My View from the Pew
A personal reflection on Trauma in the Pews
There is always a story behind the story. In this case, there is a story behind the book title chosen for Trauma in the Pews: The Impact on Faith and Spiritual Practices. Last fall, I realized that the work I was doing in promoting and speaking about the book was causing additional layers of trauma to surface. I stepped back from pursuing additional engagements and focused on healing once again.
I explain some of what I found in a blog on my website. But that is only part of the story. For now, the ending of that part of the story was when I found my traumatized nineteen-year-old self sitting all alone on a church pew listening to a sermon.
It has been wrenching to sit with this traumatized younger me. I am proud of the life I managed to live. My determination to live my life—and enjoy laughter and friendships—is remarkable. It required me to crawl from the darkness that descended in my sleep and convince myself that living could be a good thing. There were adventures to be had, people to love, ideas to pursue, and laughter to enjoy. All my friends knew this me.
It has taken me ten years of therapy to be able to sit with this teenage me—fully sit with her—and realize that in more modern language, I deconstructed while sitting on that pew. Why? Because that teenager could no longer believe that faith, salvation, or doctrine made any difference in the lives of her abusers.
Yet, I returned to college, finished my ministry degree, and spent my life serving in the church and ministry preparation colleges. I did this for two reasons:
I always felt God walked with me and provided comfort even when those who professed faith abused me.
I had never known anything but the church world. I could survive there, and it provided a place to belong and care for others.
What I needed to understand as I sat on that pew was that my walk with God could never look the same as it did for those who did not have my trauma history—specifically the Religious Trauma. I needed to be comfortable living in the tension between those things I could not do and those spiritual practices I was told I should do.
Looking back over my life, it is clear that God met me in that space between “I can’t” and “I should.” That is where my faith quietly survived. I needed someone to give me permission to be comfortable there, but that never happened. Fifty years later, I am taking the hand of my younger self and we are going to get off of that pew and forge a spiritual path that is possible for both of us. I fully understand the can’ts and am willing to glean what is possible from those things that were handed to me as shoulds.
The space where God most often met me was in nature. It is where I feel the safest. It is not by chance that I now find myself living in a cottage surrounded by nature. Nature plays a very important part in my path toward post-traumatic spiritual growth.
Last weekend our good friends who own this beautiful cottage taught us how to prune apple trees. I was very hesitant at first. “Really? You remove that much?” As they explained why pruning to that degree and in specific ways was necessary for the tree to be healthy and produce fruit, it began to make sense.
The apple tree has become a metaphor for my journey. For ten years, I have worked to prune away all the wildly overgrown false narratives about myself, damaging teachings, and maladaptive coping strategies developed during the first sixty years of my life. I was surviving, not thriving. I kept standing back and asking my therapist, “Is that enough?” She would say that I was the only one who could decide that and again and again, I had to say, “No, it isn’t.”
When I finished pruning the apple tree and stepped back, I knew I was finished. Why? Because I finally understood what the tree needed. I feel the same way about my struggles to unravel my story. Now, I finally understand that I needed to prune away all that kept from from seeing my younger self sitting on that pew. We are now sitting together waiting patiently for the apple tree to begin forming new growth. And when I bite into the first apple from the tree, it will be a celebration.
Addendum: The tree recovered with much new growth—but not apples. Maybe it was the timing or the depth of the pruning, but I never saw an apple I could pick and enjoy. It reminds me of how unpredictable healing is. Sometimes when you do the deep work, it takes a bit to recover. Patience in all things! Being patient gets both easier and more difficult with age!
“Patience is necessary, and one cannot reap immediately where one has sown.”
—Soren Kierkegaard—