Latest / A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast / The Holidays and Trauma w/ Serene Jones

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The Holidays and Trauma w/ Serene Jones · A Matter of Faith: A Presby Podcast

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hello and welcome to a Matter of Faith, a Presby podcast, the podcast where we respond to your questions and comments on issues of faith, social justice, and church life.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: Don't be afraid to write in and ask your question because if it matters to you, it matters to us, and it just might be a matter of faith,
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: Whether it be faith in God, faith in others, or faith in yourself.
• 0:24
  Speaker 2: We are brought to you by the Presbyterian Peacemaking Program and Unbound the interactive journal on Christian Social justice for the Presbyterian Church usa.
• 0:35
  Speaker 2: I am your host, Lee Cato,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: And I'm your host Simon Dune.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Without further ado, let's dive into today's questions.
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: Well, hello everyone and welcome again to a matter of Faith, a Presby podcast.
• 0:50
  Speaker 1: We are so excited to have you with us for our episode that is gonna be coming out before Christmas.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: And let me tell you, it's a really good conversation.
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: It's a very deep conversation as well, isn't it, Lee?
• 1:04
  Speaker 2: Yes, it's very deep.
• 1:05
  Speaker 2: Uh, we are welcoming Serene Jones, who is the president of Union Theological Seminary of the City of New York.
• 1:13
  Speaker 2: And we talk about trauma and we talk about a lot of things that, you know, may trigger people.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: And so we wanted to mention that it is a very deep conversation about trauma and violence.
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: And so if that is something that is triggering for you, take care of yourself.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: And yeah, it was a great conversation with her, especially during the holidays when things start bubbling up and you start thinking about things.
• 1:40
  Speaker 2: The holidays are always that time where that happens.
• 1:45
  Speaker 1: And in this episode, you'll also hear us talk with Serene about trauma in the context of the holidays, but also in the context of the story of Jesus' birth and understanding sort of the broader context in the Christmas story, which we think is both interesting and also important for us to remember.
• 2:04
  Speaker 1: Cuz it's so easy to just sort of go through the motions of hearing the Christmas story and thinking that you've heard it all before and you know the full story already.
• 2:13
  Speaker 1: So we hope that you all will appreciate that part of the conversation as well.
• 2:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah, and happy holidays everyone.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: Happy holidays to you, Simon.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: This has been a wonderful year with you.
• 2:25
  Speaker 2: And yeah, I hope you get all the things you want for Christmas, even though that's not what it's all about, but,
• 2:31
  Speaker 1: Well, you know what I want.
• 2:32
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, what I want Lee, is I want more listeners and more podcasts, downloads and some more reviews.
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: So yeah,
• 2:38
  Speaker 2: Uh, that would be great for Christmas.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: Everyone should give us a review.
• 2:44
  Speaker 2: You should give us five stars.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: Go follow, go subscribe wherever you get your podcast, and yeah, happy holidays y'all.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Yep.
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: Merry Christmas everybody.
• 2:58
  Speaker 2: Well, joining us today on the podcast is a very, very, well add another very special guest to the pod.
• 3:07
  Speaker 2: It is Serene Jones, who is the president of Union Theological Seminary in the city of New York, and she holds the Johnson Family Chair in religion and democracy.
• 3:20
  Speaker 2: Serene, welcome to the podcast.
• 3:21
  Speaker 2: We're very excited to have you.
• 3:23
  Speaker 3: Oh, I'm so happy to be on the podcast and honored to be invited.
• 3:27
  Speaker 3: And what a, you don't wanna say wonderful about trauma, but what a really important and and interesting topic, so thank you.
• 3:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 3:36
  Speaker 1: And thank you for, again, for being with us and given the, the amount of time and study you've spent on issues of trauma and trauma and grace in particular, we have a question written in that we wanted you to help us think through the question reads, trauma is a powerful over and overwhelming experience, especially when it's caused by violence and can make those who experience it feel like they are not worthy of God's love, grace, and healing.
• 4:07
  Speaker 1: It can also raise questions about God's role and very existence.
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: How do we walk alongside them and encourage them that they are worthy and help them heal?
• 4:19
  Speaker 3: Oh, such a good, um, very comprehensive question and a question that everyone, um, that, um, attends church, uh, whether you're the minister or in lay leadership, has to, um, wrestle with, uh, because, um, trauma is one of those descriptors of experience that no one escapes.
• 4:46
  Speaker 3: Um, you, you can talk about degrees of trauma, but once you begin to become aware of the impact of trauma on people's lives, it changes your expectations and the way you interact with people.
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: Um, I started writing the book Trauma and Grace, which was my initial dive into the world of trauma studies because of an encounter I had with a young woman, um, in my church in New Haven, Connecticut, who when it came time for the communion service and the minister referred to the, uh, pouring out of blood and the breaking of the body, she fled the church because that language just terrified her, um, at levels that she wasn't even he self-conscious of.
• 5:34
  Speaker 3: And, um, I found her, uh, in the back of the church and thus began a conversation between her and myself about her traumatic past and how it impacted her decision to join the church and how the church could be present to her.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: So that that church experience that you're asking about is the, the whole reason behind my own journey into this topic.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: The thing that is, um, to me important to remember about trauma is most overwhelming traumatic events do several things to our psyches and our brains and our abilities to, uh, understand and comprehend our world.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: A traumatic event is usually one in which you are helpless to respond.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: That's what makes it traumatic.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: You can't, you can't protect yourself, you can't get out of it.
• 6:32
  Speaker 3: It's something that happens to you.
• 6:35
  Speaker 3: And that has the impact of oftentimes disabling people's sense of their own agency.
• 6:44
  Speaker 3: This sense of utter helplessness begins to pervade your whole life.
• 6:47
  Speaker 3: Walking alongside someone who is experiencing trauma has experienced trauma, um, we need to stop thinking of trauma as being a state of existence in which someone is necessarily able to reach out because the very agency that it requires to reach out and say, help me, I need help, is not always there.
• 7:11
  Speaker 3: So it's a very delicate process of empowerment in the context of recognizing that loss of agency.
• 7:17
  Speaker 3: The other feature that's so important is that traumatic experiences are usually inflicted.
• 7:26
  Speaker 3: Um, if we exclude experiences of sort of large disasters in everyday life, traumatic experiences are usually experiences of violence that another person or a community has inflicted on you that makes survivors of trauma extremely suspicious of relating to other people because other people are the source of the harm.
• 7:51
  Speaker 3: But here's the vaccine reality is that you can only heal in the context of trauma by connecting to other people by, by reweaving that bond of relationality where there's true trust.
• 8:05
  Speaker 3: That is something that churches are so beautifully and in terms of the gospel well positioned to undertake is to build a context of trust in which, uh, the person who has experienced trauma or the community who has experienced trauma, uh, can find a, a sense of safety and presence of others.
• 8:30
  Speaker 3: So there are so many ways that the church's own teachings, preaching, understanding of pastoral care, own outreach to the community that surrounds the church and is within the church, are impacted by some of these just basics about what traumatic violence does.
• 8:51
  Speaker 3: Uh, i I say to ministers, once you understand trauma, you never again look out at your congregation and think, oh, I'm talking to a bunch of cognitively coherent agents.
• 9:02
  Speaker 3: I know those are lots of big words, but you know, none of our churches, including ourselves as leaders of churches are the cognitively coherent agents that the tradition has often assumed that we are.
• 9:15
  Speaker 3: There's fractures, fractures, fractures everywhere,
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: And I appreciate you talking about that relationality and that c sort of community and trust that churches can help to encourage and rebuild for someone who has experience, has a traumatic, traumatic experience, the spiritual side of that in which someone is affected in terms of like, why did this happen to me or to that person that I love, that creates a real question about God and the sort of like the original question said, God's role in our lives.
• 9:53
  Speaker 1: Like, why would God let that happen?
• 9:54
  Speaker 1: There's a lot of, there's a lot of questions that, that come up there mm-hmm.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: , and I've always wondered as, as I think about, especially related to vi issues of violence and trauma caused by violence, how does a faith community walk alongside somebody who's experienced that and is having these deep questions about God?
• 10:16
  Speaker 1: Because for some people they say, I can't believe in a God that would allow that to happen and that, and they stay there forever.
• 10:23
  Speaker 1: And I'm not, that's not a judgment for them, be staying in that state mm-hmm.
• 10:28
  Speaker 1: , but is there a way to encourage other ways of, of thinking about the situation?
• 10:33
  Speaker 1: And a lot of it I recognize is just you sort of have to let that person walk that journey and just be there to listen if they want, want to talk about it.
• 10:39
  Speaker 1: But, um, I was curious what, what you might have to say to that.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: It's such a great question.
• 10:45
  Speaker 3: Um, one of the things I've learned to say about trauma is the path forward is never straight.
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: Um, so there isn't ever a single way to respond.
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: Um, and it's absolutely, um, understandable that that persons who have experienced overwhelming violence or are close to someone who has, would have these theological questions about God.
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: Um, and the, it's also supported by the fact that their portions of scripture and doctrine in which God does get depicted as a God who inflicts harm upon people.
• 11:27
  Speaker 3: So there's that part of our tradition that we have to just acknowledge is there and say, this is not who we are, but this is part of our legacy and history that we have to reckon with.
• 11:40
  Speaker 3: The second piece of that response is, as I began to work on trauma, I was, it took me about a year into the work to be struck so suddenly by something that I've always known but hadn't understood in this way.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: In that at the center of the Christian story is an utterly, completely horrifying act of overwhelming violence, the cross, what other religious tradition do you have the centerpiece as an event of traumatic violence when read that way in terms of how we understand the crucifixion and, uh, who Jesus is in our midst, it's really a powerful moment to talk about, uh, God's own solidarity with, uh, victims and survivors of traumatic violence that, that go who God is in God's deepest self as revealed to us on the cross, is the person who has been so violently harmed.
• 12:45
  Speaker 3: And that as we know from the gospel story, um, that the capacity to be more than that violence is always the hope that God lays out for us.
• 12:59
  Speaker 3: But I think the solidarity, um, is absolutely crucial.
• 13:03
  Speaker 3: I'll tell a quick story.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: I am was in a women's self-defense class.
• 13:08
  Speaker 3: This was back in the, um, early two thousands at my church and I was helping to lead it.
• 13:15
  Speaker 3: Most of the women in the group, um, had been refer, uh, referred to this class, uh, because they had been survivors of domestic and sexual abuse and took place in the spring and it came time for, uh, holy Week.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: And I told the women in the group that I had to leave early because we were having our Moni Thursday service.
• 13:38
  Speaker 3: And they asked me what Moni Thursday was.
• 13:40
  Speaker 3: So that's where we go through the story of Jesus being crucified, including the Last Supper.
• 13:45
  Speaker 3: And they were like, oh my goodness, that's the only part of the gospel story I like.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: They didn't say like in the sense that, you know, isn't it great that Jesus got crucified?
• 13:55
  Speaker 3: It's the only part they identified with.
• 13:56
  Speaker 3: They all came with me to the Mondi thirsty service.
• 13:59
  Speaker 3: And, and it was a deeply powerful experience for, uh, the members of this group.
• 14:05
  Speaker 3: And, um, several of them ended up joining the church, but it was, it was through the cross and through that identification that they began to, um, incorporate the gospel message into their journey of healing.
• 14:21
  Speaker 1: So if I'm hearing you correctly then, cuz I've never thought about it this way, but I think for, I myself am privilege to not be a victim, a direct victim of violence, I've had other traumatic things happen around me in my life.
• 14:35
  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people have.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: But I think that what you're describing here about Jesus dying on the cross and that sacrifice is that Jesus was not only defined by his trauma and the things that he experienced, and similarly, those, those of us who have experienced trauma or violence are not only defined by by that ourselves.
• 14:59
  Speaker 1: And we see that reflected in the experience that, that Jesus had.
• 15:04
  Speaker 1: Is that, is, is that more or less, uh, what you're, what you're saying a little bit,
• 15:07
  Speaker 3: Um, it's, yes, it's close.
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Sort of close.
• 15:10
  Speaker 3: Lemme lemme just tweak a few things and that Yeah, please.
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: Beautiful, beautiful set of, um, images that you did.
• 15:17
  Speaker 3: First of all, I think that we have to give up.
• 15:20
  Speaker 3: Um, I have given up as a Christian theologian on seeing the cross, uh, as a sacrificial moment mm-hmm.
• 15:27
  Speaker 3: in which, you know, God is somehow orchestrating the sacrifice of Jesus in order to, you know, atone for some abstracted thing called sin that we're then magically redeemed from.
• 15:39
  Speaker 3: Um, and rather we see the cross not as something that Jesus chose or that God is orchestrating, but the cross is what happens to, to, in this case Jesus, uh, who spreads the message of love and justice as powerful as the message that he spread.
• 15:55
  Speaker 3: Secondly, I think that on the cross trauma completely becomes Jesus.
• 16:03
  Speaker 3: It's not just a side feature of what's happening.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: Mm-hmm.
• 16:07
  Speaker 3: , he dies a torture to death.
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: It.
• 16:10
  Speaker 3: And so, and that's an important point because it's not just saying, oh, look, Jesus hit a bump in the road.
• 16:16
  Speaker 3: It's saying, if Jesus reveals to us who God is in the cross, God descends to the very depths of the most horrific trauma we can imagine.
• 16:28
  Speaker 3: Um, and there's no part of Jesus that somehow left untouched by that.
• 16:33
  Speaker 3: What the resurrection shows us is that, that love and justice and, and, and, you know, the, the, the surgeon power of God's love cannot ultimately be conquered by that.
• 16:47
  Speaker 3: But it doesn't require lessening the fourth.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: In fact, the, the more one takes seriously the level of the trauma of the cross, the more the miraculous and mysterious character of the resurrection, uh, comes before you.
• 17:02
  Speaker 3: Um, and then again, that's not error straight road, but the, the, the co the persistence of love and grace in the midst of horrific violence is a mis is a wondrous thing to be able to proclaim as Christians.
• 17:16
  Speaker 2: And, and now we're entering into a, this, this episode will come out during Advent and this, this will be aired right before Christmas.
• 17:26
  Speaker 2: And so we are in a holiday right now that at, I mean, including myself, is very difficult for people who have experienced trauma or grief.
• 17:37
  Speaker 2: Uh, it's, the holidays just bring up a lot.
• 17:39
  Speaker 2: It's, we've built it up so much that this is a time where you're in contact with family that you may not necessarily want to see because they have have induced trauma upon you or you're around even churches that have induced trauma upon you because it's, you go to church when you're home or, and it can be a reminder of people and places that are, you know, no longer with us or we didn't have to begin with.
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: And so it can potentially, uh, perpetuate that trauma.
• 18:10
  Speaker 2: And so in the holidays now and in the birth of Jesus, how should we kind of think about the holidays differently as we celebrate the birth of Jesus?
• 18:23
  Speaker 2: And just before this, we even talked about the traumatic experience of the birth of Jesus.
• 18:28
  Speaker 2: And so how are we to think about that as we're kind of journeying through the liturgical calendar, we've gone through the crucifixion of the resurrection and now we're in the, we're we're back around at the birth.
• 18:41
  Speaker 2: So how, how should we think differently about that?
• 18:44
  Speaker 3: Well, you're absolutely right.
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: The, the Christmas holidays for so many people, throw them back into the situations where they may be in the church or the community or the family where they actually experienced violence or if they, if they choose not to be put in that position, experience the isolation of trauma.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: Um, because they may be alone, they may be, you know, their family may be present to them even though they're not with their family.
• 19:15
  Speaker 3: Just in their memories of this, of this sort of plum line that runs through all Christian individual's history.
• 19:22
  Speaker 3: You know, you, you can sort of trace your life, uh, through the, the regularity of Christmas along with that goes all of these stories.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: Um, so I think just being aware that, um, it is not just a, a cheery happy time, but actually a a um, a time in which our traumatic pasts, uh, either our own or those we're with, are coming to the surface.
• 19:48
  Speaker 3: You know, I used to in the, as a child, always think of like, you know, Christmas was the happy holiday, and then we get to the crucifixion, which is a, like the really hard part, but then we always get to the resurrection, which fixes everything.
• 20:05
  Speaker 3: So that's kind of the way the Christian story goes.
• 20:07
  Speaker 3: And in between you have all the stories of Jesus' life and interesting stories about healing, which are always good to read.
• 20:13
  Speaker 3: But, you know, mysterious, um, when I started working on trauma and I went back to read the Christmas story in scripture, you just see at every turn the level of violence within which God has chosen to come into the world.
• 20:35
  Speaker 3: God did not choose to come into the world in a peaceful moment, in a, um, you know, a lux, a luxurious palace somewhere in a land that had never known conflict.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: God chose to come into the world through the informed in the body of a woman who was literally traveling across, um, regional boundaries to try to get her papers.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: Think of she's a migrant, Mary and Joseph are going to register to get their papers right.
• 21:14
  Speaker 3: So they have proper place in the Roman Empire.
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: They're poor.
• 21:20
  Speaker 3: Um, and you know, most like how shocking is it that the Inkeeper says no and sends them to the barn?
• 21:29
  Speaker 3: You don't have to have had a baby.
• 21:31
  Speaker 3: Although it, it adds another edge to it.
• 21:33
  Speaker 3: If you have to imagine being born on a dirty floor covered with straw and just what that experience alone would've been like.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: Um, but you quickly also in the story, uh, you moved to the story of the shepherds who, when the angels come to them, they are afraid.
• 21:52
  Speaker 3: Like this is a happening in an area of the world that has been taken over by Rome.
• 22:00
  Speaker 3: It's a, it's a colonial state.
• 22:03
  Speaker 3: Um, you're under constant threat of death if you're not a, a quote Roman citizen, and suddenly the sky bursts open and these voices start coming down with you, you're not gonna greet that as something necessarily positive.
• 22:15
  Speaker 3: It's, it's not surprising that the shepherds were terrified because they lived in a constant state of terror.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: And that is the world into which Jesus came.
• 22:25
  Speaker 3: And then what we often overlook is immediately following the story of Jesus' birth comes the story.
• 22:34
  Speaker 3: Uh, and we're not sure about its historicity, but it's necessary for the gospel writers in terms of the narrative of Jesus' birth, the slaughter of the innocence.
• 22:43
  Speaker 3: There's mass slaughter of children that takes place under the sword of Rome attached to this birth.
• 22:53
  Speaker 3: So this birth happens in the midst of just unimaginable violence.
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: The killing of boy children just slaughtering them, taking from their mother's arms and killing them.
• 23:06
  Speaker 3: So what does that say about, you know, the birth of Jesus and how God is choosing to come into the world, choose God is not coming into the world leisurely, um, but God is coming with a message of love and justice and hope in the midst of, it's hard to imagine a worse situation.
• 23:27
  Speaker 3: And, and that is where we start the Christian story about Christmas and kinda throw back on your heels a little bit, you know,
• 23:35
  Speaker 2: .
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: .
• 23:37
  Speaker 2: Um, and, and I just got back from Israel Palestine and driving through, I mean, it's all mountains and hills.
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 23:48
  Speaker 2: And you imagine the travel, you imagine, I mean, being on an animal, going through the mountains and going through what is, I mean, wilderness really and beautiful, but also just in that, just in that journey could be traumatic.
• 24:09
  Speaker 2: But then also seeing where that is now and seeing the generational trauma and the tense, the, the, the tenseness that you hold.
• 24:19
  Speaker 2: I mean, I kind of see it now as analogous to, you know, in this country where guns are everywhere, there is a tenseness within our bodies that we are almost hyper aware that if a pop goes on, if a firework goes off, you're just immediately triggered.
• 24:39
  Speaker 2: And I, and, and being there and also seeing just the tenseness and like, just every day you're living in a traumatic environment depending on who you are, but that generational trauma that holds onto that, but like our trauma that we carry mm-hmm.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: That even inflicts our bodies and how tense we are.
• 25:04
  Speaker 2: And, and I just imagine that during the birth of Jesus too and how to even birth a child that where your body's already tense and you're, you're already in a state mentally of you're on edge.
• 25:21
  Speaker 2: And I remember seeing a painting of the shepherds at the, at the, uh, the shepherd fields in Bethlehem and how great they depicted their faces of utter terror.
• 25:35
  Speaker 2: Um, and it wasn't awe, you know, how we're like, oh, they were in awe of the angel.
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: And I was like, no, they were freaking terrified.
• 25:42
  Speaker 2: They were.
• 25:43
  Speaker 2: They like that picture.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: They looked real scared.
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: And it just reminded me of yeah, of what you were saying that, you know, how we carry our trauma and, and, and all the things that our body does physically during this time too.
• 25:59
  Speaker 2: I'm always tense during the holidays and just to pray that one day we can kind of release all that tension.
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: And how we do that I think is, you know, my, my prayer always is, is how we do that.
• 26:13
  Speaker 2: Um, and so I really appreciate what you're saying about this time of the year.
• 26:18
  Speaker 3: Oh, that's, that's so beautiful what you, what you just said and, and what you named is the level of cultural, pervasive violence and its threat.
• 26:34
  Speaker 3: Um, and when you look at the definition of trauma, it's not just people who have actually under undergone experiences of traumatic violence that actually says have undergone or been threatened with.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: So the threat of violence can still invoke, provoke all of these reactions that we've been talking about and it lives in our bodies.
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: Uh, if I had one, uh, book on trauma to recommend, it would be Bessel VanDerKolk's.
• 27:03
  Speaker 3: Uh, the Body Keeps the Score, which is a brilliant overview of the ways in which violence affects our bodies and rewires our brains.
• 27:14
  Speaker 3: Um, and, uh, that is context into which God came, what a odd thing.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: You know, usually when we think about God, um, in the, in the Western culture with its roots in the Roman empires, we think of God as that imperial sovereign that hovers above us and you know, is beyond us and rules us.
• 27:38
  Speaker 3: This is the exact opposite of that.
• 27:40
  Speaker 3: This is God who descends into the midst of this terror and brings love and brings life not by standing away and throwing something at it, but actually becoming it.
• 27:57
  Speaker 3: And, uh, that's where the story of trauma moves from not just being a psychological story, which it is, but also a deeply theological story.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: And it's the life and situation in which we live in the United States today.
• 28:13
  Speaker 3: And just like the story of the birth of Jesus, where you stand, what your identity is, where how much power you have, uh, affects whether or not you're gonna end up in the in and protected or you're gonna end up in the barn having a baby without any protection around you.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: And, and we have to always be cognizant of that, especially at Christmas of your, your position in society impacts how you experience traumatic violence that we all live with daily.
• 28:40
  Speaker 1: Well, we are so grateful to you for taking this time to, to be with us and think through these questions and think about trauma in the context of the birth of Jesus and in the Christmas story.
• 28:53
  Speaker 1: And we'll also be sure to have in the show notes, some links to two books that you have authored, uh, trauma and Grace Theology in a Ruptured World, as well as call it Grace, finding Meaning in a Ruptured World.
• 29:08
  Speaker 1: And Serene, thank you again so much for coming on the podcast.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: Well, thank you all.
• 29:14
  Speaker 3: This is a wonderful conversation and I wish you the fullness of the incarnate love of God, that experience, uh, all of oh, through these, uh, celebratory times and traumatic times.
• 29:29
  Speaker 3: So blessings to you both.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: Yeah, blessings to you two.
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: Thanks everyone for listening to episode 108, and it is our holiday episode with the Reverend Dr.
• 29:42
  Speaker 2: Serene Jones.
• 29:43
  Speaker 2: And thank you to Serene for being with us this week to talk about the holidays and to talk about trauma.
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: I know we've delved into a lot of hard topics this holiday season, but we are very thankful and we hope if you are experiencing trauma or the holidays are really not such a good time for you, we're sending prayers to you and sending love your way because the holidays can be hard.
• 30:07
  Speaker 2: But thanks for listening.
• 30:09
  Speaker 2: We hope you subscribe and we hope you follow, and we hope you check out our website at a matter of fate podcast.com.
• 30:16
  Speaker 2: If you have a question for us, send the fate podcast at P G s a.org and we will talk to you again next week.