Crossing the Threshold: Trauma, Healing, & Divine Action

Photo by Guillaume de Germain on Unsplash

Talk about trauma has become quite popular in recent years. This is true not only in secular institutions, but in the church. A largely positive development, the new emphasis on trauma has resulted in a plethora of new treatment options and therapies that were not even dreamt of a few decades ago. But for all of our newfound sophistication about trauma, there remain some stories that complicate the dominant narrative about its healing.

This essay will sketch recent developments in our understanding of trauma by exploring the work of Besel van der Kolk, a leading physician and popularizer of trauma therapies. Parallel to his account, we will introduce a personal narrative which stretches the bounds of contemporary notions of healing from trauma. World War 2 veteran and former prisoner of war Louie Zamperini’s miraculous healing invites a broader understanding of how people heal from severe trauma, while avoiding the mistake of pitting science versus faith. The work of the late William (“Billy”) Abraham will shed light on Zamperini’s story from a theological perspective, and help bridge the chasm between Zamperini’s story and van der Kolk’s account of trauma.

To begin, we turn to a highly influential account of trauma’s effects and its healing.

Van der Kolk and the Trauma Revolution

A leading voice in the impact and treatment of trauma in recent years is Besel van der Kolk, especially through his highly popular The Body Keeps the Score. Van der Kolk was one of the first physicians to recognize and treat what came to be known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through his work with veterans and abuse survivors. In the opening chapters he describes how deep trauma’s effects go:

“Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think” (The Body Keeps the Score, 21).

One of his chief insights, reflected in the title of the book, is that trauma becomes encoded in the body itself. Western anthropology has long had dualistic tendencies, but trauma research has made clear that even trauma that is predominantly psychological in origin can have severe physical consequences. This means the body also must be healed along with the mind. “For real change to take place,” he notes, “the body needs to learn that the danger has passed and to live in the reality of the present” (The Body Keeps the Score, 21). For Christians, this should not be surprising, as we worship an incarnate Lord who came to save us not as a disembodied spirit but as a fully human person, “like us in every way but sin” (Hebrews 4:15).

Among trauma's most pernicious consequences is the loss of agency. As Van der Kolk puts it, “Trauma robs you of the feeling that you are in charge of yourself.” The restoration of agency is thus part and parcel to healing, which demands that the survivor “reestablish ownership of [their] body and [their] mind” (The Body Keeps the Score, 205). Followers of Jesus in the Wesleyan tradition, who believe that grace enables our response to God’s initiative, may be especially comfortable with the notion that agency and healing are connected. 

Van der Kolk has been influential in what has been, in popular discourse, described as becoming “trauma-informed.” To be sure, much has been gained from his insights, and he points to many possible avenues of healing for those who have experienced trauma. He describes a wide range of traditional and non-traditional therapies, including talk therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, EMDR, yoga, and even group activities that engage the body and other persons. “Athletics, playing music, dancing, and theatrical performances all promote agency and community” (The Body Keeps the Score, 357).

Notably absent from Van der Kolk's account is a role for religious faith. There are no entries in the index for either “religion” or “spirituality.” For followers of Jesus, this begs the question: could the healing resources of the church have any bearing on recovery from trauma?

The astonishing story of Louis Zamperini provides an important case study.

The Miraculous Healing of Louis Zamperini

It is difficult to imagine a person who survived as much trauma over the course of a few years as did Zamperini. As recounted first in the book and then the movie Unbroken, Zamperini was an Olympic-caliber runner whose career was cut short by World War 2. A bombardier on a B-24, Zamperini and his crew were shot down in the Pacific theater and the three survivors drifted for weeks in the ocean. He and the pilot made it through the ordeal on the raft by eating birds and fish and relying on providential rainfall to keep them alive. A third crewmember who survived the initial crash died, but Zamperini and his pilot eventually reached the Marshall Islands.

After surviving more than six weeks adrift, itself a remarkable feat of bravery, Zamperini’s suffering was just beginning. The Japanese captors took a special interest in him when they learned who he was, and one guard in particular—known as “The Bird” to the Prisoners of War (POWs)—took sadistic pleasure in continually targeting Zamperini for physical and psychological torture. Random beatings and deprivation took a toll on Zamperini, but he endured until the war ended. He returned home a hero, but his running days were over for his ravaged body. He married his sweetheart and they began to build a life together, but Zamperini was not well. He was haunted by nightmares about the Bird, failed to hold down a job to support his young family, and to cope with all this he drank heavily. “I’d always known that I’d come home from the war with a problem,” he wrote later, “but I had never been willing to ask for help—from anyone” (Don’t Give Up, 133).

His desperate wife convinced him to go hear a young preacher named Billy Graham, whose revival was catching on in Los Angeles. They actually ended up going on two separate nights; the first night, they left early, with Zamperini enraged by the sermon. But his wife convinced him to return. The next evening, Graham’s message seemed to be directed right at Zamperini, and he remembered a promise he made on the raft: a promise to God that, if God let him live, he would serve God the rest of his life. He had the last flashback of his life at the Billy Graham crusade that evening: “...on a clear night in downtown Los Angeles, Louis felt rain falling” (Unbroken, 375).

As Zamperini described it, he got up with his wife, intending to leave, “[b]ut when I reached the aisle I could no longer resist. I just let my instinct take over and instead of leaving I went forward. Turning toward the stage was the crucial moment, the fork in the road. At the stage I fell to my knees, emotionally overcome. I asked for forgiveness and invited Christ into my life” (Don’t Give Up, 133).

Feeling what his biographer described as “supremely alive,” Zamperini returned home to realize that for the first time in years he had no desire to drink. He poured every drop of alcohol in the house down the drain, and even threw away his cigarettes. Most incredibly, he had the first peaceful night’s sleep he had known in years. He woke “feeling cleansed,” and for the first time in five years the Bird was not in his dreams. In fact, he never dreamed about the Bird again. Perhaps even more astonishingly, the hatred he had nurtured for the Bird—even going so far as planning to travel to Japan to murder him—was gone. “My lifelong desire for revenge had evaporated,” he described later in his life (Don’t Give Up, 136).

Zamperini’s story is profound, and both Unbroken and his own Don’t Give Up are worth reading to hear a fuller rendering. For the purposes of this essay, though, it is significant that Zamperini’s healing makes little sense on Van Der Kolk’s account. Severe trauma is something that generally takes significant time and effort to overcome, and often a combination of medication (though Van Der Kolk stresses this aspect very little), various therapies, and other bodily/communal practices are required. 

How can we account for Zamperini’s dramatic—and permanent—healing from years of traumatic experiences? The work of the late Billy Abraham provides a clue.

Abraham on Revelation and its Aftermath

Professor Abraham had a diverse body of work over his decades of teaching and writing, but a common theme—going back to his dissertation at Oxford under Basil Mitchell—was religious epistemology and divine action. In his brief but potent Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation, he makes a case for revelation as legitimate knowledge and lays the groundwork for the canonical theism project. Abraham’s description of divine revelation goes a long way toward accounting for the incredible change that Zamperini experienced.

“‘Revelation’ is what we might call a threshold concept,” says Abraham, “it opens up a whole new realm of reality, depending on the particularities of the case” (Crossing the Threshold, 86). For Abraham, it is almost impossible to overstate how powerful revelation can be in one’s life. Where even committed Christians often see faith as one aspect of their life side-by-side with work, home, relationships, etc., Abraham argues, “the experience of revelation is a world-constituting experience” (Crossing the Threshold, 86). Experiencing God often is not something that fits within an existing frame of reference; it causes a complete reframing of one’s life, i.e., it “is often a matter of dramatic conversion” (Crossing the Threshold, 87). This means that revelation does not merely affect that part of life that we name as “religion,” but rather serves as “a world-constituting experience for the believer” (Crossing the Threshold, 92).

Across the Threshold—But What Next?

Interestingly, Zamperini himself used the language of revelation to describe the change that God wrought in his life:

“I’ve often been asked what that moment of transformation feels like. Epiphany, revelation, call it what you want: It’s different for everyone. But for me...I felt weightless. Suddenly calm. I was no longer fighting myself. And my burdens lifted” (Don’t Give Up, 134).

Short of divine action, it is difficult to account for such a sudden healing from severe trauma in ways that would make sense on Van Der Kolk’s description. But even his biographer described Zamperini’s transformation in biblical terms: “In a single, silent moment, his rage, his fear, his humiliation and helplessness, had fallen away. That morning, he believed, he was a new creation” (Unbroken, 376).

One is compelled to ask, though, what about the next morning? Today many Christians are skeptical of dramatic conversion stories. For example, Wesleyans fight over the import of our founder’s Aldersgate experience to this day. Mainliners look down on megachurches that rebaptize people raised in traditional churches and claim them as “conversions.” Coming out of my own fundamentalist background, I couldn’t tell you which altar call is the one that “counted.” Thus it is a natural question to interrogate Zamperini’s story and ask, what came after the threshold was crossed?

First, it is worth noting that, despite popular caricatures of evangelicalism and revival experiences, Zamperini was told on the night of his conversion that he would soon face many trials of this newfound faith. Writing about Billy Graham's assistant, who spoke with him after he came forward for prayer, Zamperini recalled:

“He also made it clear that I was just at the beginning, and that the act of changing my life had been just one moment. I would face many challenges in the moments and days to come—a situation that is hardly exclusive to faith-based transformations...[t]transitions are unbalancing. Cautionary. Disorienting. I was told that I'd be tempted by my old ways and have doubts” (Don’t Give Up, 135).

He also described an inner sense—the witness of the Holy Spirit, perhaps—that his new lease on life would require constant vigilance. “I wanted to survive,” he said, “and somehow I knew that to maintain this sudden inner peace I would have to give up the habits I’d developed that weren’t working” (Don’t Give Up, 133-134). With an athlete’s sense of constant striving, he put it even more succinctly: “All major changes take daily work. It’s not happy magic all the time” (Don’t Give Up, 139).

Abraham on Revelation’s Aftermath

It is worth noting at this point that Abraham’s account of revelation also discusses what happens after the threshold has been crossed. The dramatic conversion that often accompanies divine revelation both demands and makes possible virtues of courage and constancy to continue on the new pathways which God has made possible: “It calls for a response of total and faithful allegiance, even to the point of death. Revelation naturally evokes a response of loyalty, trust, and persistence that must endure trial and testing” (Crossing the Threshold, 87). Note how this aligns both with what Zamperini is told upon his conversion and his own sense of what his new life demanded of him.

As with his running career, the development of that persistence required more than simply willpower, though, it meant training. Abraham notes, “Thus the virtues are caught more than they are taught; they are learned by imitation over time in communities of intellectual virtue” (Crossing the Threshold, 188). One way Zamperini lived this out was by pouring himself into others. Specifically, he founded a camp for troubled young men and gave much of the rest of his life to forming them in the crucible of virtuous community of the sort that Abraham described.

A Common Thread: the Recovery of Agency

One aspect that van der Kolk’s account of healing and Zamperini’s story have in common is the rediscovery of agency. Trauma leads to feelings of powerlessness, and healing from trauma requires a restoration of one’s sense of self, the reclaimed belief that one can act meaningfully in their own lives. Van Der Kolk describes this in relation to yoga, theater, and other activities that his research has shown to be effective in healing: “Children and adults alike need to experience how rewarding it is to work at the edge of their abilities,” he notes. “Resilience is the product of agency: knowing that you can make a difference” (The Body Keeps the Score, 357).

In Zamperini’s narration of his own conversion, recovering agency was a crucial part of his story. For years he had been drifting; he was unable to hold down a job, drinking to cope with his fears and anxieties, and haunted by his ordeal as a POW and the loss of his running career. He was not an active participant in his own life. Drawing on a running analogy, he recalled that part of his conversion involved reclaiming his own potentiality. “The revelation was that I had to be the starter,” he said (Don’t Give Up, 135). 

This fits well, of course, within a Wesleyan frame of reference. In a Wesleyan view, divine grace is not the overwhelming of one’s will or the loss of agency, but rather the experience of divine love and newfound response-ability. (See, for instance, Randy Maddox’s classic Responsible Grace.) Thus, when Abraham notes, “revelation will necessarily illuminate every aspect of one’s existence,” Wesleyans would recognize that this includes personal agency (Crossing the Threshold, 87).

Conclusion: Toward a Broader Understand of Healing

Van der Kolk’s work, and the broader trend towards trauma-informed institutions, leaders, and processes, has been largely positive in its impact. But his predominantly secular account leaves little room for the dramatic healing of someone like Louis Zamperini. This suggests that both Christian and secular individuals in the healing professions should consider making space for divine action in their accounts of healing from trauma.

None of this means, of course, that Christians should pray instead of seek counseling or take communion in lieu of taking an SSRI or other medication. Nothing in what has preceded necessitates pitting medical or scientific treatment against religious or spiritual practice. To do so rehashes the foolish dichotomy that modernists and fundamentalists drew between science and faith in the early 20th century. (Sadly, stances taken by some contemporary Christians against vaccines, masks, and other public health measures seem to be traversing these well-trodden paths.)

Rather, Zamperini’s story invites us to expand our understanding of how healing from severe trauma can happen and to include spiritual practices and religious community in any schema of possible therapies. For followers of Jesus, Zamperini’s story invites us to take seriously that there are dimensions of healing to which modern medicine has little access, but nonetheless are well documented in the form of testimony. We can hope for the profound and the sudden miracle, while also trusting that God has inspired medicines, innovative treatments, and various therapies that heal over time and with effort. As Zamperini illustrates, even a miraculous healing may require constant, grace-enabled vigilance.

Trauma does not get the last word with us. No matter how deeply scarred our lives are by evil, God’s grace has the final say over our lives, and even our wounds. Whether in this life or in the world to come, Christians hold that God “is making all things new” (Revelation 21:5). But until the Kingdom is present in its fullness, we will contend with sin, death, and trauma. Whatever means God utilizes to heal the wounds that trauma inflicts upon our lives and communities, we can be grateful that “who the Son sets free, is free indeed” (John 8:36).

Rev. Dr. Drew McIntyre is an Elder in the Western North Carolina Conference and the pastor of Grace United Methodist Church in Greensboro, NC. To read more from Drew, visit his blog: https://drewbmcintyre.com/.

Works Cited
Abraham, William J. Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2006. 
Hillenbrand, Laura. Unbroken: An Extraordinary True Story of Courage and Survival. New York: Random House, 2010. 
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. Penguin Books, 2015. 
Zamperini, Louis, and David Rensin. Don't Give Up, Don’t Give in: Lessons from an Extraordinary Life. New York: Dey St., 2014.