Good and Beautiful and Kind: Becoming Whole in a Fractured World

by Rich Villodas

lips. One of the ways to live like Jesus is to internalize Scripture so that when we are cut, it spills out.

The gospel says that Christ is victorious over everything, including the possessed powers.

He died to destroy the work of Satan and disarm the powers. And the powers are defeated, though it still looks as if they are victorious in the world. This is the remarkable mystery of the Cross. In the Crucifixion, Jesus looks like a tragic failure, but he is the victorious one.

Our woundedness or trauma has a way of hindering us from freely receiving and giving love.

What is certain is that we are surrounded by pain from the past and are very likely carrying it in the present. Untended, the wounds we bear can lead to anxious reactivity and an inability to be truly “here,” which often results in diverse attempts at suppressing our pain through escapism or the creation of alternate interpretations that we choose to believe instead of our own.

will always raise self-protective barriers in the presence of trauma. As a result, our ability to love well is severely compromised.

Our exploration in this chapter is to produce compassion toward ourselves and empathy toward others, which are indispensable practices of love.

The more we know about another’s story, the harder it is to hate or harm that person—including ourselves.

The word trauma is a late-seventeenth-century word, Greek in origin, that literally means “wound.” People who carry trauma have been somehow wounded,

Author and therapist Resmaa Menakem described trauma as “a wordless story our body tells itself about what is safe and what is a threat.”[5]

a wound, the state of woundedness, and the story that arises from living in that state.

Research has shown us in recent years that painful events get passed down to us even on an epigenetic, cellular level. We all have positive and negative legacies we must grapple with. As we say at our church, Jesus might live in your heart, but Grandpa lives in your bones.

But we are faced with two options: We can be wounded wounders or become wounded healers.

Traumatized people often carry great shame because they have been convinced that they are responsible for their wounds. This is almost never the case, particularly when the pain is the result of someone else’s sin.

Shame turns us in on ourselves, closing us off to others. It’s impossible to be established in love when we are rooted in shame. Why? Because true love requires vulnerability.

Making coherent sense of our stories is not simply about giving a chronological overview of our wounds. It’s about being able to give expression to our story—especially the painful parts—in an unanxious, fully present, condemnation-free manner.

Theologian Shelly Rambo described trauma as a “living and intrusive reality.”[14] Previous events intrude on us, sometimes without a moment’s notice. When this happens, there is usually a physiological response.

Our bodies contain knowledge that often takes our rational minds hours, days, weeks, or even months to decipher.

The contemplation of Jesus as the traumatized yet risen Lord is important for anyone looking to understand trauma from a Christ-centered way.

In his wounds, Jesus shows himself to be one who identifies—even in a resurrected state—with humanity. Additionally, the wounds Jesus carries speak powerfully to his followers. We are all called to be wounded healers, but the first part of our healing requires us to be present to the wounds we have carried.

First, it reminds me that our wounds don’t have the last word. In Jesus’s body, we simultaneously see broken humanity connected to but subjected to his glorious resurrected reality. One of the great promises of the New Testament is that this resurrection life is a reality that we can begin to live now.

Jesus shamelessly retains the marks because they have been reconfigured into something miraculous, something indescribable.

In God’s hands, our wounds become sources of healing, for ourselves and others. God wastes nothing, not even our deepest pain. Instead, the wounds that mark us are given a new narrative.

Finally, the wounds on Jesus’s resurrected body serve as a much-needed reminder that each one of us have been or will be wounded in some way. This awareness is necessary to deepening our commitment to becoming a healing presence in this world.

The prayer that transforms the world is prayer that transforms us in Christ. Prayers exclusively oriented around what’s happening out there (with them, in the world) mislead us into believing that the problem is rarely, if ever, in here (with us, in our inward selves).

As a culture, “prayer” has become code for a sentimentalism that is mildly sympathetic to tragedy but is helpless or even apathetic to producing real transformation.

Prayer is not about throwing holy words at God; it is about embracing a new way of seeing. Prayer is not aspirational fantasy; it is the opening of ourselves to the reality of God’s presence, an act that forms us in love. Prayer is meant to be where love is nurtured. It’s in the true praying moment that God heightens our awareness that we are already enveloped in his loving union, which enables us to extend that love to others. We are shown the wealth of abundance that has always surrounded us in Christ. This path is the way out of incurvatus in se; it is resistance to the possessed powers and is the place God forms us to live beyond our wounds.

Contemplative prayer is the unhurried opening of oneself to God through silence, Scripture, and self-examination.

To contemplate something is to fix your attention on it in a curious and deliberate manner.

Contemplation is not truly possible without a prolonged sense of attentiveness. Our pace must slow down. This is particularly difficult in a skimming and scrolling culture, hence the word unhurried.

In this act of mutual beholding, the defenses we have built up come down slowly as we open our inner space to God’s grace and love. That’s what I mean by opening oneself to God.

As we gaze into the mystery of God’s love in silence, unhurriedly listen to God’s Word through Scripture, and attend to our own interior worlds, we position ourselves to live from a deeper center. As we give ourselves over to this way of being, we position ourselves to be changed—changed in a way that the interior fractures are gradually made whole.

Biblical Idea #1: God Is Closer to Us Than We Are to Ourselves

God is close, yet we are far. God is inward, yet we live fixated on the outward. God is present, but we remain absent.

grow in awareness of God’s nearness.

Biblical Idea #2: Christ’s Work on the Cross Opens the Door to Accessing the Presence of God

communion with God is not some kind of human achievement but is always a gift from him—a gift most profoundly seen in Christ’s work on the cross.

The Cross tore the curtain down so that we could meet with God.

Biblical Idea #3: We Are Invited to Dwell with and in God

Over and over, the invitation from Jesus is to dwell, abide, remain, and stay with him. This is the essence of contemplative prayer. In contemplative prayer, our aim is not to do something for God, or even gain something from him; it’s simply to be with God.

What is a mystic, then? Simply someone who takes the radically available presence of God seriously.

practicing contemplation can permanently and positively change our lives and our world. One of the chief benefits of contemplative prayer is the lowering of anxiety and anxious reactivity.

The problem with all this is that often our lives are not saturated with silence, which means our speaking often comes from a place not rooted in God. Instead of our words carrying power to expose the powers, announce the kingdom of God, and gently encourage those bruised by life, they too often resemble the words of the fallen world system. The question, then, is, What do we need? My answer is contemplative prayer; we need more silence; we need a life of being with God.

humility is not just doing a lowly task; it’s a life committed to the hard task of lowering one’s defenses.

But the angle of humility that we desperately need for our fractured world is seeing it as the ability to live freely from protecting the false self—living free from the defensiveness that closes us in on ourselves.

The true self is the place within us where we are found securely wrapped in God’s love and have no need to project or protect it. The true self finds its identity in something much deeper than human words of approval or criticism. The false self is incapable of this level of freedom, but it is where most of the world lives from. Humility, then, is the ongoing commitment to live from the true self.

Poverty of spirit is living detached from the incessant need to cling to things that prop up our false self.

The poor in spirit don’t need to protect an idealized version of themselves.

when we live according to a healthy detachment, we can be present with others. Our sense of well-being is not established through the praise or criticism of others. It’s found in being claimed by God.

The discipline of not having the last word is humility in a nutshell.