The two prophets, I am going to focus on today are Isaiah and Jeremiah. The books of Isaiah and Jeremiah were written approximately 100 years apart from one another. Isaiah was redacted around the time that the Assyrians lost against Judah and Jeremiah was written during and after the destruction of the Temple by the Babylonians. You may be thinking: Well this is fine Emily, but I don't care about the academic stuff. How is this relevant to me? Hold your horses. We will get there. There are a number of elements of trauma narrative in both of these texts, and we can grab onto these texts today to help us to heal from the collective trauma that many of us are still feeling the long term effects of (The COVID Pandemic).
The Trauma Response:
I could pullout hundreds of verses from these prophetic works and explain how each of them fits into a theological framework and into the idea of a trauma response, but for the sake of brevity, I will only provide a few:
Comfort, comfort my people, says your God. Speak tenderly to Jerusalem, and cry to her that her warfare1is ended, that her iniquity is pardoned, that she has received from the LORD’s hand double for all her sins. Isaiah 40:1-2 (ESV)
In times of fear and trauma, it is our natural instinct (from birth) to seek comfort whether that be from our parents, our chosen families, or a deity. This is the reason that people gravitate towards nostalgia when struggling or attempt to make themselves feel better by eating. Nostalgia, comfort, brings us back to the "before times," when things felt a little less difficult and it was easier to get through the day. Comfort brings us to our "safe" places or times.
Heal me, O LORD, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise. Jeremiah 17:14 (ESV)
Last year, when I was just getting back into lettering, I made a piece for a mentor of mine with this verse in Hebrew on it. It is also the base for this beautiful song that you can hear her sing. Consciously or unconsciously, we have been trying to figure out how to heal ourselves as this pandemic has raged on, as the political climate got more and more polarized.
Trauma healing is long and complicated and overwhelming. But it is also necessary. When our brains are stuck in trauma response mode (or what I colloquially call "trauma brain), we are incapable of using our prefrontal cortexes in the way that we need to to perform complex tasks. Has anyone else noticed that things that used to be easy *ahem dishes* now feel really difficult to do. That is because there is a decrease in complex abilities and executive function during times of trauma. This verse demonstrates a seeking. A seeking for healing, for hope, for someone else top just take the tasks off of our backs for once. But Jeremiah, like many of us, has no-one to reach out to in his immediate vicinity, so he reaches out to God, the one who is supposedly going to carry him and his people through it all.
Relevance to today:
How can these portrayals of trauma responses in ancient text help us today? First of all, for this of us who are religious and/or theists, some of these txts can give us a framework into continue having our beliefs while dealing with pain.
These texts, and the texts that I will provide in following weeks of this series, will hopefully help us to think about what we are going to create in light of what we all have lived through over the past years. In ten years, how are we going to describe this time and how we coped with it to the history books? What art is going to come out of this? Most importantly, how will we choose to tell our stories?
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