in a personal way. Those of us in the academic world tend to be shy about being too personal. In this book, I have written in a more personal way than I ever have. I have been influenced by process thought and existential thought. Most importantly, I have been shaped in my thought by my own life.
Part I
1 DISRUPTION
We lived in a shotgun house, with rooms leading directly to one another, with no hallways: living room, bedroom, kitchen, bath. An ell had been built in back, adding a second bedroom. My favorite place was a roofed but unscreened porch behind the house, which one walked down to by two steps from the kitchen. The space served as my mother’s laundry, with an old-fashioned second-hand washer out there. Two rollers on top of the washer allowed a person to squeeze water out of the washed clothes, which were then hung up on a clothesline to dry. A rod stuck out the side of the washer that started the agitator, which swirled the clothes in the washer. The washer was an avocado green, showing its age in chipped paint. The agitator rod was missing the knob that would have provided a handle, leaving only the iron rod itself. There was a flat door on the porch that opened to stairs, leading to the coal cellar. Coal was delivered at the beginning of winter and my father would bring up several lumps at a time, placing the bucket next to the stove in the main bedroom that provided heat for the house. My parents did not like for me to go down into the cellar, since it was dirty with coal dust. For me, the pit of darkness was mysterious as I stood watching my father go down with his flashlight to get a bucket of coal.
Beyond those practical uses, the porch space was my fantasy lab. I often played by myself, imagining myself as the main figure in any number of dramas. The washing machine could be “the car over there” in which my imagined cohorts and I would make our getaway. Having a dungeon to which I might consign uncooperative spies also helped. As I watch my grandchildren with their busy lives full of highly programmed (and expensive) events, I wonder about their possible loss of fantasy time alone with themselves. I loved my porch.
If a person grows up in Louisville, Kentucky, Derby Day is part of the church calendar. Typically, that involves a sermon the Sunday before the first Saturday in May warning of the many ways one might be tempted to sin during the upcoming weekend. On Derby Day in 1944, my parents and I sat around the small table in the kitchen, talking about the race that would take place in the afternoon. It was a beautiful Saturday. Since my father usually worked at two jobs, I enjoyed having both my parents present, talking about the chances of various horses.
My parents began to get busy with their tasks and I bounced out the back door, down the first step, and then leaped, as I often did, over onto the flat cellar door, planning to bounce off it onto the flat surface of the porch. However, I did this at the exact moment the meter reader was lifting the door to go down to the cellar, to read our electric meter. I was thrown through the air by my own momentum, my direction diverted by the lifted cellar door, into the naked rod of the washing machine, which penetrated my cheek.
The laws of physics held true. A happy eight-year-old boy bouncing happily on the first step down, leaping over onto the more-or-less horizontal door of the cellar, a maneuver he had done many times before, at the exact instant that a meter reader was lifting the door, throwing the boy against the washing machine, where the exposed metal rod went into his left cheek. Yet, what I took from that moment was not a respect for physics, but rather an awareness that the accidental is always there, the conjoining of many separate and seemingly unrelated lines of force. No matter how causally determined things might be by brute laws of physics, the coming together of so many obvious, trivial events was itself a matter of chance. Always, anything, anything at all, can happen.
Some of these contingencies in my life have been wonderful and I have wondered whether the odd coming together of things in a wonderful way might be called grace. Other such events cry out for some other less joyful term. Another contingency that day was that the horse that won the Kentucky Derby later that day was named Pensive.
Since then, as an adult, I have thought of the meter reader, whose day started off happily enough, a perfect May day to make his rounds and suddenly there was a child there with a hole in his face.
That event had an impact on my own very personal sense of causality in life, but also of my own substance: I could be penetrated. The very thin boy with a scar on his cheek: that was my substance.
Other basic categories, such as time and space, also take on profoundly personal meanings. Philosophers speak of the categories of substance, causality, time and space. For each of us, those categories are not mere abstractions. They give form to our sense of things as we move through life. That is, if we are pensive enough.
It is a world of tragic contingency, yet meetings that seem to be filled with grace also occur. There is an incomprehensible brutality of existence and an astonishing tenderness. All these aspects are ways we experience fundamental categories of time, space, substance, and causality. Some losses are never recovered; some gifts are lasting.
Once I had time to reflect on what had happened to me, I realized that no one was to blame. So many things had to come together all at once, a moment in time and dimensions of space that would be impossible to reproduce. A few years later I began to think of this event as a “contingency.” Everything about it could have been different. Throughout life, there are many contingencies. Everything could be different. Many contingencies are wonderful events. When they are wonderful contingencies, we sometimes call them “grace.” I have read scientists who claim that if we started the universe all over again from another Big Bang, there are so many contingencies that a different universe would emerge, standing in contrast to any random moment in the path of our present universe.
I read writers carefully to see how they assume or talk about the nature of contingency, about time and space, substance and causality.
2 TRAUMA AND GRACE
EMBODIED INSIGHT
Some insights slowly emerge and change things over a significant period of time. Humans go through periods of trauma, when their very being is damaged. Healing from trauma is slow and painful, whether it is caused by physical trauma, verbal abuse, abandonment, confinement, terror, or deep loss. Dictionary definitions tend to stress trauma caused by a physical wound. However, in recent years, we have become more aware of the trauma associated with war. Even when the soldier survives without an obvious physical wound, we have begun to use the term “trauma” more inclusively.
The four major categories into which our human experience of life can be analyzed (time, space, substance, and causality) become crucial for understanding and assessing a person’s basic sense of life.
In her book Trauma and Grace, Serene Jones does not mention these categories as a distinct topic. This makes her work with traumatized people (mostly women) that much more convincing. The categories are used in the most natural way as the best possible description of what is going on. Trauma is a name for deep disruptions in our sense of our own substance, our causal role in events, our sense of surrounding space, and our apprehension or sense of lived time.
A powerful example is found in Jones’ work with women who are unable to bring a child to term, much as they might try. “Women have told me that along with their inability to make a child comes a sense of their inability to make a future”: a very personal and existential sense of time. For these women, Jones writes, “time stretches before them as a story of parching barrenness or violent bloodiness.”
This death of hope and expectancy has a spatial counterpart, a “rupturing of self.” There is often dissolution of bodily borders. Jones writes, “By ‘borders,’ I refer to those morphological lines that mark the difference between the outside and the inside of self.
