The bedside communion may have been her last.
My hospital inpatient was a 95-year-old woman of faith; a nun. I didn’t know her, and I can’t remember her name, but that’s not really the point. What was important was her spiritual care towards the end of her long life. I led a shortened service of Holy Communion, and when it was time to receive Communion, I placed a wafer on her tongue before receiving Communion myself. I had done these many times before, but this occasion was different, very different.
Allow me to explain a little further.
I was early in my journey as an Anglican Priest, and I had just asked to be taken out of an oppressive Church context for my own well-being. I was placed within a Hospital Chaplaincy Team at a major hospital while the next Church placement was arranged. I was well enough to turn up each day to serve patients and staff, and outside observers seeing me at work wouldn’t think anything was wrong. Deep down, though, the picture was very different for my experience within my church and Diocese, meant that I had become a survivor from an extended period of bullying and gaslighting. Sadly, this is not an uncommon dynamic in religious communities and is one that I see in the counselling room in my role as a registered Christian Counsellor far too often.
The impact on me was deep and complex, and while I could recognise several symptoms, other impacts were much more elusive. I was struggling at levels I couldn’t recognise or name, and even if I could, I was at a loss to know how to resolve it. So, I did what is very common for humans and males in particular, and busied myself to survive and avoid facing what was deep down.
Until this bedside communion.
With a long spiritual life of Christian service behind her, it was perhaps fitting in the economy of God that her life would continue to bless others, even in her weakened, limited, and silent state. Our God was, after all, in the business of displaying His power through our weaknesses (2 Corinthians 12:9). Her weaknesses were obvious; mine were much less so until this moment.
My direct team of Chaplains were phenomenal in providing compassionate and non-judgmental care with lots of validation of appropriate self-disclosures. The pastoral care offered to me in this season by those in overall authority, however, lacked the confidentiality required for trust to be fostered and grow, while the institutional gaslighting created an experience of isolation that was so damaging. How could those entrusted with being under-shepherds with Jesus be lacking in such basic compassionate care?
As I sat there maintaining the oral hygiene for my patient as she slowly consumed the bread wafer, her aged face served me in ways that those with power and authority entrusted with my care couldn’t.
She acted as a mirror to me.
Her brokenness was obvious; mine was less so. But in that moment, her brokenness drew mine into my conscious awareness, so there was not just one broken person receiving communion, but two.
At that time, I didn’t have the vocabulary to describe the church culture and behaviours I was living through, nor the impacts it was having on my life and career, but what was significant was this dawning realisation, a new awareness, that in the prime of my life, I was so deeply broken from being exposed to a toxic work environment that I could no longer hide, but needed to do something about it.
Thankfully, God was already at work in this space.
Shortly after being made aware of my brokenness in this bedside communion, God’s message of communion broke through in the very same moment. This bedside communion wasn’t just bringing spiritual comfort to my patient; it was a comfort to both of us. Side by side and in the very act of receiving the body and blood of Christ together, God’s message and new reality broke through - our brokenness was being met by the broken body of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. His body was carrying our infirmities in this act of communion with Him. (Isaiah 53:4a)
Recently, Psychologists and Theologians have been using the language of finding a ‘relational home’ for trauma.[1] In this act of communion, we were bringing our broken selves to their rightful, God-directed resting place – Jesus’ broken body for us. God’s body is a relational home to carry what we cannot. His word promised this in the book of Isaiah, and Jesus completes this work on the cross. In our coming to Him, we bring what we can’t carry, while looking forward to signs of His resurrection life in our lives as He absorbs our infirmities into His eternal divine life.
This experience and my reflection upon it were a way for me, as a trained Minister, to triage my own recovery journey as other supports failed me. What I didn’t know then, but only later as a trained and registered Professional Counsellor over a decade later, is that this experience and reflection fill a ‘gap’ in current trauma literature between those who argue for Holy Saturday and the absence of God to minister to victims/survivors[2] and those who argue that Christ’s body keeps the score of our PTSD.[3] God’s absence and radical presence form the two current positions on approaches to trauma within Pastoral Theology.
Through these chapters, I will be arguing, from my lived experience, recovery and ongoing research, that in the event of Good Friday, God provides Himself as a relational home for trauma, absorbing our suffering, transforming it into glory[4] through His salvific work of receiving all that is marred and broken within creation.
He has already done it. God’s sacrificial atoning presence is central to Christian trauma counselling.
This reflection was further developed within a Research Elective Capstone Project during my Counselling training and Higher Research. The purpose of publishing chapters of this research in this format online is to provide a high-level outline of my further reflections, as I seek to provide a theological basis for spiritual intervention work for spiritual abuse and religious trauma clients.
My research to date has discovered a clarion call for such interdisciplinary and integrated work from within the psychology and counselling community, and for more input from the Christian theological community to provide insights for clients wanting to engage with their faith in therapy.
My hope and prayer is that this work, begun as a way to triage my own lived experience, might make a small yet significant contribution to this important area of need in rebuilding shattered lives.
Footnotes
[1] Hunsinger, V.D. (2015). Bearing the Unbearable: Trauma, Gospel, and Pastoral Care. WM. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.
[2] O’Donnell, K. (2023, April 6), Trauma Theology, St Andrews Encyclopaedia of Theology, https://www.saet.ac.uk/Christianity/TraumaTheology/1000.pdf.pdf
[3] Hill, P. (2022), Christ’s Body Keeps the Score: Trauma-Informed Theology and the Neuroscience of PTSD. An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.14428/thl.v7i1.64223
[4] Young, F. (1990). Face to Face: A Narrative Essay in the Theology of Suffering. T&T Clark.
Disclaimer
While I am a licensed Counsellor, these digital chapters are a personal reflection rather than a developed educational resource. It is a labour of love exploring Christian resources for the remaking of myself after trauma. Reading these Chapters does not constitute a therapist-client relationship, nor are they a replacement for readers’ therapy.