The Body and Posttraumatic Healing: a Teresian Approach

Journal of Moral Theology, Vol. 9, No. 1 (2020): 75-97 The Body and Posttraumatic Healing: A Teresian Approach Julia Feder HEN MANY PEOPLE THINK “mysticism” or “mystical prayer,” they imagine a dreamy kind of out-of-body ex- perience in which one encounters the Ultimate. For W those who have suffered from sexual violence, this ver- sion of prayer is, at best, not helpful and, at worst, dangerous. Because the threat of dissociation of the mind and the body is both debilitating and ever-present for trauma survivors, imagining prayer as a “mystical flight” away from the realm of bodies (both personal and social-polit- ical) is a terrible idea—both theologically and psychologically. The idea that mystical prayer might push one beyond or away from the body is psychologically dangerous because dissociation from one’s body is a costly mode of coping with trauma and bodily reintegration is extremely difficult once this breach has been rendered.1 For Chris- tian survivors of sexual violence, a conception of prayer as mystical flight is also poor theology because the Christian tradition is an incar- national tradition—one that centers revelation on the disclosure of God in flesh. According to the Christian tradition, prayer orients us more profoundly to God incarnate—God disclosed sacramentally in our lives, in history, in the world. Therefore, Christian prayer is always and everywhere an embodied practice. Teresa of Avila, the sixteenth-century Spanish saint and mystic, is one of the most celebrated authors describing the deep and enduring connection between the life of prayer and the body. In her autobiography, she narrates a vision that she occasionally had in prayer of a small angel in human form who repeatedly pierces her heart. This ac- tion aroused in her such an intensely painful desire for God that it raged through her soul and, as she describes it, spilled over into her body. She writes, 1 In a new afterword added five years after the publication of the first edition of her classic Trauma and Recovery, trauma psychiatrist Judith Herman notably changed her own position on disassociation from “merciful protection” to a “respite from terror … purchased at far too high a price.” Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 239. 76 Julia Feder I saw in his hands a large golden dart and at the end of the iron tip there appeared to be a little fire. It seems to me this angel plunged the dart several times into my heart and that it reached deep within me. When he drew it out, I thought he was carrying off with him the deep- est part of me; and he left me all on fire with great love of God. The pain is not bodily but spiritual, although the body doesn’t fail to share in some of it, and even a great deal.2 Though this scene from Teresa’s autobiography is perhaps not even the most compelling illustration of the integration of the body in the life of prayer,3 it certainly is one of the most famous ones. In the sev- enteenth century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini memorably captured the erotic undertones of Teresa’s account in his marble “Ecstasy of Saint Teresa.” The saint is reclining beneath an armed angel—magnified from Teresa’s original account to the size of an ordinary human male—and poised to receive his spear into her heart. Reflecting Te- resa’s own description of this as a “loving exchange”4 rather than a violent one (though, many survivors have good reason to be suspicious of the coincidence of pain language, stabbing with a weapon, and sexual imagery), Teresa’s face has suggested (at least to some) that she is in mid-orgasm.5 Upon seeing Bernini’s masterpiece, Charles de Brosses famously remarked, “If this is divine love, I have known it well.”6 The scene speaks plainly to its reader or viewer: divine encounter is never exclusively spiritual in nature but also always profoundly material. As I will argue, Teresa’s ideas about the embodied nature of the human person are incomplete for our contemporary context, but they 2 Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh and Otilio Rodri- guez, vol. 1, The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1976), 272. 3 Sarah Coakley argues that fetishization of this episode in Teresa’s early work is “profoundly misleading and distorting” insofar as it prioritizes extraordinary, occa- sional, private, and gendered experiences of God. Sarah Coakley, “Dark Contempla- tion and Epistemic Transformation: The Analytic Theologian Re-Meets Teresa of Avila,” in Analytic Theology: New Essays in the Philosophy of Theology, ed. Oliver D. Crisp and Michael C. Rea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 283. 4 Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 252. 5 To Jacques Lacan’s (in)famous commentary on female sexuality that appropriated Teresa as a primary source—“You have only to go and look at Bernini’s statue in Rome to understand immediately that she’s coming [qu’elle jouit], there’s no doubt about it,” Luce Irigary sharply and perceptively retorted, “In Rome? So far away? To look? At a statue? Of a saint? Sculpted by a man? What pleasure are we talking about? Whose pleasure? For where the pleasure of the Teresa in question is concerned, her own writings are perhaps more telling.” Carole Slade, St. Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 134. For this reason, I will focus in this essay on what Teresa has to say for herself in her own writings. 6 Cathleen Medwick, Teresa of Avila: The Progress of a Soul (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999), viii. The Body and Posttraumatic Healing 77 do provide generative starting points for constructing a contemporary theology of healing from sexual violence. Teresa understands the body as having a profound significance in the life of prayer because it is only in and through the body that one experiences God.7 As Teresa reminds her readers, “We are not angels but we have a body.”8 Posi- tively, because we are fully embodied creatures, bodily pleasure is a gift from God and sensual delight is one of the purposes of intimacy with God in prayer.9 Negatively, because we are embodied creatures, we are vulnerable to intense forms of suffering—in Teresa’s own case, she reflects on the suffering of illness and self-hatred, but we might also add forms of harm intentionally inflicted by others. For Teresa, therefore, it is also the body (even the wounded and ill body), once having experienced the love of God and thus integrated with all other aspects of the person, that can mediate God’s love both to oneself and to all in need of healing. In the context of sexual violence, it is of vital importance to affirm the profoundly embodied nature of the human person. Riffing on Tertullian’s classic theological maxim,10 contemporary trauma theologian Jane Grovijahn argues that sexual abuse highlights the reality of “flesh as the very condition on which the soul hinges.”11 She explains that in sexual abuse, “God is ripped out of a woman’s body in the very same acts that violate her, pummeling her into a visceral location of deicide [… and thus,] survivors come to know a profound interdependence between the well-being of their visceral, physical self and their access to God.”12 As Grovijahn con- cludes, “The body, in all its physicality and corporeal characteristics is the only way to God.”13 Because for all humans—and, most especially, for survivors of sexual violence—the body is the hinge of salvation, in this article I outline some of the resources that Teresa can offer us to construct an embodied posttraumatic theology of healing, as well as honestly name some of the limitations of Teresa’s theological understanding of the body. I begin my argument with a discussion of Teresa’s dialectical understanding of physical well-being as important to cultivate, if possible, but, when physical well-being is not possible, the individual is 7 Cristina Mazzoni, Saint Hysteria: Neurosis, Mysticism, and Gender in European Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 195. 8 Teresa of Avila, The Book of Her Life, 195. 9 Peter Tyler, “Teresa of Avila’s Transformative Strategies of Embodiment in Medi- tations on the Song of Songs,” in Sources of Transformation: Revitalizing Christian Spirituality, eds. Edward Howells and Peter Tyler (London: Continuum, 2010), 137- 38. 10 Tertullian argues that “flesh is the hinge of salvation” in De Resurrectione Carnis, 8-9. 11 Jane M. Grovijahn, “Theology as an Irruption into Embodiment: Our Need for God,” Theology and Sexuality 9 (1998): 29-35, at 30. 12 Grovijahn, “Theology as an Irruption into Embodiment,” 31. 13 Grovijahn, “Theology as an Irruption into Embodiment,” 30. 78 Julia Feder not barred from union with God. As I detail Teresa’s own views, I explore the ways in which her thought can serve as a constructive re- source for a contemporary theology of posttraumatic healing. Next, I address Teresa’s understanding of profound bodily-spiritual integration as the fruit of encounter with God in prayer. This is a position that develops over the course of her life, appearing only in its most mature form in her Interior Castle. In this text, she suggests that the interior stability experienced by the practitioner of prayer—fully unified within herself, body and soul—nurtures virtuous activity in the world, wholly integrated with the contemplative life.

Load more