Offering: April 20, 2025
Divine abandonment
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Last week I wrote about the hunter Actaeon, who was turned into a stag by the bathing goddess Diana and then torn to bits by his dogs1. I stayed disturbed by the story all week, googling “what happened to Actaeon after he died,” finding nothing. Feeling into his fractured fate, I thought again about Toni Morrison’s response to the question of surviving trauma, which was that “sometimes you don’t survive whole, you just survive in part.”
Given all that and the timing of Easter this weekend, I’ve been revisiting one of my favorite books, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining by theologian Shelly Rambo. In it, Rambo deconstructs the story of Jesus’ crucifixion and resurrection. Dwelling in the middle terrain of the story—Holy Saturday—Rambo attends to the space between Jesus’ death and rebirth in a context of trauma.
Rambo’s work is important to me for so many reasons. It was the first real theology book I read and theologian Catherine Keller, who has since hugely influenced my thinking, wrote the foreword. As a person who thinks a lot about stories, Spirit and Trauma helped me better understand how narratives of death and rebirth or trauma and recovery that don’t attend to the harrowing space in between may contribute to feelings of alienation in that often disorientating middle ground. Lastly, Spirit and Trauma carves out a space for all those who are haunted, whose pasts seep into the present and refuse to stay neatly tucked in. As Rambo writes:
“There is a familiar saying: Time heals all wounds. Trauma represents an antithesis to this statement. In fact, in trauma, distortions in time constitute the wound. The problem of temporality is at the root of the phenomenon of trauma. Trauma is not a one-time event. Instead, trauma speaks to an event in its excess.”
Growing up casually Catholic, I never gave much thought to the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter, but since reading Rambo’s book for the first time in 2021, I try to spend some time every year dwelling. If you’ve read Offerings for a while, you know that I occasionally dip into Christian theology. I increasingly try to do so with care and humility—as I’m neither a theologian, nor a practicing Christian—as well as consideration for the vast amount of religious trauma there is among us. All of this is to say that if you’d prefer not to read or think about Jesus today, you may wish to skip today’s Offering.
In her chapter on “Witnessing Holy Saturday,” Rambo turns to the writings of theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar and physician and mystic Adrienne von Speyr. Balthasar’s writings about Holy Saturday were hugely informed by von Speyr’s reports of first-hand somatic experiences of crucifixion, death, and resurrection on Easter weekend, which she experienced annually for twenty-five years.
On the Saturday after Friday’s crucifixion, Rambo notes that von Speyr would experience “inexplicable suffering” that involved feelings of “extreme loneliness, forsakenness, and abandonment…cut off from all forms of relationship.” Balthasar believed that von Speyr’s visions of what Jesus went through that day offered “whole maps of suffering” of what occurred between death and life, when “one endures what it is to be abandoned.”
One of the things that really interests me about this is that for von Speyr’s testimonies to be useful, they had to be believed. It reminds me of Marianne Brooker’s gorgeous book Intervals, which also deals with middle spaces, in which she writes that “empathy is the work of our dogged imaginations. We must stretch and stretch, hold as much as we can, try—at the very least—to imagine and promise—all the while—to believe.” Balthasar (who, fun fact, wrote the foreword for the esoteric text Meditations on the Tarot) believed von Speyr’s accounts of what she was going through, and here we are.
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