In 1994, Jonathan Shay wrote a ground-breaking book on war and PTSD, Achilles in Vietnam. Those who have read Timothy Patitsas’ The Ethics of Beauty will be familiar with some of his observations. Shay worked directly with veterans who were struggling with the emotional consequences of their war experience and the process of their healing. PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) is not restricted to those who have endured the trauma of combat. Indeed, Shay’s work pointed to a perhaps more subtle and devastating aspect of the problem – one that extends (and explains) a wider experience that is all-too-common.
It appears that human beings are not hard-wired for war. Despite various attempts to describe us as a violent species, as given to violence and in need of control, in point-of-fact, killing brings visceral reactions that mark the soul and leave a tell-tale damage that manifests in any number of ways. Shay’s work pointed to a fascinating aspect of this damaging experience: moral trauma. And it is children that I will use as a lens to think about this.
There is an inherent moral sense within a child. If you have two children, then you will likely be very familiar with the word “fair,” as in, “It’s not fair.” It often takes very little moral violation to invoke that cry from the lips of a child. However, there are deeper, yet more fundamental notions of what is moral. One of these is: “it’s not right.”
A famous scene in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment portrays a crowd beating a horse to death. The scene stretches on for five pages. Interestingly, it is based on something that Dostoevsky himself witnessed as a child. No matter how you approach it, to beat a horse to death is not right. A child knows as much.
I had a neighbor when I was a young child who (like my father) was a veteran of World War II. He was in the infantry and part of the Italian Campaign that saw a lot of house-to-house fighting as the Allies drove the Germans up the spine of Italy. At some point, he was in a small town and turned the corner with his rifle at the ready. He came face-to-face a young German, who was equally at the ready. Both young men hesitated. Then, my neighbor fired. As he recalled, had he not fired first, his opponent surely would have. His reaction saved his life. However, every night, he awoke in a cold sweat with the same dream: he saw the face and fired again. Today, we would say that he had PTSD. It was not the stress or noise or the fear that haunted him through his many nights. It was the face. He described it as that of a young man who looked like someone he knew. The haunting reality, never truly subject to later reasoning, is that it’s not right to kill a person.
Over the course of a lifetime, adults (who remain children on levels they may not acknowledge) encounter many moments of de-moralization – times when we are thrust into the middle of things that are not right. Circumstances often drag us into the midst of such actions and make us partakers of their moral failure. Trauma (PTSD or otherwise) is a common result.
Christ draws attention to children any number of times in the Gospel. They are given as examples: “For to such belongs the Kingdom of God” (Lk 18:16). We are warned not to make them stumble (a specific reference to their “demoralization”). And yet, children stumble over moral provocations all the time – and it continues into our adult lives. The great contradictions that things are not right always abound.
In the Gospel, all of this reaches a crescendo in the arrest, trial, and execution of Christ. This is the Great Thing that is not right, but it is also the Great Thing that enters into everything that is not right. Every moral outrage is there on the Cross – all of them. There, we are crucified with Christ, but the world is crucified there as well:
“But God forbid that I should boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world.” (Gal. 6:14)
St. Paul described the Cross as “foolishness” to the Greeks and a “stumbling block” to the Jews. It seems to have satisfied neither group nor their understanding of the world. I suspect that it remains both foolishness and a stumbling block for many today. It is not the answer the world is looking for. Modernity wants utopia – a world without suffering, and would likely condemn God for having allowed it in the first place.
There is a mystery in suffering – by which I mean to say that there is more to it than meets the eye. This is evident in the crucifixion of Christ. It is evident in how the tradition speaks of it. The story in Genesis, all that we call the “Fall” points to an understanding that there is something within suffering that begs for an explanation. The book of Job is perhaps the most complete example in the Old Testament that explores the topic – though it does not exhaust it or complete an explanation.
In the Gospels, there is a different approach. There is no attempt to explain (even as our imagination thinks that explaining solves things). In the Gospel, we are presented with a different central point: the loss of communion with God. In the Genesis story, that loss of communion is the beginning of suffering. In the Gospels, the restoration of communion does not end suffering – it transforms it. The crucifixion gathers all suffering into one, and in that one, becomes the means of communion with all.
In Christ’s teaching, suffering is not abolished – it is communed. The Bread we eat is a communion in the broken Body of Christ. The Cup we drink is a communion in the shed Blood of Christ. It seems clear that without the Crucifixion, there is no communion. Suffering is never described as a good. However, as communion it is a (the) nexus of love.
It would seem possible to posit a “non-suffering” form of suffering – that is – some manner of unfallen suffering that could have been a point of communion and love. But that is mere wonderment. What we do not see in the world as we know it is love that is not suffering-love: “Greater love has no man than to lay down his life for his friends.” Christ names the sick, the hungry, the thirsty, the prisoners, the naked (all sufferers) as the points where He is present and uniquely to be communed: “if you have done it unto the least of these you have done it unto Me.”
I return to the children. They live in a fallen world, one in which they will invariably suffer. It is their de-moralization that becomes most tragic – that is – that they should suffer alone, without communion, without the love that transforms and transfigures. Christ bids us let the children come to Him, which requires that we embrace them within our co-crucifixion with Christ. We hear a foreshadowing of this communion of love in Christ’s words from the Cross:
“Woman, behold your son”….and “Behold your mother.”
It is in such suffering arms that all the children will find their souls comforted and the demoralization of sin healed.
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