Places of Hurt: The Spirit and Therapeutic Healing

“The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, “Mortal, can these bones live?” I answered, “O Lord God, you know.” Then he said to me, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” (Ezekiel 37: 1-5).

The reading of the books of the Prophets from the Old Testament is always an intriguing and fascinating endeavor, as well as sometimes troubling and complicated. At times, it seems as if they are speaking to us in a code that is difficult for us to understand. Well, we are not far from the truth, if that is what we believe. As I always tell the churches that I’ve been appointed, the key to understanding the whole Old Testament is being able to have conscience of one historical event in the history of Israel: the invasion and destruction of Jerusalem by Babylon on 586 BCE. This massively destructive event had aftershocks that are felt throughout the whole Old Testament. It just so happens that the books of the prophets, especially the major prophets, were right at the epicenter of this event. The story that it tells is coded in a different language: the language of trauma.

According to Judith Herman,

“Psychological trauma is an affiliation of the powerless. At the moment of trauma, the victim is rendered helpless by overwhelming force. When the force is that of nature, we speak of disasters. When the force is that of other human beings, we speak of atrocities. Traumatic events overwhelm the ordinary systems of care that give people a sense of control, connection, and meaning.”

“Traumatic events are extraordinary, not because they occur rarely, but rather because they overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life. Unlike commonplace misfortunes, traumatic events generally involve threats to life or bodily integrity, or a close personal encounter with violence and death. They confront human beings with the extremities of helplessness and terror and evoke the responses of catastrophe.” [1]

The horror of the invasion of Jerusalem by the troops of Nebuchadnezzar is spread throughout different books, and sometimes it is explicitly told with many details (read, for example, 2 Kings 25: 1- 21), and other times, as is more often the case, it is alluded through metaphors.

Today’s text is taken from the book of Ezekiel. The book of Ezekiel is famous for its complexity, for the awkward rituals that the prophet does to prove his point, the impressive description of images of fantastical creatures, and the convoluted way in which the narration is told. This is a book that is forged right in the heat of the exile to Babylon. We need to understand that Ezekiel, the prophet, is a survivor of the catastrophe, as well as all the other exiles in Babylon. The book of Ezekiel is trauma literature for traumatized people.

As Kathleen O’Connor discovered on her studies on the book of Jeremiah, the books of these prophets “lifts violent destruction into worlds of poetry and symbol where horrible pain and loss can be seen, taken in, and acknowledged without overwhelming its victims anew.” [2]. Prophetic literature functions as medicine for broken people. It allows them to address the event without specifically mentioning it. It helps them to recover their sense of self and their identity as survivors. As Christopher G. Frichette establishes: “the making of meaning through symbolic representation can help foster recovery from trauma.” [3] The usage of symbol and symbolic representations of places is a way of the prophet help his people to make sense of a reality that goes beyond the possibility of expressing it through words.

Ezekiel 37 finds the prophet being taken by the Spirit to a very specific place: a valley of dry bones. Notice the specificity in the text: he is being put in the middle of a valley; and it was full of bones. The Spirit leads to prophet through the scene, “He led me all around them”. Through the action of visiting this metaphorical place, the Spirit is interested in visiting the place of trauma, to bring to the surface the event that is trying to hide away in the subconscious of his people. If the trauma is not brought to the surface, it will continue creating destruction deep within the soul and the spirit of the survivors. Going to the valley of bones, and the prophet being able to affirm that the bones “were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry” is an action of naming the trauma and its consequences: the victims are many, and the effects of it has dried the survivors as people of God and as individuals. They have become shells of the people that they were. The dryness of the bones is a metaphor that points to the disconnection of who they were before the catastrophe and who they have become after it. That disconnection is within the self, within them as a people, and within them and God. They are struggling with their new reality as survivors, they don’t know what they are anymore (Are we Israel? Are we slaves? Prisoners of war?), which is a question of identity, and finally, they are not sure what their relationship with God is, who was depicted early in the book of Ezekiel as abandoning the Temple of Jerusalem.

The question asked by the Spirit is saturated with meaning. “Will these bones live?”, asks the Spirit, bringing to the surface the obvious: in the mind of the survivors there is no option for life, they are dry bones, and there is nothing left to do about it. The prophet, however, is confronted with possibilities. The question itself brings the possibility of life. In other words, the question has in it the seed of hope and overcoming of the catastrophe. He is unable, however, to be able to give an answer to that question: “O Lord God, you know.”. Remember, he, as a survivor, is also as traumatized as the people he is sent to prophesize.

Already we are seeing how this narrative is working as therapeutic medicine, it is leading the people to see what they were not willing to look, in a way that is not overwhelming, and is leading them to imagine a world after trauma. The inability of the prophet to imagine life after trauma speaks to the inability of trauma survivors to transcend the trauma they have gone through. And yet, we see that the action of the Spirit is careful, as approaching the center of the catastrophe in circles, not directly, but with the determined intention of bringing healing and the possibility of life.

The Spirit affirms, then, “Prophesy to these bones and say to them: O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live.” The prophet is asked to speak about a different reality, a reality that highly likely he is not even convinced that might occur. The Spirit invites the prophet to change his language, from insisting in the dryness of the bones, to proclaim the possibility of renewal and life. Having a different word to describe the catastrophe brings new meaning to it and helps the people to reconsider their place in the world, and their place in relation with God. The intervention of the Spirit is an action of creative therapy, in which the words can create a new reality, one in which there is healing and the possibility of a future full of life, beyond the traumatic catastrophe.

Notice, importantly, that the Spirit never denies the awful tragedy of the destruction of Jerusalem. Instead, by acknowledging it, it is providing tools to the survivors to overcome it and help them to be the creators of their own future. And finally, the action of the Spirit in this text, represents a God who is willing to go with us to visit our ugly places, and bring healing and renewal through words of hope and love.

This text, as literature for traumatized people, gives us a route to deal with survivors of trauma. We need to walk with them, in solidarity with their pain and amid their confusion. We should help to bring new words, new healing experiences that will bring new possibilities of life for them. The possibility that there is a future beyond the hurt of trauma, a future in which we can still breathe and live through the work of the Spirit in us.

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[1] Herman, J. L. (1992). Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence: From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror. New York: Basic Books, p. 33.

[2] O’Connor, K. (2012). Jeremiah: Pain and Promise. Minneapolis, Fortress Press.

[3] Frichette, C.G. (2015). “The Old Testament as Controlled Substance: How Insights from Trauma Studies Reveal Healing Capacities in Potentially Harmful Texts”. In Interpretation: A Journal of Bible and Theology, vol. 69(1), 20. Theology, vol. 69(1), 20.