next, from one sensation to the next, without ever coming to closure…While symbolic perception is intensive, serial perception is extensive. Because of its extensiveness, serial perception is characterized by shallow attention.”4

Serial perception is like a humming bird taking the tiniest sip of nectar from one flower after another, then doing that over and over to the point that it forgets it can hover and drink deeply from one flower. What’s more, our age is like an assembly line of flowers along which hummingbird-humans move:

“The neoliberal regime pushes serial perception, reinforces the serial habitus. It intentionally abolishes duration in order to drive more consumption…The ever-present compulsion of production leads to a de-housing, making life more contingent, transient and unstable. But dwelling requires duration.”5

“Dwelling requires duration.” Here’s one of many, many reasons to read The Golden Key: it invites rereading and facilitates dwelling through symbolic perception.

Turning the Symbolic Key

Now we get to the door, and we’ll walk through using the key of symbolic perception. I’m going to give a brief overview. It won’t spoil much, but even if it did, nothing is ruined, because the story pays more with each rereading.

The Golden Key follows two children, a boy named Mossy and a girl named Tangle, who meet in Fairyland and set out on a journey filled with beauty, sorrow, wonder, and longing. Guided only by a golden key and a deep yearning for something greater, they pass through strange lands, face trials that test their courage, and slowly, painfully, grow up—both separately and together.

At the outset of the story, MacDonald helps us understand how to read and understand it. More so, he teaches us how to enter the land of fairy itself. The first main character to appear is the boy named Mossy, although we don’t yet know his name. The boy would listen to his great-aunt’s stories, one of which is “that if he could reach the place where the end of the rainbow stands he would find there a golden key.”6 The boy dreams of the golden key, and then MacDonald narrates the following:

“Now all that his great-aunt told the boy about the golden key would have been nonsense, had it not been that their little house stood on the borders of Fairyland. For it is perfectly well known that out of Fairyland nobody ever can find where the rainbow stands. The creature takes such good care of its golden key, always flitting from place to place, lest any one should find it! But in Fairyland it is quite different. Things that look real in this country look very thin indeed in Fairyland, while some of the things that here cannot stand still for a moment, will not move there. So it was not in the least absurd of the old lady to tell her nephew such things about the golden key.”7

Notice the descriptions of movement and absence of movement. The second to last sentence is key: “some of the things that here [in this country] cannot stand still for a moment, will not move there [in Fairyland].” Remember Han’s line, “symbols stand still.”8

Ask, Knock, Seek, and Stand Still

So, one evening, the boy saw a rainbow in the forest that borders between his country and Fairyland. Actually, he didn’t just see, he gazed. MacDonald says the boy “lingered,”and repeats twice in one paragraph that the boy “gazed into the forest.”9 Remember Han’s axiom, that symbolic perception lingers, which serial perception cannot do. It is only in this state of lingering, with intensive gazing, that the boy was able to see the rainbow. And of course he rushed out of the house, into the forest, to find the golden key!

But as he got into the forest and closer to the rainbow, “He stood gazing at it till he forgot himself with delight—even forgot the key which he had come to seek. And as he stood it grew more wonderful still.”10 I won’t give away what he sees in the rainbow, but I want to point out how the boy is able to find the golden key. He stops trying to find it. He is content. He dwells in the moment. In that contentment, he “drew nearer to the rainbow” but it disappeared. “He started back a step in dismay. It was there again, as beautiful as ever. So he contented himself with standing as near it as he might,” and just gazed at the rainbow and what was inside of it.11

Now some more symbolically potent narration:

“When the thought of the golden key returned, the boy very wisely proceeded to mark out in his mind the space covered by the foundation of the rainbow, in order that he might know where to search, should the rainbow disappear. It was based chiefly upon a bed of moss. Meantime it had grown quite dark in the wood. The rainbow alone was visible by its own light. But the moment the moon rose the rainbow vanished. Nor could any change of place restore the vision to the boy’s eyes. So he threw himself down upon the mossy bed, to wait till the sunlight would give him a chance of finding the key. There he fell fast asleep.”

In the morning the boy finds and takes the golden key. He found it by waiting, being still, and letting it appear to him. Stillness came natural to the boy, for his very name was Mossy, just like the space upon which the rainbow was founded and upon which he slept. A little later, when the boy is in Fairyland and meets his first wise guide, MacDonald explains his name:

“Now Mossy was the name his companions had given him, because he had a favourite stone covered with moss, on which he used to sit whole days reading; and they said the moss had begun to grow upon him too.”12

Symbolic Perception

Why is his name important, and what is the importance of all this symbolic stillness? If there is wisdom available in this story—and I believe there is, a full treasure chest—it doesn’t come quickly. One must be still. Dwell. Gaze. The way to read the story is the way to read our own stories, too, and how The Golden Key can help unlock their meaning.

No one can tell Mossy what the golden key unlocks or how to find whatever that is. I cannot tell you all that The Golden Key itself will unlock for you. But here’s a suggestion: perhaps one thing The Golden Key can unlock for you is the key of symbolic perception itself. The story can help you slow down and stand still so that you can take a figural look at your life, as Tangle and Mossy contemplated the figures of the rainbow stairway and gradually—not just gradually, but painstakingly, slowly, through death upon death and rebirth—figured out the way into the stairway that went “up to the country whence the shadows fall.”13

Quotes from Flannery O’Connor and Curt Thompson

Question

The Golden Key is a short fairy tale, just shy of 11,000 words. Would you consider reading it? It’s a great story to read alone, with a friend, with a spouse, with children and family.

If you want to read free online or download a PDF, here is the original 1867 edition in a collection titled Dealings with the Fairies.

As with many findings of modern science, wise men and sages have been aware of this reality—if not the precise data—for quite a long time.

“A person’s thoughts are like water in a deep well, but someone with insight can draw them out.” (Proverbs 20:5 GNT)

Because the thoughts of the heart are deep, and because our minds typically swim on the surface, it requires the help of another to fathom the depths and draw them up to where we can engage them. And how does “someone with insight draw them out”? Probably the same way one angles for bass: patiently; waiting hours, days, weeks, months to build trust and rapport; repeatedly, casting the same question three times in five different ways in ten different meetings; studiously, knowing when, where and what the fish are biting; and flexibly, knowing when it’s time to pack up, go home and hope for better luck tomorrow.

Sometimes you land a keeper; sometimes it’s a dinky catch and release; sometimes you snag a soggy boot; and sometimes when you think you’re reeling in a big ‘un you’re shocked to drag up some ancient relic, only made possible by patience, persistence, and Providence.

Quote from Blaise Pascal

Question

Who can you can thank today for their patient and persistent showing up to catch the deeper, unknown thoughts in your soul?

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What: 24-week virtual support group for survivors of spiritual abuse and religious trauma.
When: Fridays at 1pm CDT
Tentative start date: TBD (hopefully April/May 2026)
Price: $400 (payment plan available upon request)
Sign up: Google Interest Form.

You can read this or watch my video, it’s the same content.

Scattered and Found

The name Scattered and Found comes from John 10:12 (where the wolf scatters the sheep) and John 9:35 (where Jesus finds the healed blind man who had been scattered). This group is a bit different from other short-term support groups, and I’m going to take some time to explain what it is all about. If you or someone you love might benefit from a group like this, I think the time to read or listen is worth it. It will help you decide if this group might be a good fit. I believe it can provide unique help to survivors struggling to reconnect with faith and spiritual community.

Why Support Groups?

One of the most painful realities in religious trauma healing is a paradox: we need community to heal; but community is what harmed us and thus feels dangerous. So how can we heal? One helpful avenue is through a support group of fellow sufferers who share your specific pain. While it doesn’t alleviate all of the reasonable doubts and fears, it often feels safer to heal alongside others healing from the same or similar experience. “Safety is the treatment,” and I put safety first in the designs for this group.

A Book and a Group

Scattered and Found is a support group, but specifically it is a book group, and so it has two elements: a book, and a group. I’m going to explain them in that order, but please don’t mistake the order for priority. The group is just as important as the book, and in some respects, more so. One can engage a book, even a book of the Bible, in isolation. Not so with a group.

The Book

This group is centered on a slow reading of the Gospel of John, for a very important and perhaps surprising reason: John was written for Christians suffering from trauma caused by religious abuse and oppression. There are many ways of explaining this. The quick version is that the group of Jewish believers for whom John was written, often known as the Johannine Community (ie the community of John), were kicked out of the Jewish synagogue and the entirety of their Jewish community because of their belief in Jesus. While there are many layers to this—ethnicity, culture, politics, and religion—it is the religious component that makes John especially relevant for religious trauma survivors in any setting.

I’m going to share just a few places in John’s narrative that give us glimpses of the traumatic experiences of the Johannine community. If you join this group, you will see even more of these signs of God speaking directly to your traumatic experiences and God’s healing grace. But since this theme is probably new, I don’t want you to just take my word for it. I’m reading these without explaining any story context; just pay attention to themes of fear, violence, conflict, and trauma.

First, there are repeated mentions of excommunication and the threat of religious persecution, notably, not from people of other faiths (ie Roman authorities), but from those who shared the same Jewish faith:

• John 9:22 His parents said these things because they were afraid of the Jews, since the Jews had already agreed that if anyone confessed him as the Messiah, he would be banned from the synagogue.

• John 9:34-35 “You were born entirely in sin,” they replied, “and are you trying to teach us?” Then they threw him out. [35] Jesus heard that they had thrown the man out, and when he found him, he asked, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”

• John 12:42 Nevertheless, many did believe in him even among the rulers, but because of the Pharisees they did not confess him, so that they would not be banned from the synagogue.

• John 15:20 “Remember the word I spoke to you: ‘A servant is not greater than his master.’ If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they kept my word, they will also keep yours.”

• John 16:2 They will ban you from the synagogues. In fact, a time is coming when anyone who kills you will think he is offering service to God.

Second, there are repeated mentions of religious violence and fear of religious authorities.

• John 5:18 This is why the Jews began trying all the more to kill him: Not only was he breaking the Sabbath, but he was even calling God his own Father, making himself equal to God.

• John 7:13 Still, nobody was talking publicly about him for fear of the Jews.

• 10:12 “The hired hand, since he is not the shepherd and doesn’t own the sheep, leaves them and runs away when he sees a wolf coming. The wolf then snatches and scatters them.”

• John 11:8 “Rabbi,” the disciples told him, “just now the Jews tried to stone you, and you’re going there again?”

• John 12:10-11 But the chief priests had decided to kill Lazarus also, [11] because he was the reason many of the Jews were deserting them and believing in Jesus.

• John 19:38 After this, Joseph of Arimathea, who was a disciple of Jesus—but secretly because of his fear of the Jews—asked Pilate that he might remove Jesus’s body.

• John 20:19 When it was evening on that first day of the week, the disciples were gathered together with the doors locked because they feared the Jews.

• John 20:26 A week later his disciples were indoors again, and Thomas was with them…[and] the doors were locked.

Can you hear the story? Why would there be so much repeated emphasis on fear and religious violence? Because that is what John’s audience lived through. John highlights those themes to point out how the story of Jesus speaks specifically to the lived experience of religious trauma.

The Group

One of John’s programmatic, foundational themes is that famous statement in 1:14, “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us.” This group is a way for the Word to become flesh. After Jesus, the enfleshed Word, was raised and ascended to heaven, he sent the Spirit and became Word again in the pages of Scripture. We encounter the enfleshed Word in the Bible. “The gospel of John provides more than the fact of the Incarnation; through the very specific words the Word speaks, the gospel narrative enacts the Incarnation for the gospel’s readers.”1

And, as 1 John 4:12 makes clear, we encounter the divine Word in other brothers and sisters: “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us.” We are invited into a process, of Word becoming flesh [incarnation], expressed in words [inspired Scripture], and then those words put on flesh again among us in our love for one another. And we participate in the divine Word when we likewise allow the Word to be enfleshed among us.

It’s a reciprocal dynamic of finding our story in this story of the Word, which sheds further light on our story, which then invites the Word into our lives today by the presence of the Spirit who mediates the divine Word and the written Word.

Format

The basic format of the group is simple—on the surface more like a 12-step meeting or a Bible study. But it is a support group, and it’s not a traditional Bible study, nor is it a 12-step meeting. 21 of the meetings will be devoted to each of John’s 21 chapters. Additionally, we will have a joint intro session, a final closing session, and an (optional) individual session with me. Each meeting we will read the chapter aloud in the group, go through a round of sharing, read the chapter again, and then a second round of sharing. We also practice a short time of silence, starting at one minute and gradually working up to five minutes.

The key element that makes this group supportive and healing is that we will explicitly and intentionally read John in light of religious trauma and experiences of spiritual abuse/church harm/deconstruction/etc. That is literally why this Gospel was written and how it was intended to be read by the original audience. As Barbara Stewart put it when describing her trauma recovery groups for war veterans reading through Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, “It is a book group where we put the text in the middle of the room and allow its meanings to resonate.”2 We will put the Fourth Gospel in the middle of the room and allow its meanings to resonate. Additionally, following Stewart, “[John] offers [survivors] a map for coming home. The reading group provides the opportunity to read the map.”3 Like traumatized war veterans being guided home in their reading of the Odyssey4, John guides traumatized believers to the home promised by Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (John 14:2, 17, 23). Only, as John tells us, we have a distinct advantage: Jesus promised his Spirit to all disciples, and promised that the Spirit “will teach you all things and remind you of everything I have told you” (14:26). “If this story is the story of the enfleshed Word, what happens to the words of the Word when the Incarnation comes to an end, as it will with Jesus’ death? The resolution, which Jesus himself offers within the framework of the story, is that the Paraclete will carry Jesus’ words into the future.”5 The Spirit leads us to the words of the Word in the Gospel of John so that they are not just words but, as Jesus said, “The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (6:63).

Not a Therapy Group

This group is designed to be supportive and to provide a place for belonging and healing through the sharing of personal experience. However, it is not group therapy in the sense of process groups or individualized work. While this group is for trauma survivors, it is not focused on the embodied wounds of trauma (nervous system regulation skills, etc.), nor is there focused education on abuse, trauma, and receovery (defining, recognizing, naming, etc.). Those are critical components of healing which can be addressed through counseling or other support groups. While this group is supportive in nature, at times a member can experience some discomfort. If this were to happen, or has a chance of happening, members are encouraged to have an outside counselor. I am also available for individual counseling and can be reached at hanncounseling@gmail.com and https://aaronjhann.com.

A Note on Potential Members

I will often refer to members as friends because of Jesus’ astounding statement in John 15:15, “I have called you friends.” It is possible that your group will have friends with some or all of these experiences: friends from toxic, abusive systems with harmful theology but without any specific abuser or abuse event; friends who were spiritually abused by peers; friends who were spiritually abused by parents; friends who were spiritually abused by pastors, teachers, and organizational leaders; and friends who were leaders abused by other leaders and/or congregants. (Of course, none of that excludes other forms of abuse in addition to the spiritual component). Depending on one’s personal experience, having friends with different experiences can be triggering. This is actually a good thing, though it isn’t easy. It creates the possibility of seeing the humanity in someone who, because of association with our own trauma, we might prejudge as bad/dangerous/untrustworthy. It is important to be aware of this possibility, but at the same time, all potential members are screened to ensure good fit and safety for the group.

24 Weeks?

24 weeks is long. That’s basically six months. Change takes time. Healing and repair, when lasting, takes time. I recognize six months might sound like too much. As a survivor of religious trauma you may not even know what your life will look like in 6 months, what job you will have, where you will live. That’s okay. You will get more out of this group if you can attend every meeting, but attendance is certainly not mandatory. I am asking members to commit to a minimum of 18 sessions (about 75% of the group). General consistency is for the good of the group as well as each member, and a consistent place of belonging can re-ignite and sustain hope, whatever your unique season of life.

Book/Word and Group/Flesh

I call this a “book group,” and I use that phrase intentionally. It is word and flesh. Scripture and embodied relationship (even if we aren’t in the same room together).

Now, you might find one or both of the elements—the book and the group—triggering and daunting. Religious groups are scary after spiritual abuse. The Bible is scary after spiritual abuse. But we need both: we need grace from God offered to us in his Word, and we need that grace to be Spiritually mediated through connection with others. My aim is for this book group to provide a safe environment—kind of like the locked room in which the disciples hid from the dangerous religious authorities in John 20. They still locked the room one week later even though Jesus had already proclaimed to them the shalom of God in his healed hands and side (20:26). This group is a room where you can meet Jesus again, in the middle of your fear, joining hands with fellow traumatized brothers and sisters.

If you are doubting in the wake of trauma, wrestling with what you believe, asking questions while also afraid to ask questions, this book group is for you.

If you were abused by a pastor, religious leader, and/or church community, this book group is for you.

If you were silenced, forced out, or kicked out of your church, this book group is for you.

If church and faith stirs fear and anger and other negative emotions, this book group is for you.

If you feel like an outcast and are searching for where you belong, this book group is for you.

If you were betrayed and scandalized by a trusted leader or group of leaders, this book group is for you.

This book is for you, and this group is for you, and I look forward to taking this journey through John together.

Interest

If this interests you, please submit your information at this link: Google Interest Form.

If you think this group might benefit a friend, relative, or person under your care, please consider sharing this information.

Testimonials from previous members:

“The time spent in this group is precious. I found the community, support, and discussions in this group healing. Reading through the book of John together and sharing stories and perspectives created a safe space for personal growth.” — Anonymous

“You’re not alone. Come join and see how not alone you are.” — Anonymous

“This group is truly wonderful. It is a safe place to feel seen, heard, and share the scripture together. I highly recommend this group and Aaron Hann’s other services. He’s so knowledgeable, caring, and offers transformational support.” — Anonymous

“By writing I myself have learned much that I did not know.”

Augustine of Hippo wrote that in his theological classic On the Trinity.1 What a statement. Much of what Augustine knew was only learned through writing. He was a theologian, but it would be a mistake to limit his statement to scholarly abstraction. For example, surely there was much he learned about God, about himself, and about his relationship with God, through writing his Confessions.

Or consider this from Flannery O’Connor:

“I have to write to discover what I am doing. Like the old lady, I don’t know so well what I think until I see what I say; then I have to say it all over again.”2

This happens every time I write for this newsletter. I never know quite what I’m trying to say until I try to say it. The same thing can be said about thinking and feeling. Which is why journaling is a fundamental tool for soul care.

Writing serves as a conversation with the self. In drama this is known as soliloquy, literally “to speak alone.” Actually, the term was coined by Augustine himself in one of his earliest works, Soliloquies, in which he holds an ongoing dialogue with himself as a form of therapy.

Perhaps that is why the sons of Korah didn’t just sing Psalm 42, they wrote it:

Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you in turmoil within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my salvation and my God. (Psalm 42:11)

Caveat

Writing isn’t strictly necessary in order to heal. That said, of the therapy clients whom I have seen make significant lasting progress, the majority of them have used writing and/or some form of creative work (art, drawing, painting, etc.). Writing just happens to be a cheap, accessible option for most. For those who have difficulty writing, alternatives include speech-to-text (which is actually what Augustine usually meant by “writing”), voice memos, and expressive art. On the latter, just like you don’t need to be “a writer” in order to write for your own benefit, neither do you need to be “an artist.” No one needs to see what you write. No one needs to see what you draw, or paint, or sculpt. It’s between you and yourself and God.

Quote from Graham Greene

Some Recommended Resources

• The Healing Power of Writing: A Therapist’s Guide to Using Journaling With Clients, by Susan Borkan. Though written for therapists, this book is very accessible and has a ton of practical exercises.

• Journaling for Spiritual Growth: Six Weeks to Build a Habit That Fosters Spiritual and Emotional Maturity, by Marc Alan Schelske. The subtitle explains why this is a great resource. Schelske helps you build the habit of journaling, whether you’ve tried it here and there, or have never journaled at all.

Question

What happened? What do you think? What do you feel? You don’t need the answers to those questions before writing. Instead, write, and you’ll find the answers.

Leave a comment

I was a student at Moody Bible Institute during the last year of Joseph Stowell’s presidency. I can only remember one sermon he preached, because of his tongue-in-cheek big idea: “Get a biblical life.” Riffing off of that, I suggest that we need to get a metaphorical life. As I put it earlier this year, “If we want life, we need metaphor. It is not merely the caviar of poets; it’s the bread of life for all.”

We all know teaching is more than information download. But the computer metaphor of the mind sticks like gum to our shoes as we walk into classrooms, into sanctuaries and auditoriums, and yes, even as we walk into counseling rooms. I am reminded of this each time I am able to help a client explore his life through imagination. The image always outlasts the info.

Images and metaphors are what I remember most from my own time as both student and counseling client. Here are a few that I can call up with ease: immigrant parents and the potential for generational healing beyond the first and second generations; a story about the counselor following his wife’s preference for leaving clean pans on the oven rather than putting them back in the cupboard; a Bob’s Big Boy figure placed on an overhead projector in John Koessler’s Cultural Dynamics in Congregational Ministry class; listening to “A Little Bit of Everything” by Dawes in Dan Zink’s Marriage and Family Counseling class.

Psychologist Terry-Marks Tarlow shares similar testimony from one of her own clients. After one session, this client “quipped casually, as if an afterthought, ‘I really appreciate the images we are using. I think about them often between sessions. It’s funny how I often lose the details of exactly what’s happens during our sessions or what we talk about. But I never forget those images.’”1

My best counseling sessions are metaphorical. Like when a client feels safe enough to swim into the deep end, tread water, and hold his breath while peering down under the surface, and swim back to the shallows.

In time, I hope to see him scuba-diving and riding with whales.

And that’s exactly what we cannot do by teaching, in the sense of teaching as information transfer. There’s a reason the human brain has a corpus callosum separating the left hemisphere from the right hemisphere. There is a place for left-brain information, and there is a place for right-brain imagination. But the information is not going to do what only imagination can do. Here’s how Eugene Peterson puts it: “How is it possible for people who give so much attention to the word of God, to remain so unaffected by it? Not, surely, through unbelief, but through lack of imagination.”2

This isn’t just about what’s effective. It’s about imitating Jesus as the best communicator and counselor and teacher who ever lived. So Peterson writes,

“Metaphor and story characterize Jesus’ language…For those of use who decide to follow Jesus, it only follows that we will not only listen to what he says and attend to what he does, but also learn to use language the way he uses it. We will be onguard against disincarnating our language into formulating ideas or summarizing rules or giving out information.”3

If we learn to use language the way Jesus uses it, we wont’ just use language, we will live language. We will get a metaphorical life.

Quote from Edwin McMahon & Peter Campbell

Question

What metaphor is guiding your life right now?

Bars—iron forbidding endurance
That end in skyward arrows of caution,

Standing wide on the curious red edge
Of a brick road now chopped off by asphalt.

This gate protected something important
They all say.

The ivy even agrees, or used to.
Now the vines are just a part of nature

Enveloping the gate,
Nature swallowing an abandoned plot.

The field of tall grass,
Wild with the seasons,

Is now the park where mice stroll
On the old brick road, protected by green blades

And gate from the outside world.
In December, the mice have departed

Underground to flee from snow that covers
All traces but this obstinate black gate.

This is the gate to nowhere.

Quote from Eugene Peterson

Question

What have you seen lately by means of imagination?

Of the many topics that I have studied in my ongoing reading of John’s Gospel, symbol is probably in the top three of what I study the most.

But I fear I have already lost you. My interest in symbols and symbolism is not just about John. It’s about reality. I am learning from the Spirit through the testimony of John that reality is symbolic. But we by and large fail to appreciate this reality.

Here’s the TL;DR: Your neighbor’s face is a symbol. Faces aren’t meant to be interpreted. Faces are for communion. The same goes for symbols generally.

Symbolic Faces

Iain McGilchrist summarizes how the brain hemispheres approach language differently:

“In the left hemisphere’s world words are seen as arbitrary signs: in the right hemisphere’s world they are seen as to some extent fused with the aspect of reality they represent.”1

We can put the distinction like this: signs represent, while symbols mediate. With the left brain’s preference for representation, the sign is substituted for the thing it signifies. That is, “signs are substituted for experience.”2 In contrast, the right hemisphere views the world symbolically, whereby words “are seen as to some extent fused with the aspect of reality they represent.”

Here is Sandra Schneiders with some real-world examples:

“The task of the symbol is to take that which, by nature, is spiritual or transcendent, and therefore sensibly unavailable in itself, intersubjectively available by giving it a “body,” a sensible form. The human body, in which the person becomes available, is perhaps our best example of symbol in the strong sense. Speech is the symbolization of inner experience. Art symbolizes the beautiful. The church is the symbolic presence of Christ in the world...Jesus is the symbol of God, and the Gospel itself the symbol of Jesus. In short, a symbol does not stand for something. It is the “something,” available in sensible expression. Therefore, it is the locus, the place, of revelation and encounter, whether human or divine.”3

If you have a parent or a sibling or a child or a spouse—in other words, if you are human—you know this. Take love and safety. As an experience, such emotions can’t be held or smelt or tasted, nor even seen or heard, at least not directly. The human face and voice symbolize the inner spiritual reality of love. We can see this through research in Polyvagal theory:

“the brainstem area regulating the autonomic state that supports feelings of safety also regulates the muscles of the face and head that we use for ingestion, social communication, and signaling [or better, symbolizing] that we can be trusted and are safe to approach. For example, the intonation of voice reflects our autonomic state. If we are calm and our heart rate is slow and rhythmically variable, our voice is prosodic.4 The intonation of voice reflected in prosody is the product of vagal pathways regulating laryngeal and pharyngeal muscles. When we are frightened or angry our voice loses prosody, and our heart rate is fast and loses rhythmic variability. Feeling safe, by being in a calm autonomic state, provides access to efficiently use the social engagement system and to convey the feelings of safety to another. This is universally observed as a mother calms her infant with melodic vocalizations, gentle reassuring gestures, and warm facial expressions.”

Symbolic Language

Words and language are symbols, too. Or at least, language can be used symbolically.

Symbols require more interpretation than signs. That is, there is an inherent depth of meaning, because they mediate the real which they represent, just as a prosodic voice mediates the depth of safety a parent provides for a child.

But it is all too tempting to take the left brain’s approach and focus on signs. We interpret the sign and move on. Once one arrives at the destination signified in a downcast face, a long ugghhhhh, followed by “I forgot your birthday,” interpretation is closed. No more meaning to glean (but certainly more meaning to give back!).

In contrast, symbols invite questions which lead to surprising answers which produce better questions, and, voila, dialogue. As Paul Ricour put it, “The symbol gives rise to thought.”5

Symbolic Deconstruction

“Signs have a single, fixed meaning, whereas symbols are by definition multivalent, capable of more than one meaning, their referent unable to be fixed in as precise or logical a way.”6

This distinction is, I think, helpful regarding discussions about deconstruction. I’m almost halfway through The Deconstruction of Christianity by Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett7, and it provides a clear illustration of the left-brain semiotic/sign approach. They nail down deconstruction to a fixed, determinate meaning:

“Faith deconstruction is a postmodern process of rethinking your faith without regarding Scripture as a standard.”

If others use “deconstruction” in a different way, eg as a crisis of faith guided by Scripture, they are wrong and not actually deconstructing. The point here isn’t to debate definitions but to point out the temptation to debate definitions caused by the authors’ focus on a single 1:1 meaning of “deconstruction.” They treat it like a sign, which one can follow, travel to the destination, and then move on (and in their case, move on to thoroughly warn against and critique deconstruction).

But what if deconstruction is a symbol? What if we viewed “deconstruction” through Sandra Schneider’s explanation of symbol as “(1) a sensible reality (2) which renders present to and (3) involves a person subjectively in (4) a transforming experience (5) of a transcendent mystery”?8

Regardless of it’s (alleged) 20th century roots in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, Christian faith deconstruction is a without a doubt a reality that is much bigger than a slippery slope from critiquing doctrine leading to full-blown apostasy. How Schneiders explains symbols fits quite well with the image of deconstruction:

“The symbol, unlike the sign, is not an objective communication of information. Rather, it reveals by involving the person in a subject to-subject relationship with the transcendent. This characteristic of the symbol has two implications. First, unlike the sign, which designates the known by means of an unambiguous one-to-one correspondence (the exit sign means only one thing), the symbol leads a person into the unknown by rendering present the mystery of the transcendent, which is essentially many-faceted. Because the symbol involves a one-to-many relationship, it resists translation or explanation. The question “What does this symbol stand for?” shows that the questioner takes the symbol for a sign. The symbol not only does not “stand for” anything, it cannot be reduced to signifying one thing only. Second, the symbol does not give objective information; it initiates one into an experience that is open-ended…A symbol cannot be explained because it is not simply an appeal to the intellect but a locus of experience.”9

I believe Jesus’ temple cleansing and statement “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days” (2:19) are symbols of deconstruction. I believe we can and should approach “deconstruction” itself as a symbol, not a sign. If deconstruction is a symbol, that means it is a tangible image of an immaterial reality, something to be experienced and not merely understood.

What if “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it up in three days” is not only a once-for-all action of the Son but also a recurring action of the Spirit throughout history? And what if “deconstruction” is a succinct symbolic doorway into taking part in that action?

To return to a more everyday example, what if you looked at your neighbor’s face as a symbol? And what would be different about your communication and relationship if you related symbolically, along the lines of Schneiders’ quote above re: symbol as a “locus of experience” that “cannot be reduced to signifying one thing only”?

2 Corinthians 4:6

Augustine of Hippo referred to the Lord’s Prayer as a “directory of desire” because each petition seeks satisfaction for God-given desires.2 Perhaps if he were living today Augustine would use the analogy of a food menu, a written directory of spiritual delights. Menus whet our appetite, helping us visualize what we desire. And desire is the missing ingredient in lifeless prayer.

Augustine also said, “If you desire always, you are praying always. When does prayer nod off to sleep? When desire grows cold.” Because desire can grow cold, we need help staying alert to our deep hunger and thirst for God. The Lord’s Prayer helps us like a dinner menu by reminding us of what is truly desirable. Here is what the Lord’s Prayer, the Directory of Desire, would look like as a dinner menu for our hungry souls:

Being God’s children

Living for God’s glory

Receiving God’s rule

Willing God’s will

Trusting in God’s provision

Welcoming and extending God’s forgiveness

Relying on God’s protection

Seeking God’s deliverance

Jesus’ instruction to “pray then like this” helps us to labor in prayer for that which satisfies. If we “listen diligently to [him],” we will surely “eat what is good and delight [ourselves] in rich food” (Isaiah 55:2).

Quote from Augustine

Question

How might viewing prayer as desire affect how you pray? When someone asks about how your prayer life is going, what if you can simply answer by saying, “It is good, I’m so hungry for ________.”

I love used bookstores. Not because of the savings, but because of the books. What I really love is finding books I’ve never heard of. With today’s oversaturated market, there are hundreds and thousands of books sitting on second-hand shelves that the algorithm and social media will never tell me about. So I go, and I browse, looking at each title one by one, head tilted for hours as I search for hidden treasure. My criteria for buying used books is not “is this cheaper than Amazon?”, nor “will I actually read this?” My criteria is, rather, twofold:

A) Does this look interesting? And,

B) Will I ever come across this book online?

If the answer to A is “yes,” and the answer to B is “no,” then chances are I will buy the book (if the price is right; money does matter, and some used books are strangely expensive.1) I don’t always read these books. It’s more like building a library. Often enough, weeks and months go by until I remember a used book and pull it of the shelf because I’m studying or writing on a subject for which it’s relevant. But some of these purchases get neglected for a long time. Like this one.

The first random review in this post is about The Mystery of Continuity: Time and History, Memory and Eternity in the Thought of Saint Augustine by Jaroslav Pelikan. I’m sure 90% of you just decided to close this email or click to another post. But wait just a minute! Despite its boring title, this is a fascinating book. Whatever your denomination or theological tradition, if you are a Christian, you are influenced by Augustine of Hippo. Even if that’s merely because your tradition disagrees with Augustine. Pelikan, an outstanding church historian who taught at Yale for over 30 years, writes,

“There has, quite literally, been no century of the sixteen centuries since the conversion of Augustine in which he has not been a major intellectual, spiritual, and cultural force. For more than a millennium and a half, continuity with the thought of Augustine has been one of the most persistent themes of Western intellectual history. Thus, although Alfred North Whitehead suggested in his Gifford Lectures that the history of Western thought could be read as a ‘series of footnotes to Plato,’ he could as well have said ‘a series of footnotes to Augustine’” (140).

I have my fair share of disagreements with Augustine2, but I have also been deeply moved and edified by his writings. If you’re interested in an overview of Augustine’s most important contributions to Christian thought and Western civilization, this book will meet that need.

Brief Summary

The Mystery of Continuity is a combination of two sets of lectures Pelikan delivered at the University of Virginia in 1984 and Seabury-Western Theological Seminary in 1986. In the first half, Pelikan engages with Augustine’s most influential works: Confessions, City of God, and De Trinitate (On the Trinity; I don’t know why that retains it’s Latin title while the other titles are in English). The second half deals with Augustine’s writings on nature and grace, on the church, and the sacraments. Pelikan artfully traces a thread through of Augustine’s thought that runs through all of those subjects: continuity and discontinuity between God, the human self, history, redemption, the church, and the sacraments.

Some Random Gems

Part of my reason for starting with this book is that Augustine’s work has many connections to the two sections of this newsletter, Theology & Therapy and Thesis 96. Here are some random, relevant gems.

• One of Augustine’s most famous ideas is “faith seeking understanding.” Quoting De Trinitate, Pelikan writes,

  “This meant that ‘faith seeks, understanding finds,’ but also that ‘we ought to believe before we understand.’

  Here is the gem that really caught my eye:

  “The method, then, was to begin and to end with faith, but in between to seek for understanding” (56).

  If you’ve read Iain McGilchrist, or are familiar with some of my adaptations of McGilchrist’s work3, this “method” should sound familiar: right, left, right. In healthy brain functioning, the right hemisphere openly receives new information (whether sensory input, texts, experience, etc.); the left hemisphere analyzes and reasons with that information to understand; and then that information is sent back to the right hemisphere for lived, relational application. RLR for short. Or, FUF: faith, understanding, faith.

• The chapters on the church contain many gems for me, but more challenging than encouraging. I wonder if you’ve heard of the Donatist controversy of the 4th and 5th centuries? If not, the debate will surely sound familiar. The Donatists, named after Donatus Magus, believed that the Catholic church had failed to maintain its holiness during seasons of Roman persecution. The details of that criticism would take us too far afield right now. Pelikan gives Augustine’s nutshell of the conflict:

  “the question between us [Catholics and Donatists] is, ‘Where is the church?’”

  This is a question that gets raised time and time again throughout the past 2,000 years. The Protestant reformation is just one notable instance. And that is one of the main questions among Christians today, is it not? Where is the church of Jesus? How do we know? Who gets to ask and answer that question? One answer Augustine gives is inspired by John’s Gospel, and so obviously that interests me. And it’s a challenging answer:

  “That a man should be a true priest, it is requisite that he should be clothed not with the sacrament alone, but with righteousness, as it is written, “Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness.” But if a man be a priest by virtue of the sacrament alone, as was the high priest Caiphas, the persecutor of the one most true Priest, then even though he himself be not truthful, yet what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his own but what is God’s; as it is said of Caiphas himself, ‘He did not say this of his own accord, but being high priest that year he prophesied.’” (109).

  Could we, and should we, use that line for someone like Mark Driscoll or Ravi Zacharias or Bill Hybils—if “even though he himself be not truthful, yet what he gives is true, if he gives not what is his own but what is God’s”?

Here is one final quote, which shows that this issue of Donatism is incredibly relevant4:

“Until the end of history, then, the pilgrim church would be a mixed body of good and evil, a threshing floor with both wheat and chaff, a flock in which the sacraments were often administered by wolves to wolves. While insisting that church discipline must be practiced and was being practiced within the Catholic Church, Augustine acknowledged that ‘everywhere, on both sides,’ there was a ‘multitude’ of cases of clergy who had fallen into sin, so that ‘the churches are few and far between, whether in cities or in country districts, which do not contain men detected in crimes, and degraded from the ministry.’…[T]he Catholic theory of continuity took account of the reality that the sacraments were often administered by evil men; for if a minister was a good man, he was a partner in the working of the gospel, but if he was an evil man, he did not cease to be a dispenser of the gospel. Thus the church was indeed a congregation of saints, but one in which, ‘by the prayers of the saints who are spiritual within the church," the sacraments also of evil ministers were valid.’ (119, emphasis added)

Question

Was this post interesting to you? Would you be interested in more short reviews from random books? For example, I found a biography last night of Jacobus Arminius for the right price. As a Presbyterian who didn’t learn much unbiased history about the person of John Calvin until after Bible college and seminary, I’m sure very few people know much of anything about Arminius (aside from the theological tradition of Arminianism.)

1

Eg, this book I considered last night while at Half-Price Books on a date with my wife for our eighteenth wedding anniversary. $25 is too much for a book I will probably use too little, but it is 50% cheaper than Amazon, so I really was tempted.