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The Distillery podcast explores what motivates the work of Christian scholars and why it matters for theology and ministry.
Shari Oosting:
Sandy Hook, Uvalde, the Pulse nightclub. Hurricane Katrina, COVID-19, 9/11. For millions of people in our country, these words are shorthand for unthinkable moments of trauma, and the effects linger. What can be said when a community is shaken to its core? And how can a Sunday morning sermon help a fractured community? In this episode of The Distillery, Kimberly Wagner explores these questions and more as we discuss her new book, Fractured Ground: Preaching in the Wake of Mass Trauma. Wagner is professor of preaching at Princeton Theological Seminary and an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church U.S.A. You are listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Thank you so much for talking with me today, Kim.
Kimberly Wagner:
Hey, it's so good to be with you. Thanks for having me!
Shari Oosting:
I have been enjoying reading your recent book, Fractured Ground, and I will share that rarely do I weep while reading, but there are a couple stories in here that I had to read aloud to my family while I was going through your book. So first, thank you for writing something that is so compelling and timely. Let's start with a story. So, you share a lot of stories in the book, but I think this will help us frame kind of the why behind the book, I hope. So can you talk about—take us back to 1940 and Coventry, England.
Kimberly Wagner:
Yeah, no, it's such a powerful story, and it's actually when I encountered—when I was in Coventry—and got a chance to worship at the Cathedral. But the story starts, of course, November 14th, 1940, when over 500 German planes blitz the city of Coventry, England, and it just destroyed the city, right? Destroyed factories, businesses, hospitals, water lines, homes, and it was a blitz of almost 10 hours—it was one of the worst in the histories of the war, and killed about—in this little town—killed over 500 people, injured over 1200, and just kind of went on all night. And one of the structures that was hit was the big cathedral there, St. Michael's Cathedral. And, of course, it was completely destroyed and it was burning, and there was nothing they could do because there were no functioning water lines, right? The water lines had been destroyed. And those pictures of the cathedral—and it still stands to this day as a shell of the cathedral—and those pictures became kind of a symbol and a rallying cry for countries all over the world, including the United States. There was a sense that this was the representation of the destruction and the horror of the war. But what's fascinating is how the community responded. Reverend Richard Thomas Howard was the provost of the cathedral at the time, and he immediately was really insistent that they would not seek revenge, but that this would become a symbol of honesty, about brokenness, but also of hope for peace into the future and reconciliation. And so, what's fascinating is they get into the cathedral once the fires had kind of subsided, and they went into this shell of a church and there's all these amazing photos of this church with the destruction, everything burned in the middle, and these just shells of—you know, the glass is gone—the glass had melted because of the heat—and they began to kind of pick through the rubble, and different—there's all kinds of stories around it, that a fellow clergymen found three large nails and bound them together to make a cross, which this cross of nails actually remains the symbol of Coventry Cathedral, and as a symbol of kind of reconciliation that is at the heart of this community—the stone mason in charge was standing at the bell tower with a reporter, and they found two steel beams forming a cross and that became another kind of famous photo from it.
Shari Oosting:
Like, there's something haunting about those images.
Kimberly Wagner:
It's very haunting! It's very haunting! And what I find most incredible, though, about this story—well, two things. The first is that less than two months after the bombing and the fire, Reverend Howard actually asked the stone mason, Jock Forbes, to build a new altar in front of where the old altar had stood. And he built it out of broken pieces of stone, and even pieces of tombstones, slate from tombstones, and built this altar so that they could worship in this shell of a cathedral. And then he also found—Forbes found these two charred beams that were rescued from the ruins—and he constructed this 12-foot tall cross. And that cross, you actually can still see it at Coventry, they now have put up a new one and stored the old ones so that you can see that preserved. But the idea is the community just sat there and worshiped around a rubble altar and a charred cross, right? And what was really powerful was that Provost Howard was really clear about the hurt, the pain, the suffering, but he also refused to let it turn into anger and revenge. And he kept preaching kind of the Good News of—that this ruined cathedral was a space in which God's love could still be proclaimed and felt, and this idea that they needed to build a new cathedral. But one of the most fascinating things for me—and this is the other thing I love about this story—is they decided not to reconstruct the old cathedral. They actually built a new cathedral next door, and they're now, to this day, connected by a brick walkway. And this new cathedral is really all about reconciliation and kind of peace, and it's become kind of a centerpiece of that work. And, in fact, I believe it's on Fridays, if you go and visit, you can go to worship in the cathedral on Friday, and then they do communion. But halfway through the service, you walk over into the old cathedral to have communion.
Shari Oosting:
Wow.
Kimberly Wagner:
And it's just this really powerful symbol of new life in the midst of and accompanying death, right? And so for me, in the way I think about trauma, this church is just so powerful as a just even architectural representation of what it means to coexist in this tension, in this in-between space, between life and death and destruction and hope. And when I went to visit it, one of the things that struck me as I left was that—and it feels almost too poetic to be true, but it's very true—is that the cornerstone of the old original shell of the church actually has the scripture from Haggai that says, "The glory of this latter house shall be greater than the former. And in this place, I will give peace."
Shari Oosting:
Wow.
Kimberly Wagner:
And so, it's this just beautiful representation of this juxtaposition between hurt and hope, brokenness and redemption, right? And so for me, that story sits as a kind of symbol for how we as faithful people, and how we as preachers, have to contend and think about this work amid trauma.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. That community experienced something so traumatic together, but the way that then architecture marks that part of their history and the liturgy bends to it—rather than trying to erase it, and just build something new and beautiful on top of it—that strikes me as being so unique. And so of course, that sets the stage for your book—really is about communal trauma and pastoral response. So, trauma is a word that—it's become very commonplace. The trauma of having to do paperwork at the office, or the trauma of family history, or the trauma of a war, like you've mentioned. So, let's just say—frame what you mean when you use the word “trauma” in your book, and maybe what you don't mean.
Kimberly Wagner:
Yeah, absolutely. So, one of my frustrations with this work in these days is that trauma has become such a commonplace word, right? We use it to give kind of emphasis, or to hyperbolically, like, "I ran out of coffee this morning. It was totally traumatic!" And it totally drains that word of its power and of its importance. But even when we use that word precisely and well, it is describing a response to a wide variety of events or situations—everything from mass violence to natural disasters to individual experiences of abuse or neglect, all the way to historical and cultural traumas, including racism and white supremacy or LGBTQIA+ discrimination. And so, at its best, this word still has a kind of broadness to it. But that being said, I think it's important to understand trauma as also separate from the traumatic event.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah.
Kimberly Wagner:
And so for me, this is the other place where I think we get mixed up with this word—is that oftentimes we equate trauma and the traumatic event. And I think it's really important to hold them apart because trauma is actually the subjective experience of an event, right?
Shari Oosting:
Yep.
Kimberly Wagner:
Event or experience. And so, being subjective, it means that we can't pre-prescribe how people are going to respond to a given event, or how communities are going to respond to a given event. And at the same time, we want to not fall into the trap of believing that just because an event has ended, that the trauma has ended.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. So, for an example, an assault would be the traumatic event—
Kimberly Wagner:
Correct.
Shari Oosting:
—and trauma itself is the way that that lives on within the experience of the person who is assaulted. Is that fair?
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely fair. Yeah. And sometimes people and communities can't even begin to grasp the breadth and depth of their trauma until after there is kind of a—at least a subsiding of the event or experience, right? This is why I think a lot of our communities are just now beginning to contend with the trauma of the pandemic.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. You experience some relative safety is when you have time to reflect or make meaning of it.
Kimberly Wagner:
Yeah, exactly. And so, I actually think about trauma as this kind of blow or wounding, I talk about, of the mind, body and spirit-self. And here, I think of that beautiful Hebrew word “nephesh” for all our nerdy Hebrew scholars out there. It's the whole idea of the entire self and the entire person and one's soul and spirit, right? This idea of the whole of who we are. And so, this idea of trauma impacting all kind of parts of who we are, right? It impacts our brain, it impacts our body. One of the famous trauma books out there right now is Bessel van der Kolk’s “The Body Keeps the Score,” right? But I also think that we as people of faith and as clergy need to think about its impact on the mind, the body, and the spirit on our own conception of ourself, our conception of who we are in relation to the holy. And so, trauma is this kind of blow or wounding that happens when an experience or an event exceeds our capacity to make sense of it, right? To assimilate it or integrate it into what we've known before, into the stories we've told about who we are, about who God is, about who the world is. And this new traumatic event can't fit in. We can't find a home for it. And so it becomes trauma, which then, by definition, lingers. And so, trauma to me is deeply disruptive. Not everything that is sad or hard is trauma. Trauma, I talk about in the book, disrupts both time and coherence, right? It disrupts our sense of time and how things fall in order, as well as how our stories and lives and identities hold together. I think there is times that things are really hard and there's suffering and there's challenge, and those are important for us to think about and attend to from the perspective of faith, but that those things aren't necessarily trauma, right? Trauma has a foundationally disorienting impact.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah, that's a great distinction. So, the death of a loved one, of course, causes deep grief, but it may or may not be traumatic in terms of disrupting your sense of what the story of life is or should be. So, you used the word “fracture,” so you can talk a bit more about that, the narrative fracture?
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely! So, this is a term that I coined because I find it to be really helpful in thinking about trauma, and particularly care of folks experiencing trauma. And so, narrative fracture to me is when you have this—I talked about this kind of crisis of time and crisis of coherence, right?—that when they come together, there is this experience of narrative fracture. And I picked this word really carefully because I didn't want to say “narrative obliteration.” It's not “narrative decimation,” right? I want to give credit to the fact that we, as individuals and as communities, have a lot of resiliency. But often what happens in—if this traumatic event or situation can't find a home in our stories, can't find a home in the ways that we describe ourselves and our communities or even God, it begins to kind of crack away at the stories we tell. It begins to kind of break apart because those stories no longer feel helpful or meaningful, or they can’t help us safely navigate the world, right? And so they don't hold together in the same way. The blessing of narrative fracture is that there are raw materials there for eventual rebuilding and reconstruction. However, the very first thing I think that we need to do as people of faith for one another—that we need to do as community leaders, as clergy, as preachers—is to first bless that narrative fracture, right? Because oftentimes, the ways our culture, especially western Christianity, I would argue, implies that if we don't have it all together, that somehow that is a sign of a lack of faithfulness, right?
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. To be a Christian is to have your stuff together.
Kimberly Wagner:
Exactly! Or if you can't buy wholesale into resurrection and you're still a little bit stuck in Good Friday, then you may have some work to do before you can really show up.
Shari Oosting:
But you have to ignore a lot of biblical stories to think that.
Kimberly Wagner:
Oh, you're telling me! Yeah, exactly! This is what makes me kind of frustrated at times, is we have these resources in our faith to hold together, to name brokenness as not beyond the holy, and as actually a part of what it means to be people in this world and to be disciples—that brokenness, that this kind of traumatic reality has always been a part of our faith story and has been a part of Jesus' story. We have a savior who is not some triumphalist, right? We have a savior who goes to a cross and who lays in a tomb. Our hope is always grounded in the shadow of the cross, that we are not a people of erasing pain, but we are people who find God's glory and God's honest hope, authentic hope, genuine hope, genuine redemption in the shadow of the cross, right? And so, our faith has space for this reality. But I think so often, our inclination with narrative fracture is to encounter it and to immediately want to fix it.
Shari Oosting:
You talked too about honestly naming that things have fallen apart—
Kimberly Wagner:
Yes!
Shari Oosting:
—so that's probably part of blessing those pieces is acknowledging that things are in pieces—
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely.
Shari Oosting:
—with some level of candor.
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely. And honesty, about what has been lost, because so often, I think our inclination is just to name, "This is how many people died," or "This is what was destroyed." But also, other things are lost too, right? Like a sense of safety or a sense of security, or trust in our community, or trust in God. And I think naming those things—especially from the pulpit to me—can be incredibly powerful because it allows people's space to acknowledge those broken pieces that even we may be struggling to name.
Shari Oosting:
And that feels like a particular challenge for those who preach because the job is to wrap language around meaning and experience. And so, the pastor has also—in an instance of communal trauma—the pastor has likely also experienced that—if it's a mass shooting in your community or another traumatic communal event. So, can you talk a little bit about the pressure on a pastor—which is very real—to use their words in a moment like that?
Kimberly Wagner:
Oh, absolutely. Yeah, no, thank you for naming that. So, the first thing to say is I think preachers and pastors have to acknowledge that they're in it too, right? That they are not somehow unaffected by this event, by this circumstance, by this experience. And so, they have to attend to their own traumatic loss and grief. And there's a few ways, I think it can be helpful to think about this. The first is to say that trauma does steal language, which is why it's really important, I think, for us as leaders, as preachers, as pastors, to think in advance about this work and to practice this language, to practice what it means to honor brokenness and grief, to do this with the biblical stories, and to practice this language for ourselves and with our community almost in a way that that language then is held in trust for us when we need it. The second thing is—and I've kind of already hinted at it—is that I think we don't have to invent the language, right? We have been gifted this language in our scripture, in our liturgy, that we don't need to feel like it is our job to somehow know exactly what to say in this moment, and that it's okay to say, "I don't know what to say in this moment." I recently heard a gifted preacher do a funeral for a young man who committed suicide, and she opened it by saying, "My degree says I should know what to say in times like these, but I don't know that I have the right words." And it was just a beautiful way to open—I mean, she went on to name the brokenness, proclaim the good news, it was a beautiful sermon—but even just acknowledging that at the start can be really powerful, and then leaning into these biblical stories, the gospel that's held in trust for us, the gospel that can carry it for us when we struggle to carry it. And then the third thing to say, I think, is understanding the role of the preacher, or the pastor, or the minister. And our inclination—and you know this—is to want to jump into action and fix it all. And so for me, one of the images that has been really helpful in thinking about this is, what would it mean to imagine instead of ourselves as the superhero or even the meaning maker, but to be like the midwife? Right? Because the midwife is ushering life through pain. The midwife is fully in it with the birthing parent, yet the midwife can't get on the table and take an hour of contractions for that birthing parent.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah.
Kimberly Wagner:
Right? They can't do the work for them, but they can accompany with them, right? And they can coach and they can breathe together, and they can tell stories together, and they can encounter struggles together. And so that image of midwife has been a really helpful way for me to think about it. The other image—and I offer it a little in the book—is that of the prophet Habakkuk, and this idea of how Habakkuk genuinely stands and cries out with and for his people in his community, and yet decides in the midst of lament, in the midst of just absolutely—there is no kind of toning it down for Habakkuk. Habakkuk is a good lamenter, but he stands—he goes up and he stands on the rampart, on this wall that is on the edge of the community. And I always say from there, it's not like—that's not a point of escape. He can probably actually see the destruction of the city better from there.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah.
Kimberly Wagner:
It's not a place of escape, but instead, it is a place of anticipation—that he is going to still fully have his feet planted in the lament of his community, and yet look and see what God is yet doing and anticipating that God is still going to show up. And so for me, inviting preachers and pastors who think that it is their job to have all the right words or to make meaning out of what might actually be a meaningless situation, that instead their job might be to lean into the words that we've practiced, to lean into the language gifted us, and to recognize that their role is not that of superhero or meaning-maker, but instead of accompanier—right?—of midwife, of Habakkuk, of this kind of prophetic posture that doesn't disregard pain. So, I talk about the snapshot form. The other form I talk about is the frayed edges form. And I use Ellie Wiesel's book “Night” as well as thinking about the original ending of the Gospel of Mark—where the women leave the tomb in fear and amazement, where they said nothing to no one—and think about what does it mean for our sermons to hold space for that uncertainty, to hold space for kind of ambiguity, to not end every little narrative, every little story we tell with a pretty bow, and they lived happily ever after, but instead to be willing to live with frayed edges, which are actually our reality, particularly in the wake of trauma or in the wake of a traumatic event.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. Yeah. That's beautiful. And you shared a story—I believe this was when you were writing about frayed edges—about Reverend William Sloane Coffin, who preached ten days after his own son's death.
Kimberly Wagner:
Yeah.
Shari Oosting:
Can you share that story?
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely. It’s one—I use the sermon a lot. It's still, to me, one of the most stunning sermons that I have read. So Reverend William Sloane Coffin, he was the pastor at Riverside Church, and his son died, was in a car accident where he was living in Boston, and his car drove into the Boston Harbor, and he was killed very young. And William Sloane Coffin decided to preach ten days—preach in his home pulpit at Riverside—ten days after the death of his son. And it is one of the most stunning sermons, and it is a—I think one of the best examples we have of this kind of snapshot form where he's able to really—he starts by kind of naming that death is not of God, right? And then he moves into his own lament, his anger. He moves into thinking about natural and unnatural death. And one of my favorite parts in that sermon is when he says this beautiful line. He says, "I know all the right biblical passages, including blessed are those who mourn, and my faith is no house of cards. These passages are true. I know it. But the point is this, while the words of the Bible are true, grief renders them unreal." And it's this just stunning line where he admits kind of the nature of trauma. And then he says that, and then in his next move, he speaks about the power of community, right? And then he jumps back to the Valley of the Shadow of Death and what it means to—I love his line of—he talks about marching in the world's army of the bereaved, right? It's just some beautiful language. And then he closes this whole thing by just reciting those biblical texts that he wants to be true again, even if he can't believe them yet. And it's just this stunning sermon. And I will tell you one of the greatest gifts of this project for me was I put lines of his sermon in this book, and so I had to get permission, and I had to physically mail his widow and send her—so I sent her the manuscript, the part of the manuscript that had his sermon in it—and I mailed her a permissions form to sign, and a letter, a personal letter that just explained who I was and what I was doing and why I wanted to use her husband's sermon. And she immediately mailed me back. I was shocked! I was sure it was going to take forever. And she mailed me back the permission slip, if you will, with a handwritten card that she talked about how grateful she was that his words are living on, and how that sermon was a comfort to her, not just on Alex's death, but on his. And so just the gift of having her affirm kind of the power of this moment and the hardness of it.
Shari Oosting:
Wow, that is a good word. One more thing this calls to mind when you bring up Reverend Coffin's spouse who found comfort again in the words of this sermon when he died, trauma—because it's a subjective experience—does live on. What encouragement would you give to people who are still trying to find words further down that’s perhaps not the immediate response, but does at least acknowledge the longer-term impacts?
Kimberly Wagner:
Absolutely. It's always going to be there, and so acknowledging it becomes important. And one of the ways we acknowledge it is we may not talk about it every week, but that our theology, our interpretation of biblical text, the way we understand our faith to be at work will always be shaped by it. I want to say that you don't always have to talk about it all the time as the event itself. But from here on out, everything you do, the way you minister, the way you think about suffering, the way you think about anger or hurt, the way you think about resurrection should be shaped by and have in mind the reality that that trauma lingers. I think actually this preaching and the tension is something we should do every Sunday, not just because we need to practice it and have it and trust for when we need it, but because we all need it at some point, right?
And that's part of our trauma aware and trauma sensitive care for people as they continue through that journey. And just being tuned into the fact that these things will come up that bring the urgency of the trauma back. And that isn't a sign of failure or a lack of health or progress or a lack of recovery or resiliency, but that that's just the case. And so, we as pastors have to be, and preachers, have to be attuned to where our congregations are at any given time.
Shari Oosting:
Yeah. Well, thank you for that good word, Kim. It's so great to talk with you, and I'm grateful.
Kimberly Wagner:
Thank you so much for having me and thank you for this rich conversation.
Shari Oosting:
My pleasure. You've been listening to The Distillery at Princeton Theological Seminary. Interviews are conducted by me, Shari Oosting. Our editorial and production staff include Nathanael Hood and Byron Walker. Like what you're hearing? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app, and don't forget to leave us a review. Even better, share an episode with a friend. The Distillery is a production of continuing education at Princeton Theological Seminary. Until next time, thanks for listening.