God for an Old Man. Thomas M. Dicken
loss knows herself as powerless to stop it and yet guilty for her perceived failure. (2) As her hope dies, she also becomes a self without a future. (3) She is a self, whose borders are as fluid as the blood she cannot stanch, a self undone. (4) And in the space of this undoing, she is the antimaterial self who does not give life; she takes it away.”3
Daunting as some philosophical categories might be, Jones uses them to yield insight into the real nature of lived experience. The disruption of trauma is a rupturing or shattering of these categories.
Grace in these traumatic circumstances moves slowly, healing very gradually. Healing often happens, if it happens, in a group of other traumatized people, listened to and guided by a sensitive leader. Perhaps none of us is ever healed completely. I believe, however, that having a sense of God’s presence is not a merely spiritual or ethereal experience. It is something that offers us a different take on or a different way of seeing our very being, in all its substantial, causal, temporal and spatial structures. Though we do not need to use technical language, we need to be aware of the intrinsic change in how we experience ourselves in the presence of God.
Stories such as those told by Jones suggest that we need to be very careful in our language about God. The penumbra around the word “presence” needs to be monitored carefully in our language. Though language about God often thoughtlessly presupposes a male God, Jones points out that, at such times, lifting up prayer to “ ‘Mother God’ seemed a cruel joke.”4 We need to do caring, careful searches for the best ways to express our deepest experiences.
To explore trauma as a realm that may be entered by grace, we need to be aware of the very physical or embodied aspects of both trauma and grace. Trauma clinicians, Jones reminds us, speak of “the visceral traces left behind by traumatic events, traces like quick-startle responses, headaches, exhaustion, muscle aches, distractibility, and depression—all of which sporadically haunted my own interior world. If the aftermath of violence was this visceral, I reasoned, it made sense that grace capable of touching it should be equally physical.”5
Most religions do suggest muscular, embodied ways of being in the presence of God: kneeling, prostrating oneself, standing, bowing, singing, raising one’s arms. To be in God’s presence is not merely a “high-end” experience. There are even stories about how, in the presence of God, we may be ordered to take off the shoes from our feet (Exodus 3:5). Insight into God is an embodied, visceral experience, not merely an intellectual hunch.
1. Jones, Trauma and Grace, 137.
2. Ibid., 138.
3. Ibid., 139.
4. Ibid., 127.
5. Ibid., 158.
3 THE SUMMER OF ’45
I still remember the summer of 1945. I was in love with Anna Laurie, and her husband, Joe, was my best friend. I think all three of us had a pretty good idea of how I felt, but no one seemed to have a problem with it.
There are snapshots from those summer days that are sharp and clear in my mind, just as there are many details that I probably didn’t bother to get straight in the first place. And there are emotions I can still evoke simply by remembering.
Most summers, I would visit my grandparents for a few days on their farm just outside Glasgow, Kentucky. Sometimes it might be a week or so. This particular summer must have been one of my longer visits, maybe two or three weeks, but I wasn’t noticing such details. As far as I was concerned, a world war might be drawing to a close without impinging on my nine-year-old life.
Joe and Anna Laurie lived in a shack on my grandfather’s farm with their three or four children. I never got all the children straight, since they were all too young for me to play with. Joe worked for my grandfather, though their arrangement was also one of those things that didn’t interest me. Looking back, I imagine that both Joe and Anna Laurie must have been in their mid-twenties. I never thought to ask them how old they were, though their first question to me each summer was to ask how old I had gotten to be, then beaming as if my age was the most extraordinary thing either of them had ever heard.
Sometimes I would go along with my grandfather to do “chores,” which was the name for all the work that went on around the farm. When I returned each summer to Louisville, my mother would not let me refer to anything I did around the house as a chore, telling me it wasn’t that hard to do, so I have always associated the word with farm work. I preferred doing chores with Joe, however, who was more fun than my grandfather. He treated me as an equal, telling me what “we” were going to have to do next and sometimes asking my opinion about things. I was always thrilled when I got the answer right. Joe would say “That’s right,” as if that was as extraordinary a fact as my age.
Most of Anna Laurie’s work kept her confined to the house with the children, though she let me come and visit and talk with her. I marveled that so many people lived in the small house, though I never thought about why that might be. When Joe came home to take a nap or do work around the house, she would go out on the farm to do chores. I joined her whenever we went to pick damson plums from the orchard. We would take several buckets with us and my grandfather would pay us a quarter for each bucket we filled. Anna Laurie made me be careful as I climbed up into a plum tree, holding my bucket for me till I got up. She climbed up after me and found a secure branch opposite me to nestle into. We would start picking, with Anna Laurie picking four or five times faster than I did. I would look around for a plum, then pick it. Anna Laurie would have one hand moving towards a cluster of plums while the other hand was emptying three or four plums into the bucket. Occasionally, she would drop three of four plums in my bucket and give me a big smile.
Her smile is one of my mental snapshots. She had a wide mouth and her teeth glistened white. She had very pronounced cheekbones which seemed to stand out even more when she smiled. To this day, I notice the cheekbones of women. She wore a bright bandanna around her black hair. I suppose that today I would describe her eyes as sultry, though that certainly was not a word that came to my mind in 1945. I simply noticed that her eyes were different from any I had ever seen. She wore ragged jeans and a flowered blouse. Back then, even my grandmother made “sun dresses,” as she called them, out of the feed bags, which had bright designs for that very purpose.
Picking damson plums with Anna Laurie was something I had done for several years, but this was the summer I fell in love with her. I noticed myself noticing her in a different way. When she leaned over me to reach a cluster of plums, I inhaled deeply, loving the human smells of skin and sweat and something else, something not perfume but better than that, something clean and deserving of a deep breath.
This was the summer that it hit me in a decisive way that women were more beautiful than men. It was a couple more years before I noticed that girls were more beautiful than boys, but I knew that Anna Laurie was something unlike and better than anything that was male. Anna Laurie had a way of reaching forward for a bunch of plums and her blouse would loosen at the top and there would be the very top beginning of a swelling of her breasts. Her skin was the color of the chocolate milk I still preferred to white milk. It was not so much sexual desire that I experienced, but more of a dizziness, an enchantment with that very moment. To this day, if I notice damson plum jam on a grocery shelf, I can experience the identical dizziness, a desire to lose myself in the moment. Sometimes Anna Laurie would notice me looking. She would reach up and adjust the top of her blouse, all the while giving me the biggest, most wonderful smile.
One day we returned to their house and Joe asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him