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The Apostle Pauland

Post-Traumatic Stress

From Woundedness to Wholeness

By Robert and Annelie Collie

Fairway PressLima, Ohio

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THE APOSTLE PAUL AND POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS

None of our illustrations will be from our clinical practices.We have reflected on them but have used no case histories.

FIRST EDITIONCopyright © 2011 by

Robert and Annelie Collie

All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, without permission in writing from the author. Inquiries should be addressed to: collierm30@gmail.com.

Some scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission,

The poetic passages are from the Good News Bible, in Today’s English Version. Copyright © American Bible Society 1966, 1971, 1976. Used by permission.

______________________________________________

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929115______________________________________________

ISBN-13: 978-0-7880-2239-5ISBN-10: 0-7880-2239-3 PRINTED IN USA

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tomy mother and grandmother,

who bent over mewhen the bombs began to fall

— Annelie Collie

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Table of Contents

Preface 5

Acknowledgments 9

Introduction 11Premise and Purpose

The First Phase 23The Fracturing of the Person

The Second Phase 75Becoming “Well-er than Well”

The Completion Phase 131Walking on When All Seems Dead-Ended

Postlude 157

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Preface

As you gain maturity the healing of memories starts to catch up with the forgiveness of sins. So it was — I was stunned by an insight, but probably I was ready for it — you may well know how that is. I had been finalizing a manu-script based on the Gospel according to Matthew that was to be the third in a series on one of the anxiety disorders, the obsessive-compulsive one. As usual I was starting the day doing the daily one-chapter-at-a-time meditation, this time doing Acts. I have yet to get back to polishing that draft.

It was a profound shock when I realized Saul’s traumatic experience on the way to Damascus had the characteristics of a flashback. Looking back now, the buildup to the insight was my concern for combat veterans coming home with Post-Traumatic Stress.

As a pastoral counselor I knew the characteristics of a traumatic response and could not prevent myself from read-ing Luke’s account of what began happening to Saul. Quick-ly, rather than slowly, it began to dawn on me how Saul’s post-traumatic condition impacted our history. It has made, marred, and now, as we understand the process of Saul’s transformation into Paul and beyond, opens to us new poten-tialities for hearing — and sharing — the good news.

Thinking back about why I was so stunned, I think one reason was that even the chapter titles from the Bible got stuck in my mind as The Bible, such as “The Conversion of Saul.” Several editors had put some such phrasing in various translations of the Bible to mark the place about Saul being overwhelmed and his life forever altered. I had associated this “conversion” with all sorts of evangelistic doctrines, certainly never asking myself how the response of Saul was different from the stories in the gospels about life-chang-ing events. I had never asked myself how Saul’s experience

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of the accusatory Jesus differed from other experiences of the risen Jesus, such as the two Marys at the tomb. Perhaps, however, I am too hard on myself. An insight — in my expe-rience — comes as a gift and not by being intellectual. Still, once a person’s mind gets jump-started, the memory does start to run on its own.

An incident happened in my first student pastorate, the very first conversation I had with this middle-aged parishio-ner. “I served in the First World War. I remember this man getting hit. He was such a nice little fellow and he just lay there, begging us to shoot him.” I did not know what I was hearing. Post-Traumatic Shock was the current term then, but the host of studies on the condition only began after Vietnam. We have been learning: slowly, too slowly in retro-spect, particularly we of the church. A lot has changed, but some of us have and some of us have not. Being oblivious is both understandable and forgivable, but it should not pass for being godly.

Some of the stories I have had cause to reflect upon do go far back into my student days when veterans came back and took advantage of the GI Bill. I anticipated recalling a lot of vivid stories that I preferred to stay forgotten, but these helped in thinking through the dynamics Paul displayed. There have been a lot of stories over the years: ones shared by returning GIs in the dorm, in the Marine Reserves, as a pastor, and pastoral counselor.

The co-author, Annelie, was born on the night of the first bombing raid of Wiesbaden during World War II. By the end of the war, much of the city lay in ruins. Annelie suppressed feelings about many events of the war years. She began school just when men were returning from the POW camps and resumed teaching, even as they struggled with their feelings.

Memories often get processed only as we get older or maybe when we are mature enough to grow from them. Two

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decades or so later, she was caught on a bus in a traffic jam and suddenly realized that her claustrophobia was related to being once trapped in their basement bomb shelter. The feel-ings had been displaced, but not denied. She never had let herself cry until we began working on this manuscript two years ago.

All too often memories have been accompanied by tears. If some reader begins recollecting and the feelings flow, you are in good company.

There is a confession to be made: the male on our writ-ing team is the one at the computer. To give you a sense of how we worked, however, one afternoon we sat on the patio drinking coffee and discussing Saul’s experience after flee-ing Damascus. Afterward I got up and made a note on what she had said.

Post-traumatic stress (depending on its severity, of course) re-duces the person to a state of self-defense. It cuts a person off from others, filled as it (the condition) is with anger and resent-ment, (the person) becomes totally isolated. It (the condition) is both a blessing and a curse. It is better to flee the situation and be in the desert than somebody gets hurt. On the other hand, the person is for a time cut off from human connections.

Yes, Saul must have had a flashback and had a traumatic response. Later, we will explore this in detail.

In the interest of transparency, I also want to acknowl-edge that I spent a goodly number of months in a prison setting as part of a clinical pastoral education program. My assignment was doing the chaplain’s mandatory pre-parole interviews. If my perspective on Paul’s letters from prison is an unusual one, it reflects how often I had to take into ac-count the situation of the person talking to me. Things go into a person’s file and keep resurfacing. I had to think through what that meant to Paul when he was writing those letters. For Annelie’s contribution, think of some German theolo-

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gians who spent time in prison. Whether our interpretation of Paul’s last years is appealing or appalling may depend on how familiar a person is with prisons.

I have wondered, too, about the persons reading this. Working on the research for this manuscript for me has not been without its surprises, and not altogether pleasant.

As a Boy Scout I had a face-to-fang experience with a rattlesnake in a cave. I had retained the memory just as an in-cident and totally denied the feelings. The feelings came out in a dream triggered while doing the research for this manu-script. The flashback was intrusive for some time. I learned something from it that had never come up in personal psy-chotherapy while working on my doctorate in Berkeley: I too had PTSS — the syndrome, not the disorder.

In retrospect, there were those curious experiences while a student after having been a pastor in Louisiana during the Civil Rights years. Curiously, I had never put some things together until I was far into this study. One of my two such experiences in life was more of shock, one of them more related to stress.

The point is that the Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome condition covers a broad range; it is much more than just related to combat events. We are all in process and, as Chris-tians, never stop growing and maturing in our understand-ing and in our faith. The perspective from which this book is written is more personal than academic. In writing this book, like Martin Luther when he was translating scripture, we have tried to look persons “in the mouth.” — Robert Collie

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Acknowledgments

Many males — including Paul, we may suspect — have not adequately acknowledged victimized women. The re-flections in this book show Annelie’s influence. If this book is being discussed in a group, hopefully this will give some women permission to join in the sharing. When it comes to trauma, situations vary, dynamics seldom do. Woundedness is woundedness, whether from rape or rifle.

Our thanks go especially to Lucy Clarke of our Friday Morning Book Discussion Group at the First Presbyterian Church, Fort Wayne; her reflections were invaluable. Each of those group members has also made helpful comments during the reading and discussion of the manuscript. Our thanks also go to the Reverend John Newburg, a fellow Unit-ed Methodist, for his unwavering support and insightfulness. We are also indebted to our friend Monica Chamberlain of Indiana Tech University, for her astute editorial notations. Our thanks also go to our son Rob, a reader for a Hollywood production company, for his literary comments.

So many faces, so many voices. Let us simply acknowl-edge Bodo and Bere for all of you. We were at supper at our house and they greeted each other like old friends. “You should have been killed in Russia and I should have died in Belgium. And here we are,” exclaimed Bere.

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Introduction

Premise and Purpose

The premise of this book is that a fundamental building block in the apostle’s life is his suffering from a post-trau-matic condition, and in his life and ministry we see a work-ing through of this. There is a myth that a killer is destined to drag “a bag of bones” — the remains of his victim — with him; it is one way to speak of post-traumatic dynamics. We will be considering the circumstances in which Saul found himself, because in a sense many of us also carry around such a bag — or feel that we are in one.

The primary purpose of this book is to be helpful to those who must struggle in some way with Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSS) and look for religious support and encour-agement. Secondly, the purpose is to make use of the largest mental health therapeutic resource in society: the caregiv-ers of the church. We want to enable church leaders to learn about post-traumatic stress in a way that is natural to them: through the biblical stories. The hope is that old texts will become alive in a new way; they do, you know. The inten-tion is that pastoral visits in emergency ward situations will be followed up in a meaningful way thirty days later, and that pastors reach out afresh to the families impacted by a returning veteran of whatever war. A sermon series on faith development and post-traumatic response would be a cause of celebration for Annelie and me. Our hope is to provide a book for small group discussions as a part of some far-flung ministry, for suffering from the post traumatic has surely been flung far....

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An Overview of the Value of the StudySaul of Tarsus is extremely valuable in a study of trauma.

As “Saul” he experienced the role of victimizer in an early period of his life. Then as “Paul” he had to cope as a vic-tim in that final period when he was imprisoned. Every time there is a knowledge explosion, such as understanding more about traumatization, we have an opportunity to expand our appreciation of persons such as Paul. Here is an additional perspective by which we may explore scripture — and en-large the church’s pastoral ministry still further.

From the perspective of Hebrew scripture the chosen were almost exclusively in the role of victim — think slav-ery in Egypt, the Babylonian Captivity. There is even a Jew-ish joke to the effect that “if God ever starts the world again we hope someone else will be the ‘chosen’.” On the other hand, the conquest of the Promised Land was gory, but there is no sense of being the victimizer. Responding to being an abuser, rather than the abused, is the “black hole” of theol-ogy and of pastoral practice. Studying Saul is valuable in that we have the opportunity to reflect on the two sides of a story, persecutor and persecuted. It is quite different than sitting side by side in a curtained-off confessional booth or across the desk in a counselor’s office.

The enormous creativity of a converted Saul as he evolved into the apostle Paul is at least based on having been a persecutor and having to deal with it. When he claimed that his unique theological insights came as a direct revelation, he spoke truly: The Hebrew scripture gave him little guid-ance about being a persecutor — think Job, think Jeremiah. If you have a big enough biblical concordance you can find one reference to being “bloodthirsty.” When the flash came, “Why do you persecute me?” Saul, a graduate student of the Hebraic tradition, had to start thinking himself out of a black hole.

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Years later, under an evolving self-identity as Paul, we read him as perceiving himself more in the role of victim. In it he would gradually shift into a more traditional, familiar religious perspective of sacrifice, but this was not the per-spective from which Saul began his long journey from night into day. From the time of Damascus he knew what it was to feel like “the chief of sinners”; from the time in Caesarea on, he knew as well what it was to be forced by circumstances into a constricted way of life that no one of us would choose. It is little wonder that so many have sought guidance from Paul, the dean of role models. What we have in him is not only theological insight, but the demonstration of a hard-won maturity. Saul’s story is beyond a “disorder” it is a rev-elation beyond “recovery” as he evolved into Paul.

Expanding Our View of the ApostleGiven the sequences around Stephen’s stoning we read

about in Acts, we can infer Saul would have been born in Tarsus about 5 to 10 AD. Many scholars have traced his in-tellectual and inspirational thoughts. We will be following a different track, tracing his emotional trail. In Tarsus he would have been subject to three pressure points from his very birth cry.

There would be the Roman. During his Egyptian cam-paign Julius Caesar anchored his flanks in Cyprus and Tarsus. He awarded Roman citizenship to its free populace for ser-vices rendered, but Roman occupation never ceased either.

There was the Greek, both language and culture. Tarsus was a university center famous for its five Stoic philoso-phers, regarded as on a par with Athens and Alexandria.

Most prominently — and peculiarly — there was the Jewish, most particularly the Pharisaic. Saul would have been born into a Jewish merchant family. The name given him is peculiar. Saul was the first king of the Israelites, but persecuted the tradition’s beloved David. As he grew older,

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King Saul grew obviously crazy and ended his life by sui-cide during a losing battle with a Gentile army.

At some point Saul was sent, or the family moved, to Je-rusalem. There Saul would have been a contemporary of Je-sus. As an outsider moving in from Tarsus, Saul would have felt he had a lot to prove and, if he was to succeed, would have to try twice as hard. As he studied the face of the coin of his religion, however, the flip side of it would have been nationalism. As an outstanding student of the great Pharisaic teacher Gamaliel, he would be well known in those circles. He would have also inevitably been a part of the excitable Greek-speaking segment of Jewish religious adherents. He would be known by them and, in a rather small community, would personally know many of them.

Leaping ahead, this reality will come to bear on the se-quence in which our New Testament was written. From the perspective of post-traumatic stress and the Pauline story, there is an interrelationship between Galatians and the Gos-pel according to Matthew. The question of authorship and dating of these ancient documents is best addressed by the question: Who benefits? This perspective is unusually sup-portive of Early Church tradition.

Expanding Our View Beyond a “Disorder”We now come to the beginning of Luke’s story about

Saul. He is standing and watching a murder close up. Let us next look at the basic criteria for the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but there are other characteristics and we will con-tinue to identify these others. They are the reason why it is more appropriate to associate traumatizing with syndromes.

Four Basic Criteria for Recognizing the Post-Traumatic Condition

A horrific, overwhelming experience beyond the ordi-nary. We read in the Acts of the Apostles that the young Saul

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“held their coats” when Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death. Furthermore, he approved of it. When he was older and even as his self-identity changed Paul never wrote of Stephen. Many of those reading this will recognize “emotional suppression” and perhaps even “denial” all too well. Knowing PTSS as we now do, perhaps he felt he could not. Some things are too painful, or seem to be.

There is at least a time lapse of thirty days before the diagnosis of PTSS can be made. Before four weeks have passed, what was experienced as trauma by a person is termed “an acute anxiety reaction.” When sufficient time has elapsed and the abnormal event floods back, the diagno-sis changes. After the murder of Stephen recorded in Acts, Saul participated for at least that period of a month’s time in hunting down Jesus’ followers in Jerusalem. Then he volun-teered or was ordered to go to Damascus and run down some refugees that had escaped.

There is a reoccurrence in consciousness of the pre-cipitating event as if it was happening again in all its in-tensity and immediacy. On the way to Damascus, Saul was startled and overwhelmed by a sense of being confronted by a person whom he knew to have been gruesomely cru-cified. Later he obviously referred again and again to this killing. More significantly to us, it was not Stephen he saw and heard in his death throes gasping out forgiveness. It was rather Saul’s re-experiencing of Jesus when alive that over-whelmed him. It is only now that we have accumulated suffi-cient studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome that we are in position to recognize what is being described on the road to Damascus. Now we know what Saul was beginning to ex-perience: a traumatic response, beginning with a flashback.

The painfulness of this event(s) results in the per-son’s emotional and/or physical withdrawal. We see this in Saul’s sitting, blinded, for the following three days in a

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house in Damascus. We recognize it in his suddenly fleeing the city into the silence of Arabia for the next three years. Then after a brief appearance in Jerusalem Saul disappeared for another thirteen years.

Think of “Syndromes” rather than a “Disorder”From a health perspective the issue we are considering

can be characterized differently from that of a mental dis-order. There is another perspective, that of syndromes. Con-sider the consequences of a trauma and its flashback: being emotionally overwhelmed, physically impacted, rage, fre-quently a value reversal, alienation, withdrawal, avoidance, high-risk behaviors, interpersonal difficulties, difficulties with intimacy particularly in regard to the opposite sex, the startle response, emotional cycling, a sense of the mystical or perhaps a tendency toward exaggerating the imaginary, a foreshortened sense of the future.

Breaking a trauma down into its various consequences makes a therapeutic response much more feasible, particu-larly a pastoral one. These characteristics will be italicized in the text for the benefit of readers and discussion groups. No one person has these responses to trauma in the same ways, some more, some less, some somewhat differently, but Saul’s difficulties point to the scope of the condition.

Where We Stand NowWe are at the end of the beginning of understanding the

Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. To help understand such persons — of whom any of us may very well be one! — we must explore who they were and acknowledge the posi-tive potential of who they can become. Being traumatized does not explain the person’s “is.” The person after his or her wounding is much, much more than a one-dimensional psychiatric casualty. One cannot ignore the psychological, social, and somatic aspects in regard to wounding and re-

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covery; we must explore the whole of the person and be pre-pared to celebrate it.

There is another dimension as well: the religious. We are also at the beginning of a new understanding of the great apostle. We are in position to explore the process by which Saul became Paul — and beyond. At the very beginning is the differentiation between the mystical and the flashback. On the way to Emmaus the two disciples had an ecstatic rev-elation; on the way to Damascus Saul had an intense form of an anxiety attack.

This Is No Insignificant IssueThe “post traumatic” is a hand-me-down that is like a

piece of tough meat: The more you chew on it, the bigger it gets. Try naming those countries over the entire world that have not experienced mass violence within the memory of their older citizens; even relatively calm countries have had their share of shrieking sirens and screams in the night. In those societies that have had mass violence, persons repeat-edly attempt the peace-making process. It makes us wonder if sometimes the committees on reconciliation are not meet-ing in a haunted house.

To jump-start our thinking, let us acknowledge that so much of mass violence has a religious aspect in its causation. Even more painfully we have to acknowledge its role in its perpetuation. Ours is that learnable moment when we need to examine the healing aspect of religion to memory.

The Price of Learning: Dropping Our Pre-Existing As-sumptions

One assumption has to be stared down: no one is so re-ligious, or so intelligent, that he or she cannot be hit with the post-traumatic condition — or so tough! Traumatization is located in the older midbrain; our pathway to healing is located in the newer, consciousness-developing forebrain.

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What we will be exploring together, like Jesus’ parable of a wise scribe, is a bringing together of the old and the new. Old wineskins are threatened by new wine, but we all know how old wine tastes… sometimes it has just gotten too old.

We must begin by acknowledging that throughout his-tory the role of the church has been largely defined by one man: the apostle Paul. When we apply recent understandings of the impact of stress on an individual we find that Saul, and then Paul to an ever lessening degree, was a wounded war-rior. Paul, indeed, knew about working out one’s salvation with fear and trembling.

Some Christians will doubtless feel it sacrilege to con-sider the great apostle’s story in association with the post-traumatic condition. It has ever been so: Jesus’ crucifixion was a scandal, a foolishness to be proclaimed. The eternal Word is ever made flesh in order to dwell among us.

A fresh examination of the life and teachings of Paul can point the way now, as it has so often. First of all, it challenges us to rethink portions of our history, for a lack of understand-ing him from this perspective has muddied the unity of the church. It has certainly distorted we Christians’ relationship to the Jews in a most unfortunate way. We have preserved the tradition of asking “And who is my neighbor?” but have neglected the mind-furthering exercise of asking “And who is the ‘Gentile’ of today?”

Most immediately, the need for understanding the post traumatic is within the local congregation. Inside the con-gregations the syndromes of the post traumatic have swirled about and often confounded our attempts at service. Outside of the churches the sufferers from the post traumatic justifi-ably have questioned our proclamation of what it means to be saved. Together this represents the greatest challenge in our time to the pastoral ministry of the church.

In urging the reader to be open to the scriptural record in a new way we are being aware of scientific research and

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mental health advances, while not being eager to snatch at some data or theory just because it is the latest. Science-based articles need to be considered thoughtfully. We of the church can appreciate all such perspectives: After all, the closest friend that the greatest evangelist ever had was Dr. Luke, a Greek physician.

A reader should understand that this book is more than primarily a Bible study when read in a group. There are post-ings about where in scripture a discussion is centered, but there is no attempt to proof-text anything. The book is more about sharing than assuming.

A Contemporary Perspective on Our TraumasThe face of the unforgettable is oh so familiar, yet there

are many who have to learn about the consequences of be-ing around someone suffering from post-traumatic charac-teristics — even grandchildren: “Now don’t you wake your granddad. If he’s sleeping and you want him, you stand in the door and call out to him. You don’t ever go over and touch him.”

The hard-faced reality is, to go from there, a lot of us have blinked and wondered what happened and how to get on with living. Jeff Donn describes it in this way:

The disorder has stretched to take more frequent swerves along life’s road — car crashes, house fires, a sudden death or severe family illness or even learning of one. The disorder has broad-ened the model of mental illness to cover disturbances set off solely by external events, outside the mind.… Research sug-gests the disorder is now present in 5% of Americans, or more than 13 million… It is expected to touch 8% of adults during their lives.1

The psychiatrist Mark Goulston and his co-author Niki Moustaki, in their chapter “The Invisible Epidemic of PTSD,” put it much higher.2 Only three years later and the

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percentages had rocketed and different categories of suffer-ers were catalogued. In their analysis of the situation the es-timate is that 30% of all American women will experience an abusive situation severe enough to warrant its consider-ation for bringing on post-traumatic thoughts and feelings. In television interviews Goulston was now giving particular emphasis to the need of sufferers for a role model.

PTSS is a family affair of ongoing tensions, of ruptured relationships, of a community’s blackest hour and consequent suppressions. We cannot expect my friend to forget when, as a young child, the family moved into a small northern town as the first black family; one morning they found an effigy hung on their door. The collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11 is such an event for many; it affects both memory and judg-ment, not only of individuals but whole societies. PTSS even has its effects into the second and third generations: witness the descendants of the Armenian survivors of the massacres in Turkey and similar events. The post-trauma stress of the Holocaust continues into the third and fourth generations, the transferences as painful and sometimes peculiar.

So here we are together, pastors and people, counselors and counselees, we who have sat at both sides of the table. There will also be those for whom “life is just a bitch,” who are unable to take a seat at the table, but who are not for-gotten. It is a time for holding one another’s hands, for the sharing of stories. A police officer may not be able to forget a particular car pile-up, but he or she needs more than just fellow officers laughing together in a bar; an abused woman needs more than the comradeship of “men haters.” I, you, we — there is no “us” and “them.” We are all in need of walking out of where we are.

From this beginning, we want to acknowledge a particu-lar perspective to be drawn from Paul. A “flashback” is also a “flash forward.” The function of an intrusive thought or image will be seen to mean the mind’s attempt to assimilate

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what cannot — as yet — be integrated into the person’s self-identity and beyond: far beyond.

A Final ThoughtThere is one particular reflection to suggest. We hope that

those who cherish the Word of God will not get so caught up in thinking about some theological perspective on a passage that he or she will miss a point about trauma and suffering. Some readers will also wonder why a particularly meaning-ful verse has been omitted from the text. We have not pri-vately ignored that verse; we have just not allowed room for it to be entered into the discussion.

Our thought is that sufferers of PTSS will get the most out of a group discussion and our hope is that everyone will feel free to share a viewpoint and a story. We can trust the Word of God to become lively among us.

Finally, we want to share a personal perspective on the New Testament narrative. Because everything rested on the reality of the resurrection, the absolute gold standard for a follower of Jesus was — and is — credibility. There could be differences of opinion and experience, such as whether there was a light, a noise, or a voice, because people remem-ber things differently. What counted was, “Just say ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ Anything else you say comes from the Evil One.” Au-thenticity in expression: that meant in or out. Still does.

Now, as Isaiah wrote for the very beginning of his work:

Come, let us argue it out, says the Lord:though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be white as snow;though they are red like crimson,they shall become like wool.

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If, on the other hand, you are not in a lawyerly mood, as an older translation put it, we will be glad to reason it out with you.

__________

1. Jeff Donn, “Post-Traumatic Stress Cases Surge,” Associated Press, quoted in the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, August 15, 2005, 9A.

2. Mark Goulston and Niki Moustaki, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for Dum-mies (Indianapolis, IN: Wiley Publishing Company, 2007).