Greetings in the Name of the Lord, 

I did a bit of a deep dive this week on what sort of similarities may exist between current trends in trauma-informed mental health therapies and the teachings of Jesus. I noticed some big similarities along with some important differences, but for the time being at least, those do not matter too much right now. 

What jumped out at me more was a realization about the way Jesus reached out to and interacted with people. One of the main themes of Jesus' teaching was regarding the Kingdom of Heaven (or Kingdom of God depending on which gospel one reads) and how it in the midst of that he was asking people to detach from the things they cling to and let go into a trust of God's divine Love. I have always found this a hard topic to preach on, and really it is Jesus' example of trusting in God's divine Love, even into death, that best illustrates what it means to let go into God's Love.

But people still say it a lot, some version of "let go and let God" is pretty common to hear. It is said a lot, but I am not always sure it lines up with what Jesus was hoping for us. In the midst of all this, I stumbled across someone pointing out (and I already forget where i read this) that Jesus' first step with folks, particularly those at the margins, was to heal. 

For Jesus, teachings on the Kingdom of Heaven were the end point, but he knew it would not make sense to anyone unless their past trauma was healed. Jesus was miraculous in terms of healing, and realistically, it was God doing the healing, not the person (human part) of Jesus that was doing the healing. 

For us today, it means that we should be careful throwing around phrases like "let go and let God" because not everyone is ready to let go into God.  And this is where the modern day trauma informed mental health therapy is useful, because it reminds us that until someone is healed, it can be dangerous to let go.  

I went on such a deep dive this past week that I ended up digging into my old seminary papers to see where I might be on to something and where I might be wandering in the wrong direction, but John Calvin had some notion of this concept and understood that Church was a place where healing could happen.  Calvin understood that one of the roles of the church was to help facilitate the healing God offers.  That healing often involves stripping away the vision of ourselves in relation to our societal status or our belongings or our past mistakes or the pain we have suffered, but to instead seek to understand the "self" that is freely given to us in our being created by God.  According to Calvin, this process of better understanding our God-given selves occurs through prayer and bible study and worship and teaching from well trained and vetted clergy. Much of current mental health counseling seeks the same, to reclaim a truer version of oneself, not the one distorted by past trauma, and can be an effective tool in achieving healing.  And once this healing can occur, then one can start to let go into trusting a Loving God, or as Calvin himself would have put it, being loved into freedom.

I bring all this up to remind us of our role, as a church, in facilitating healing, that in just being present, and by offering opportunities to pray and be in community and study the bible and learn from others, healing can happen and is an important part of the journey for most people.  And the healing allows some to be loved into freedom. And that freedom, it does not mean that someone gets to do whatever they want whenever they want, but offers an opportunity to free of the burdens of anxiety and trust that the self a person brings out into the world, is the very self God intends that person to be, a conduit of Love, the very hands and feet of Christ.

In Peace, 

Mike