From Volume 10, Number 3, Winter 2004

Healing Wounded History
Part 1

 Wholeness. It’s what draws many people to the St. Aidan Way, regardless of how it is described: trying to piece together life in a coherent whole, recognizing we are part of something greater than we, but unable to make the connections.

 The hunger for wholeness shouts our own fragmentation, that we are a wounded people who live in a wounded world. The comprehensive scope of the Aidan Way includes an element given to Wholeness, but that is focused on how we minister wholeness in our lives. It is the entire Way that addresses the fundamental woundedness at the heart of creation.

 To help us develop and fine-tune our personal Way of Life and to enable us how to see the Way in the larger context of local Christian community we are beginning a new series in The Wild Goose on how we undertake the path to wholeness. The title of the series is taken from the book by the Rev’d Russ Parker, Healing Wounded History. Russ is one of the founders of the St. Aidan Trust and author of several books on healing. He is director of the Acorn Christian Trust in the UK. This book, now available in the US from Pilgrim Press, looks at reconciliation and healing of communities through the wounded stories of groups at many levels.

 As was mentioned above, the hunger for wholeness implies that we are not whole, that our lives are fragmented, wounded both internally and externally. This is true even  within the Church that is called by God to be a community of ministers of reconciliation. The fragmentation of the Church institutionally into a multiplicity of denominations and spiritually into competing and intolerant spiritualities is more than just a sad and frustrating circumstance, it is dangerous to the well-being of the members of the Church and to the lost who come in seeking healing and restoration. This danger is best expressed in the truism that a wounded animal is a dangerous animal. Wounded people wound others. Victims of abuse as children can become abusers as adults. Wounded communities also wound their members.

 In order to address the movement from woundedness to wholeness we need to look back to the source of all wounding which we have as the story of the Fall of Man in the 3rd chapter of the book of Genesis. The approach taken to the story is not exegetical but a commentary on meaning that looks at the story through the lens of the whole story of God’s dealing with humanity as recorded in the Bible.

 To put the Fall in its context we begin at what is sometimes called the “second creation story” which is found in Genesis 2:4-25. Here God creates Adam (’adham) of the dust of the ground (’adhamah). In the land of Eden (Heb. delight) God plants a garden and places his new creature there. As the story continues we learn that Adam’s role is to tend the garden. That garden is all that is needed for life. Adam names the beasts and is finally given a companion like him, a woman who is later named Eve. This section ends with the comment that these first humans were “naked, and were not ashamed.”

 In this garden two trees are mentioned, the Tree of Life and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. It’s worth noting at the outset that apples and sex, two items popularly associated with the story have no mention at all throughout the whole narrative. Adam, as the gardener, is to tend the garden and is free to eat whatever he finds there with the exception of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The state of this first couple as naked and not ashamed speaks of a vulnerability and child-like dependency. Their recognizing the sound of the Lord walking in the garden after their disobedience hints that it was familiar to them, that perhaps God came to them at the end of each day to instruct them about this new world God had put into their hands.

 It is important to note that the one prohibition was not about a tree of knowledge, as if human curiosity and desire to learn was a wrong thing. It was a particular knowledge, a moral knowledge associated with the tree. The opening chapter of Genesis details a moral pronouncement over creation as God calls his work “good.” Creation and its interrelationships are ultimately moral issues and this morality would be opened to them in their discipleship with God. The prohibited fruit represented a way to short cut this relationship, and according to the serpent’s words, to move from the role of dependency to equality.

 The key to this paradise was the network of interdependent relationships that were derivative from the fundamental relationship with God. God had given the human race authority over the earth, dominion over the beasts, to bring order and to tend lovingly. So long as the first humans remained in relationship with God, then all subsidiary relationships were whole and well. But there was this serpent...

 The temptation to be like God, to break the subservient role was a test that the humans failed. One can almost hear the fracturing of relationships throughout the whole created order. The first visible fracture is within human nature. Their eyes being opened to their folly, they are ashamed of their vulnerability and seek to cover it by their rudimentary clothing. The second is a sign of their broken relationship with God; they hide. The next fracture shown is that between people, the blaming. Adam seems better at this than Eve for he attempts to pass the blame on to both Eve and God in one sentence!

The final fracture illustrated is normally referred to as God’s curse of the ground. But this is probably not an accurate label. It seems not so much that God is placing a curse where none existed as simply pointing out that Adam, being in authority over creation, is now a curse on creation. “Cursed is the ground because of you.” The systems of creation still function. Adam’s body continues to work, his intelligence to reason. The land is still fertile, the earth holds together. Adam and Eve even maintain a community of sort, but now it is disordered involving domination and held together by a biological function that was ever intended to be secondary to the fellowship of human beings in wholeness.

 As we look upon the story in Genesis through this lens, the full breadth of the fracture begins to show itself. Even the concept of “total depravity,” never a part of Celtic Christian spirituality, makes a sort of sense —  not as the utter ruin of the imago dei, but the declaration that there is no part of existence that has escaped wounding by sin.

 As nothing has escaped the Fall, so no part of our life is free from the fragmentation of a wounded creation. However, what began in Adam is being reversed in Christ. In the death and resurrection of Jesus a new humanity is offered, and the members of the old may enter, but only by dying to the wounded human nature and being born anew in Christ. This new creation is a work in progress and involves the taking up of the wounded stories of creation into the redemption of Christ.

 The rest of this series will look at how, in the new creation, we can start the healing of wounded histories in individuals, communities, institutions and in the creation itself. The Aidan Way is one tool (among many) for this work. If there is one bit of encouraging news in the task that lays before us it is that just as the one sin led to a multiplicity of fractures, so the work of healing in one place can send waves of healing into many others.