Lately I’ve been engrossed in Shelly Rambo’s deeply important book, Spirit and Trauma: A Theology of Remaining. I’ll have more to say about it later on, but for now, I have a few reflections on the many thoughts that this book stirs for me. In brief, Rambo articulates an attempt to think through the problem of suffering through the lens of trauma. What distinguishes trauma from suffering in general (in brief) is that trauma is a suffering that remains after the initial event is long past. Trauma persists with the sufferer in a way the runs through their life inescapably. There is no longer simply a straightforward progression from past suffering into a healed new life. Rather there is an interstitial space that is opened up in trauma, a “middle space” in which death and life are co-mingled and intertwined. For the traumatized, life and death no longer oppose one another in a straightforward way, temporal or otherwise, rather they exist together. Death is now shot through all of life, and life, somehow endures, remains in the midst of death.

It is through thinking this “middle space” that Rambo enters into dialogue with the Johannine discourse of abiding and the Spirit, and the Christian tradition of Holy Saturday, the day between cross and resurrection. Through all of this Rambo argues that we must displace the figure of Jesus and of a vision of redemption that moves in a straightforward way from death to “triumphant new life” and instead learn to theologically think and recognize the suffering that remains, that endures, that stays with us, that leaves us in this middle space, this Holy Saturday between.

I am deeply challenged by Rambo’s reflections, and am still exploring them, but I wonder about her thoroughgoing valorizing and perhaps festishizing of this notion of the “middle space.” In her book it seems that any attempt to think the resurrection or new creation, or any kind of triumph of life over death on the other side of this middle space elides and covers over the reality of the middle space, thereby betraying and suppressing the true reality of traumatic suffering. This is critique I think we need to really reckon with.

However, it seems fundamental that there is, inherent to the reality of occupying the “middle” of remaining in the abyss of trauma, of the unresolved and unresolveable, an attending  yearning, a hoping that cries out, not for survival, or persistence, but for radical newness. Inhabiting the nullpoint, the zone of death, the Holy Saturday moment cannot create a stable “middle” but rather names movement-in-remaining-together, an abiding that looks beyond itself, a remaining that remains only as it yearns. To remain without yearning for the genuinely new, without really and truly yearning—not in a metaphysical, but in a profoundly historical, existential, and fundamentally personal sense—is to be ossified, immobilized, left merely to spin for ourselves spiritual forms of propaganda that might satiate our despair. Rambo speaks of a vision of love as remaining in this middle space as “survival.” Yet I am left wondering if this casting of abiding love as mere survival can ever be good news to those who truly live with unending suffering and trauma. Is survival enough?

I would hope that to yearn for the genuinely and radically new is not to deny or elide the traumatic and enduring reality of the depths, but rather to dare to cry out for every depth to be lifted up, and likewise for every high place to be made level. Indeed, can we not only inhabit the depths, the day of silence, the “middle” in the mode of yearning? Is it not that yearning that alone establishes this space as something that can be meaningfully called a “middle”? Can we really have a middle space without something that comes after it to cast it as truly a middle and not simply the inderminate end that eats us and exhausts us?

What if the very naming of these depths as a “middle” speaks of the ultimate act faith, an act of utterly audacious hope? It dares to name what, by all appearances is an irrevocable and omnivorous end as something else, as a space into which the new may irrupt in as yet unimagined forms. To speak of remaining in the middle, in the depths is to speak of a very odd kind of remaining indeed. It is to speak of a remaining that can never be satisfied with mere perdurance, mere survival. It is to speak of a remaining that remains precisely as a mode of lived hope that can only appear in this world of life-in-death as utter foolishness. And yet might it be perhaps that only such foolishness that can truly, patiently, for the long haul, remain?

To remain, to abide in this mode, this mode of apocalyptic yearning, is to remain unsettled, to remain ever ready for action and for new calls to action, risk, and yes, even to open ourselves to further suffering. It is to continue to hope even when one does not know how to draw breath for the next moment, when one cannot “bear the thought of enduring another day” (Craig Keen’s phrase). It is to know an unshakeable love, only known as such because, in being utterly bereft, so utterly broken, so utterly hapless before the burdens of the this life, we find ourselves unable to turn away from those we find ourselves remaining alongside. To remain in yearning is to somehow find oneself acting in faith, somehow believing for inarticulable reasons (with sighs too deep for words) that the suffering of these dark days, weeks, and years is somehow not the harbingers of an end, or of a never-ending middle, but rather the last futile struggles of a defeated death, somehow promised to be transformed into life.

Remaining, abiding, the vitally important theme of Rambo’s work, I would suggest names not a mode of resignation to an eternal middle, not a struggle for survival in a Holy Saturday that never gives way to Easter, but rather the evernew gift of finding oneself actually being resurrected in the midst of death. We remain, not because there is a way to make it through, not because we can endure by survival (Rambo’s claim), but because, precisely having no ability, no potentiality, no hope of ever making it out, of ever surviving, we yearn for the genuinely new. And we yearn with a yearning that somehow, again, inarticulably, is met. This meeting, though eludes our grasp and denies us any stable possession of it. It comes to us as life, as promise, as hope, as transfiguration, and yet, in the end all we can say for sure is that it comes to us. This, this grace, meets us. And it is this meeting, this inability to deny that our yearning has been met with something, with something beyond all that we could ever ask or think, it is this stumbling block, this foolishness, that impels us on, that calls us to remain, to abide in the shadow of death, and somehow, idiotically, to hope and work for new life.

This is the vision of remaining that I can wholeheartedly affirm, and Rambo’s reflections are helping me to search this out afresh, even where I think, in the end I part company with her in crucial ways. But more to come on that later.