We are growing in our understanding of the long-term effects trauma and moral injury can have on bodies and spirits, including those within our own congregations. In this important and tender episode, Brandon and Whitney talk with former Army Chaplain and Episcopal priest David Peters about the ways faith communities can lean on Jesus’s life story to respond with love and care to these wounds. David’s latest book, Post-Traumatic Jesus: Reading the Gospel with the Wounded, offers a portrait of Jesus as living and speaking into a world that was familiar with trauma, from war to oppression to political violence, and reading the Gospels through that lens can create space for healing.
64: Post-Traumatic Jesus - A Conversation with David Peters
Host: Brandon Nappi with Whitney Coe
Guest: David Peters
Production: Goodchild Media
Instagram: @theleadersway.podcast
berkeleydivinity.yale.edu/podcast
Brandon: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast. I’m so excited to be here with Whitney Kimble Coe.
Whitney: We are back.
B: We are back. I am feeling the fall vibes, Whitney. I’ve got Folklore and Evermore on constantly, just on repeat. That’s Taylor Swift for the three people in the world who don’t understand those references, but I’m so excited. I feel like I was built for fall. How are you, how are you doing?
W: Yeah. Oh, I love fall and I have felt a nibble in the air. Um, and that’s something I love about new England is we still do have four seasons for the most part, um, up here and fall up here is really tremendous. You know, I’m from Tennessee; fall in the Smokies is gorgeous, but, um, there’s something special about new England and it starts a little sooner. And I want it to last longer so that we can listen to evermore and folklore and feel all those fun vibes. Um, I’m also listening to that. So is my 12 year old.
B: Oh, good. You know, I mean, we’ll have a moment, I presume, in the next generation or two, that might not be quite as attuned to Taylor’s every …
W: I don’t know. She’s got many eras …
B: Pumpkin spice lattes or … it’s not pumpkin spice lattes; I failed there. Um, what’s her favorite cookie? It’s the, um …
W: Is it the … I have no idea.
B: It’s a chai tea latte cookie.
W: I love that you know that. That’s awesome.
B: I think I got it right.
W: That’s awesome.
B: Do you have any special like fall foods here? In New Haven. Are you a foodie?
W: No, I’m not. Gosh, I hate to admit it. I’m just not a foodie. I appreciate pretty much anything anyone puts in front of me. I’m just grateful for the effort and usually for whatever I’m eating at that moment, but I know you’re a foodie, so you might ought to tell us what are some of the fall foods you love.
B: Well, I mean, I think I am a foodie. I don’t think I can deny that. Oh, although I do, I do eat whatever’s in front of me. I’m not fussy. If my children are listening, they’re gonna completely disagree with that. But no, on September 1st, we rolled out a butternut squash soup. Just, I mean, that’s like the taste of fall for me.
W: That sounds delicious. I’m sure I could learn how to make that.
B: Oh, it’s so simple. Yeah. Yeah. You roast some squash and you put it in a blender with your favorite stock of choice. Some white beans. Like it’s so simple. It’s also pesto season in my world. Basil is the only food that I grow in my garden. My garden is mostly, you know, hundreds of flowers, right? But it’s basil harvesting time.
W: Oh, I do love basil too. And pesto.
B: Like every meal is, is like green, has some fair amount of greenness.
W: Yeah. Well, maybe I am a foodie. I have opinions about these things. So this is … that’s good. That’s good to hear.
You know what else I think of during the fall is like some of my favorite fall movies, like You’ve Got Mail and When Harry met Sally, Practical Magic–these things are already queued up for me. So we’ll be watching those at my household very soon.
B: Thank you for naming falls as part of the–movies as part of the fall vibes. My favorite fall movie is also my favorite movie, which is Dan in RealLlife. Do you know this movie?
W: No, I don’t.
B: It’s a, it’s a deep cut, but it’s, it’s one that we watch every year. And it is – it’s got Steve Carell, and Steve Carell has lost his wife to cancer, has three daughters, and he’s part of a big family. He’s a journalist and the family is all coming together to close up their summer cottage in Rhode Island. So fall is in the air and it sort of marks this transition from summer to fall. And it’s … I mean, it’s a romantic comedy.
W: Okay. Oh, well that’s, that’s great. I’m totally adding that to my queue. I think of, um, Meg Ryan coming out her New York city apartment in You’ve Got Mail in this really cute, like wool skirt and, and leggings and, um, loafer shoes and she’s picking up, you know, her pumpkin spice latte, which gives her an absolutely defining sense of self. And then she heads over to her bookstore. It’s just so, it’s so perfect. That’s where … that’s where my mind is right now.
B: Okay. So friends, go back to season two and listen to the pumpkin spice latte episode that Dr. Hannah Black and I did. It was a taste testing because I’d never had one before.
W: Yeah, it’s overwhelming. Imagine it.
B: We have a wonderful episode, an intense topic, but one handled with such care and tenderness and compassion. We have the Rev. David Peters with us, who was an enlisted Marine. He was an army chaplain. He’s an Episcopal priest. He was deployed to Iraq in 2005. He’s written many books on ministry and trauma, on spirituality and trauma. He wrote Post-traumatic God: How the Church Cares for People who’ve been to Hell and Back, and he’s the vicar at St. Joan of Arc Episcopal church and a new church plant in the diocese of Texas.
W: What a fierce name.
B: Right? Yeah. And he’s written a wonderful book called Post-traumatic Jesus: Looking at the Life of Jesus through a Trauma Lens. And there’s so been so much discussion these days about trauma. I’m really thankful for this conversation.
W: Me too.
B: Welcome to the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We convene sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars, and spiritual leaders who explore the creative vision needed to lead change in our aching world. I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, lecturer at Yale divinity school and Executive Director of the Office of Transforming Leaders at Berkeley Divinity School at Yale. I’m so glad you’re here.
David Peters. Welcome to the Leaders Way Podcast.
David: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.
W: David, it’s really wonderful to have you here. This is our first time being introduced and I’m really excited I get to ask the first question because I want you to introduce yourself to our audience. You’re an enlisted Marine. You have been an army chaplain. You’re an Episcopal priest. And you’ve written this book, Post-Traumatic Jesus and those are a lot of components to your life. And I wonder if you could weave them together. Maybe tell us a little bit about your background and vocation, how those things tie together.
D: Certainly. It all happened really fast and I really didn’t have a much of a plan for how my life would go. I always wanted a fairly interesting life when I was a child, but I didn’t. Kind of know it would be interesting in this way particularly, but I was drawn to religious leadership for lack of a better word or pastoral ministry. When I was a child, a teenager, my father was a pastor. And so I kind of grew up in that world. And I knew that I wanted to be part of that in some way. I was drawn to ancient languages and the history of it all and the experience of death and what that was like and to be with people in those moments. It fascinated me and I was always trying to get close to that, but I didn’t quite realize that ministry was really about people and the kind of things they were encountering. And that dawned on me when I was in seminary.
I just got started at a new seminary after moving and I was living with my parents as often happens in one’s early twenties, living there and writing papers in the basement and sort of like reconstructing my 23 year old life at that moment. But my dad was away one night and this man–and my dad’s a pastor–this man came to the door from our church and he was distraught. His wife had left him and he was just didn’t know where to go. And, and there I was, you know, studying all this theology and learning about all this stuff and digging into the stuff I really enjoyed. And that was the night I kind of realized that this was all about people and the kind of things that turned their world upside down. And that somehow I had to learn about that stuff because I wanted to, to help people. Little did I know that I would have my own stuff.
Certainly, enlisting in the military after high school in the Marines has a sort of trauma of its own and then leaving the military saying, “I’m never going to do that again. I want to work in churches.” I was a youth minister. The Iraq war started and I knew they needed chaplains to go. So I said, that’s something I can do. And I had another baby on the way, needed health insurance too. So people join the military for a lot of reasons. Um, both, you know, wanting to serve their community and country, the need for an income, health insurance, um, and just the need for that moment.
So then I became an army chaplain for many years and then transitioned to civilian ministry in parishes here in Texas. And, and that was actually harder. It was harder to leave the military than to join it. It was an immersive world that had a real focus and purpose in the way that civilian life doesn’t quite have. It also had a way of handling traumatic events because sort of everybody was in it together that I don’t find in the civilian world. And that’s really where the church comes in is trying to create a world or a community that, uh, can handle that kind of stuff. And that’s why I wrote Post-Traumatic Jesus. I wanted to try to equip the church and Christians and people that are interested in trauma and how to care for each other, because, uh, these, uh, these events happen all the time. Traumatic events happen all the time. And everybody we talk to, everybody I know, um, has had something that turned their world upside down. Being a veteran is kind of a privileged thing. Cause if I say I’m, I have PTSD, you believe me. Cause you know, you can say, well, that’s a war. That’s trauma that makes sense. But for a lot of other human experiences, people aren’t believed. And that is also a kind of trauma that, that happens. So that’s kind of where this book came out of my experience of the pandemic as well, it was written during the pandemic. As a lot of people tried to be creative. I found I couldn’t be creative during the pandemic. I thought I would accomplish a lot of things, but it was overwhelming to me creatively. And so this is sort of a later pandemic kind of thing that I’d started during it, uh, to try to say, where is trauma in the life of Jesus and in the ministry of Jesus and how does that show up in the new Testament and in the church that has come out of that movement today?
B: I’d love to ask you about, about the book in a second, but before we go there, I wonder if you could share a little bit about the chaplaincy experience, especially for some of our students who might be listening, who may wonder if that is a call that they might say yes to, or maybe for a particular student who really struggles to understand how chaplaincy and military life, chaplaincy and war might go together. Can you share a little window into what that experience was like for you?
D: My military experience has always been like seeing it through a very narrow lens of my own experience. And when you’re in something, I probably knew less about the Iraq war when I was involved in it in Iraq than I, than I did before and after it, uh, cause it’s really hard to see the big picture of a war. You see your little picture really clearly. And my little picture was I was 27 at the time and I was older than most of the people, the people I served. You kind of are given a village, uh, as a battalion chaplain. The battalion is a, a unit of maybe 500 to a thousand soldiers. And that is like a small village and you’re the chaplain for that village, that unit, and they have a very specific function usually, but it’s military stuff. And so there’s a lot of just dealing with the military. There was a missionary that came to a church I was at many years ago and I was a youth minister in a Mennonite Brethren Church and he was from Mongolia and he, he said that we spend a lot of time with the yak. He said, there’s this yak we have and we got to go out and milk it every day. And we got to care for the yak, and the yak is like our, like our life and every world revolves around the yak, the family yak.
And I’ve always thought about that with military ministry, that there’s this yak, which is the army for me, this military culture, machine, language. And you have to work in that, but inside that is the ministry of people. ‘Cause there’s people there, and all of them are going through all the things that people go through. And the military is a huge youth group. Um, they are … I went from youth minister to army chaplain and they, uh, were people in their early twenties. Many of them were married with kids. The military incentivizes marriage for young people for money. You get more money when you’re married, you can move out of the barracks and you know, it’s kind of a privileged position.
So, and you’re far from home. So people will do it. And you, there’s the threat of death, imminent death that, that forces or encourages people that way. So my ministry is very much a ministry of presence that kind of, that’s kind of what the chaplaincy is. But it was also, uh, a learning experience for me that people carry with them so many difficult things that they hide from others. And we do that for good reasons. But the trauma of war, the trauma of violence and the trauma of, um, you know, for me, the big awakening was the trauma of sexual assault for many soldiers that were experiencing military sexual trauma that I did not know anything about when I was starting it. But we did do a lot of training with that. And trying to get people to the kind of healthcare that they needed, both mental and physical, um, but also supporting them through that journey, because that’s another thing chaplains–that we walk with people through the journey of healing as best we can, uh, while we’re trying to function in our roles and responsibilities.
So it’s also a multi-faith kind of experience, but the dominant religion in America is Protestant evangelical. And so that’s the dominant group in the chaplaincy. So becoming Episcopalian during that experience, uh, I found the Episcopal church really before the Iraq war, but, but joined it after the Iraq war, uh, coming home from that because I needed a place where I could feel that they accepted me for the upheaval of my life. Um, I had recently gotten divorced. I was trying to start a new life over. And I was trying to make sense of God, who had abandoned me in Iraq, who I was angry about and upset about and hurt by and felt like that God of my childhood had disappeared in the anxiety of all the things that I experienced.
So I was doing exactly what the soldiers I was serving was doing. I was going through traumatic events. I was having my world turned upside down. The trope of your marriage breaking up when you’re in the army is like … it’s a joke, um, it’s reality, and it was happening to me at that time. So I kind of thought if I did everything right in my life, and that comes from my fundamentalist background a little bit. If you do all these things right, a lot of bad things won’t happen to you that happened to other people. And I found that that deal had not been, that deal was broken with God. God had broken that deal with me.
And so I drew on the experience of another army chaplain from a losing war named Paul Tillich, who was in world war one as an army chaplain. He came home to a shattered marriage, too. And the rest of his life is spent trying to construct the theology that can handle trauma and traumatic events like war and all the things that come with it. So his theology of God as the ground of being helped me a lot. Um, trying to get back with God, cause I was still a Christian. I still loved God, but I felt like the God that I’d gone to Iraq with had died there and had not come back. And that’s true of my own soul as well, that I had died there as well. And– um, or should have. And that feeling that you shouldn’t be alive is a real symptom of moral injury and PTSD, that a lot of veterans and a lot of people experience in life. I think a lot of people are familiar with PTSD as a concept, post-traumatic stress disorder, a psychological diagnosis to describe how people sort of cope and both try to prevent future traumatic events from affecting them so much. But moral injury is a new concept. It’s getting more, I think traction in at least healing communities for describing a certain set of symptoms that are just as debilitating. PTSD is about being the prey. Something is hunting you. Something’s trying to kill you, destroy you, terrorize you. And that can be an imagined threat, a very real threat. Um, it can be a lot of things has to do with how you understand and what you trust and what is then upturned.
Whereas moral injury is more about being the predator and doing harm to others and being part of doing harm to others or not helping people that you feel like you should. And so you feel like you’re not good anymore. And that’s what I experienced after the Iraq war, was that feeling. I wasn’t good anymore. I had trouble going to church because I felt like good people were there and I wasn’t good. This is the tricky part about trauma. And I hope I help–this book kind of gets, helps people with this. In all traumatic events, I think there is a little bit of our participation in them. That even though we did not start it and we didn’t do it, and it’s not our fault, our participation or at least experience of it produces an immense amount of guilt and shame because we all feel like we should have handled things better. We should have done a better job or whatever it is. And the military is like a hundred percent perfection or honor shame community. So when you fail, it feels like another failure and all injuries are a failure in some ways, moral injury is a failure to live up to your own ideals.
So for me, moral injury captures a lot of the experience and that’s something the church has been trying to heal for thousands of years. We have tried to help people deal with the areas of their life that they feel like they’ve come up short and fail and not done well with. And that’s, we have a word for that called sin. It’s not an English word anymore, a modern English word. Nobody uses it. You won’t hear it anywhere, but maybe in a funny sense, like “sinfully delicious desserts” or something. It’s not a word. So the church again has to reinterpret language for people because all trauma healing starts with language. It starts with words. It starts with hearing a word that, or a conversation maybe like this that says, oh, I had that experience too. Or that sounds a lot like me.
And then concepts that help us with that like diagnoses. When I found out I was diagnosed with PTSD, that helped me a lot because I was able to say, now I kind of know what I thought was just me being nervous or weird about playing racquetball in an enclosed space. Or I’d have these experiences where I would go through these floods of emotions and then I would drink to kind of tamp that down and the cycle would repeat itself over and over again. Once it was kind of named, like Jesus naming the demons, he– or asking for the demons’ name, making them name themselves. I was able to then start to heal. But that doesn’t heal people, just knowing about stuff.
You know, we’re all pretty smart. I mean, if you’re listening to the Yale podcast, you’re smart, you know, you’re able, you’ve probably read a lot of books and you’ve, you know a lot of things, but knowing things doesn’t ultimately heal people. And in this book and in my work in the church, it is, has to move into the body and that’s Bessel van der Kolk. The Body Keeps the Score and lots of other writers. Um, when they talk about trauma that, that this bodily experience to me in the church is a sacramental experience– that there’s an always a touch in every sacrament, there’s always some kind of connection to it, an actual real part of human life, not just a theory or a concept. And this is where the church has a huge amount of opportunity to help people heal with trauma. And most clergy probably don’t know that when they’re up there running stuff on a Sunday and people are asking them when the potluck is and things like that, that that is actually a way of healing trauma; that this embodied experience where people are there and doing rituals that are embodied–that actually is healing people, whether they’re saying that that’s happening or not. That’s, that’s the good thing about healing in the body.
So moving from words to body, that is to me, the healing journey that is lived out in the life of Jesus. He does a lot of teaching. He does a lot of preaching and talking, but he also does a lot of, um, touching and healing and meeting people where they are and then an enacting in his, um, movements and walking also a lot of walking. That’s another thing.
W: There’s a lotta walking.
D: I spent, uh, this morning running with my running group and I was running back with a friend and, you know, talking about this podcast, that was going to be on about trauma and we talked about trauma and their trauma and traumatic events, and it just kind of popped up and I was like, yeah, we’re here running at 5:30 in the morning. There’s a reason for that. That’s why people do this kind of stuff, challenging themselves physically and feeling that exhaustion and pain. And there’s a healing quality that’s embodied in running and walking and any kind of endurance activity that the medieval pilgrimage had for people that were experiencing these things in the middle ages. And I think it’s moved into fitness culture, um, in modern America. So there’s a rules, there’s all kinds of things in fitness culture that we can make fun of, but there’s also a big part of it that is a response to traumatic events that people are instinctively seeking and sometimes finding there.
W: David, I wanted to go back to something you said about, well, I mean, and what you’ve been leading up to, which is that the church has a role to play that, um, the story, the stories of Jesus and, um, what we read in scripture can be, can offer us some of this language and a reframing, um, perhaps of our experiences. But I was thinking about last summer, I did a CPE unit, clinical pastoral education, which is required of all divinity students, which is terrific. But I completed mine at a veteran’s hospital in hospice with veterans who– many of whom had been through the Vietnam war and were dying from, you know, carryover from their experience in the Vietnam war from things like agent orange. And they had not only, you know, their physical issues, but also the spiritual one. Which–you mentioned moral injury was a really strong one. And the church, many of them pointed to the church as a place that had not actually met them in that space and had actually compounded a lot of the moral injury that they were feeling that they had even left the church for those very feelings that you are, are seeking to combat, I think, shame, guilt, sin. So I wonder if you could say more, and maybe this leads us to your book, um, about how the church can actually, actually show up, um, in a way that is healing in a way that does offer a reframing of that language, um, that creates or in, informs the shame that we sometimes carry.
D: That’s a great question. And the question I’ve been trying to ask myself in my book of Post-Traumatic God I wrote a while back there was like two chapters that were about the new Testament and Jesus, and those were the chapters that people that preach a lot were, would always tell me they really liked. And so this book is sort of like an expansion of those like one or two chapters of that book because I realized that preachers, teachers, and people that, you know, talk about God and church need to be equipped to talk to people that have been through traumatic events, especially veterans and, and that veteran experience of coming back to a world they don’t recognize anymore that feels misaligned, like there’s values that are different. Um, because war is a different moral universe. It’s an upside down moral universe that you live in. And then when you come back to this world, there’s a whole another set of rules and the church seems to embody this nice set of experiences, the nice– that things are kind and happy and good, and that you have to be those things to be a participant in it, which is not true at all. And I wish people knew that about the church that every church I’ve ever been part of as a parishioner, as a priest or pastor, have been full of people with all sorts of experiences that were various levels of, of good and bad and evil.
W: Full of humans, really. Yeah.
D: There’s all these things and there’s nobody perfect there, including me. And so recognizing that and churches haven’t done a good job of selling that. Cause if you sell that you’re the market that you’re too, uh, too messed up, you know, why would anybody want to join at the same time? I also know that in the, in progressive Christianity, uh, that I’m part of now and in Christianity in America, at least there’s two responses to war. And that is, you know, get up on the altar and wave a giant American flag or tell everybody that it’s like wrong to join the military and they’re all killing babies all the time. And these two extremes are what you will find in most churches in America. Even the discussion of like flags in the, in the nave or in the sanctuary, to me raises that, that issue up in a way that is a symbolic issue and controversy that a lot of people, I was joke about or remember fights about or something. But usually they’re touching on the symbolism of an experience.
And I think there are ways for churches to talk about war and trauma. And if you look at the General Convention sermons from the Episcopal church in Vietnam during the Vietnam war, they often will have this sort of dual message, we want to support the troops and we think we should surrender immediately to the North Vietnamese troop forces, you know, and the dual message of, of we, “We love you, we care about you.” And “we think what you’re doing is completely wrong and evil.” Um, that was the, in that time period, how I think a lot of churches were talking about either one or the other or both and all of those messages.
I think Jesus really does show us how to do this in his own ministry. When you think of the Roman empire, and I write a lot about Rome in this book, cause this is before the meme about the Roman empire, I was thinking about the Roman empire long before, uh, the memes about men doing this or people doing this. Because that was, that is sort of a, you know, brown point of Jesus’s light. This world, the Roman lake of the Mediterranean sea that Jesus lived next to and how that was part of his world. And yet in the midst of all that, Jesus has a way of making everybody angry. Rome, his own faith, his own community, everybody eventually in the end turns against him and he is crucified on a Roman cross after a Roman trial and a religious trial from his own faith. So all these factors pull together to say like Jesus, it’s easy to see him as someone who embodies my kind of politics or something like that. When in reality, if you look at how little he talked about the Roman empire in some ways in his ministry–he was always focused on a bigger picture of redemption of the world, a bigger picture of enacting God’s in- breaking of the kingdom, of this moment in history that did have something to do with Rome, but that wasn’t the whole story. Rome was not going to last forever.
And he kind of lives that way as if Rome is not going to last forever. And neither does it become a puppet for the Roman state. And he doesn’t like start a revolution against it in the way that we might expect someone to or hope someone would, that people in that part of the world eventually do 30 years after his death. Uh, there is an insurrection against Rome that culminates in, in just horrific, traumatic events. So I do think going back to Jesus as a Christian is kind of a basic point of it. And I hope this book helps people do that, because Jesus is talking about trauma after trauma. And when you deal with veterans, you don’t have to worry about the politics of it. Cause it’s all over at that point, whatever, or any traumatic person has been trauma tight. And trauma is a word used in the New Testament. It’s used only once in the whole new Testament, uh, for the man who fell among thieves on this way from Jerusalem to Jericho, or he’s going from Jericho to Jerusalem. I forget which way he’s going. But he’s beat up the good Samaritan comes along after the clergy come by and others, uh, and he treats his wounds with oil and wine. Here we have these sacramental instruments of God’s grace flowing into our lives. And in physical embodiment, I always think about that when I sip out of the cup at communion. And, uh, I’ve had struggles with alcohol since the Iraq war. I didn’t drink before it. I couldn’t stop drinking after it. So my sobriety and recovery has been very difficult for me and it’s every day it’s ongoing. But the VA has really helped me. I’ve been helped by the VA for years now. It’s been a really good thing in my life, but I still sip the chalice and I don’t finish it off at the end like I used to. But I sip, you know, I do my part to enact the ritual of, of our communion service and that the words of institution, they are different than the bread. It’s for the forgiveness of sins. And I think of that trauma word being used in the Good Samaritan or the victim of the man that falls among thieves and gets beaten up, left for dead; he’s got these wounds and they– the Good Samaritan puts wine in those wounds. And I always think about that when I sit from that chalice that, you know, that’s the healing coming into me. And it’s in my body. It’s not going away. It’s going to be here forever.
And I do think this idea of healing is not getting rid of it. You know, healing at first for me was, I want to go turn back the clock to the minute before all this stuff happened to me. And if I could just turn that dial back for the minute before and then figure out a way to avoid it and live, I would be happy and you can’t do that. None of us can. We can try. Um, alcohol did that for me. It helped me turn the clock back to pretend, but it doesn’t work. So this idea of healing is learning to live with the wounds of your life. And that’s what Jesus does. He’s got the wounds still in his hand. He introduces himself with these wounds and they are healed wounds, but they’re not invisible. They haven’t gone away.
I also think that if Jesus has those five great wounds, which talk about symbolism of Christianity right there, that he also has invisible ones that are a bit like PTSD. And that part of him is the part that I feel and see and know. And I just think that we already have the structure for healing in churches, ritually. We also have this other part of sacramental life that is the people of the church, and those people have helped me a lot. They’ve also caused me a lot of retriggering of things because that’s people.
Churches are going to do that to just about everybody. And as leaders of churches, we need to always remember that if you’re talking about a subject like trauma, we should assume that the people listening to us have had that particular one, which I remember I was preaching about when I was a youth minister and I got to preach in the big church many years ago. I remember talking about some domestic violence theme or something. And like three people came up later and said that they had had that experience. And I was shocked. Well, you know, I was 22 or something, you know, but like now it’s … it shouldn’t be shocking for us that everyone carries something.
B: David, you’re bringing together a couple of themes that I’m just bumping into and the people that I talk to. And that is the historic kind of divide between body and spirit in Christianity that somewhere we’ve inherited sometimes directly from church teaching. And sometimes it’s just sort of in the air that the, you know, the body is bad. The spirit is good. And there’s this sort of move to transcend the body. And of course, there’s so many wonderful somatic practitioners out there, mental health professionals.
You mentioned Basil van der Kog’s Body Keeps the Score. There’s a kind of, we’re in a moment right now where we’re reclaiming the body as a place of healing, as sacred. And we are reuniting these two aspects of who we are as human beings, body and spirit together. And of course it’s one of the great ironies of Christianity, this beautiful religion of ours that teaches that God took on a body, that the body was actually so holy that it was capable of holding divinity, right? Humanity could hold divinity in the person of Jesus. And yet nonetheless, over 2000 years, we’ve had this historic split.
So I wonder as you read scripture and as, as you’ve written about in the book, are there some moments in the life experience of Jesus and Jesus ministry in his embodied presence, especially when he’s encountering other people that you see this sort of fusion of spirit and body in, in the person of Jesus, because of course it’s all right there. The, the unity of these aspects of ourselves and yet, and yet we’ve missed it traditionally.
D: Oh, that’s a good question. And you’re right about that split that exists. And we always kind of blame the Greeks or somebody.
B: We blame the Greeks.
D: But like it’s, it’s in humanity. It’s in a lot of stuff, not just Greek thought or something. It’s like, there’s something in us that the fact that our brains kind of named our, the brain, you know; this means that we have a control center that we like think about it that way, but, um, and it’s not like, I don’t think humans– there may have been a time when they didn’t sort of have that split, but I think we’ve always sort of had that, because our minds do imagine us as amazing characters on the stage, and then you go and you, you go into that job interview or whatever. And you’re like, Oh, I feel like a complete idiot. How could I say these things that–or athletics, you know, you, I go out to run and I pull my hamstring and I think, ah, this is, I was a great runner until that moment.
In the life of Jesus, I’ve been thinking about “if your son asks for a fish, would you give him a snake” and, uh, that line from Jesus where he’s teaching on prayer. And I think, where did Jesus learn that a good father gives his son a fish instead of a snake when he’s hungry, when he has this physical hunger? And when you’re a child, you know, I remember being hungry as a child–not that I was, you know, in any great need or anything, but the intensity of that experience is, is a lot of what childhood is about going from hunger to hunger and just that desperation and, and really anxiety from that. And then add to that food instability and a lot of other factors. It’s a million times worse, but just in that experience. And he learned that from Joseph.
I think that he had this experience where Joseph gave him things that he wanted. And to me, that’s like the child Jesus. Um, they are talking about his own, own experience of the child, which is the ultimate embodiment that we experience as humans. Once we get to a certain age, I teach middle school now and you know, they’re, they have done the mind body split somewhere in that age. Like they go from, I can watch them in sixth grade in the gym playing with like full force, and then I see them in seventh grade the next year and they just like, they can’t do it anymore. They can’t play anymore.
And for adults, you know, we have to recover play and that is a really serious business. I’m part of a skating inline skating group here in Austin and we skate around the city and have a good time, but it’s, most of us took like a 20 year break from skating or a 10 year break because it was too uncool or too nerdy or something that said, don’t do this anymore. You need to focus over here on the mind or some achievement.
But that embodied play, I see that in Jesus. There, I also see it in his experiences of friendship with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus and the healing of Lazarus, which is very much an embodied experience of Lazarus’s body coming out of the grave. Hee could have said we have Lazarus’s memory with us. You know, he was a great guy. Let’s move on from there. But this miracle of resurrection is a bodily resurrection of Lazarus’s body coming out of the grave and it’s kind of the same body that Lazarus had before. I assume—’cause it, he’s got the grave clothes on that is somehow alive. And I don’t know/understand all that stuff, but you know, Lazarus probably dies again. I guess, uh, he gets to a certain point. But that’s not the point of that story. The point of the story is that Lazarus’s body matters, and Jesus knows it does.
And that’s true for my body and our bodies like that; that our lived existence is the thing. It’s the whole point. And I found that things that helped me with my traumatic reoccurrences and, and even others, and my ways of coping with that, which are usually pretty unhealthy. The way to deal with that is to do really dumb things to solve them. And this is sort of the principle of AA as well. Like the way you don’t drink is you just don’t drink or also to like, I know I got to get up and walk around this neighborhood. You know, I got to go skating tonight. I’ve got to run in the morning. I’ve got to make a plan for that.
And these very basic, like things that aren’t that intellectual actually do help people and churches like that church is not an intellectual place. That’s the disappointment of every young clergy person. They get in there and they think people are going to want to talk about. There’s always somebody in every church, but those are the people you often don’t necessarily want to talk to for like 12 hours a day. Most people, they’re just like happy there’s a church here and they come in and you know, that–providing that for people is actually a huge part of their healing journey for life, for just living.
I wish I had known that earlier as a clergy person, that me kind of putting this thing together or trying to with other people’s help and making it function in a way that people can just experience it is actually the whole point of church. It doesn’t have to really … they don’t have to come away learning. Well, let’s take atonement theory, you know, um, let’s all just break up into small groups based on your atonement theory. That’d be a good seminary mixer first day of class, you know, see who we can hate now because it’s something that makes me …
B: Oh my gosh.
D: I mean, penal substitutionary atonement, you know, what a terrible marketing phrase for that one. But you know, part of our, um, different atonement theories are–when you think about what you’re talking about, an atonement theory, a way of, of the crucifixion, this event that’s like larger than life, a traumatic event that happens at Jesus, that he actually expresses his heart for the world in. And that’s where we turn to, every moment of our trials and tribulations, and how that event has some effect on me in 2025 here in Texas as the theory that will connect those dots–how we believe that.
But actually me just saying that, that Jesus died on the cross and he said these words when he was there and then he gave up his spirit. And you know, that, just that story, is the main point. And however people hear that, they’re going to do their own work to say that story matters to me because stories have that power that theories don’t– and theories create arguments. And we have to have theories on the atonement. We have to go into there. But usually we end up looking at a theory that maybe we don’t like and saying, I don’t know why anybody would think that. But there might be a reason somebody thought that. And often the reason is their own profound traumatic experiences.
And so I try to not take away things that work for people, even when it comes like the sovereignty of God, where’s God’s control over the universe, which was something I wrestled with in the Iraq war. How could a loving God allow this to happen–in my part in it as well? And everybody sort of has that moment in life where they say, how could God be good and also let this happen? And some people turn to rigid God’s sovereignty that this is all scripted by God. And even that can be a way of living and handling something that is unthinkable and insurmountable for some people. And then –or to say it’s more of a process like Alfred North Whitehead, who’s mourning the loss of his son in World War One, comes up with process theory of how God didn’t do that to his son, basically. Like so much theology is born from trauma.
And so I always try to trace in the life of the writer who came up with this wacky theory that I hate or something–like what happened to them? Where is that place in their life that they had to make this move that maybe I don’t agree with, but I got to find out why? Because we’re always doing this. We’re all making meaning out of our experience and we’re making meaning out of the experience of Jesus on the cross.
And as part of the progressive church and very much in the middle of it now, we have a hard time talking about the crucifixion in our liturgy. We sort of confine it to one day a year that nobody comes to just because it’s a little much. And yet I really think if you’re going to church in 2025, you’re going for one thing, and that’s God. There is no other reason to go to church in 2025, not for your job, not for your family. People don’t bring their families to church. They go by themselves a lot. There’s a lot of that–cultural Christianity has long gone. We all kind of know that. We lament that maybe, or wish it were different. But people are coming for that story of death and resurrection. And the resurrection is just as big a deal as the death.
That part of it has to be there too, because the healing of Jesus in the resurrection is the model for our healing; that God will bring from the dead new life. And that death inside us. And we experience so many little deaths in this world, so many big and little. And ultimately, it all is a foreshadowing of that one that’s at the end, that we don’t maybe like to think about. I used to think about death a lot when I was younger, and I would sort of romanticize it and how like maybe I should die now and die young or something like that. And certainly after Iraq, I had the feeling like I should have died over there because life is a mess now. But then when I had a really bad health problem about five years ago, I thought I heard maybe I was going to die in a couple of years and I– that made me want to live. I suddenly wanted to be alive and say like, I want to be alive. I want to live. That was a kind of resurrection for me. One of the symptoms of PTSD is a foreshortened future. To cope with the enormity of the horror, you just say, I’m going to die soon. And that sort of makes it easy to not worry about the future.
And that’s something that happens in the brain. So I was kind of living with that foreshortened future that was resurrected in that moment of what does matter in life and will God be there for me in the end if I do have a couple of years to live? And the answer was yes, God will be there for me in the end. And suddenly I was alive again in a way I hadn’t been before. So every resurrection is preceded by a crucifixion, by a death. And that’s the Christian pattern of life that I think is the message that people are coming to church to hear. And it can take a lot of different forms, so many different ways of preaching that good news of Jesus. And I’ve heard it in so many different ways from so many pulpits, but I always say that’s what people are coming for, I think.
B: Oh, well, thank you, David, for this. I mean, for this work, this book, sharing your life with us. We are so thankful for your presence. I hope you wouldn’t mind answering our final five questions, which we call Holy Cow, to describe the experience of utter amazement as we discover your humanity.
W: So David, what do most people misunderstand about you or what you do?
D: Just because I’m smart about some things like Roman history doesn’t mean I’m smart about other things. I think that’s a big misunderstanding, especially in relationships. You can be really good at some things and not really good at other things.
B: Yeah. I love it. What’s your go-to comfort food?
D: Probably right now, Ethiopian food. There’s a restaurant right down the street here I go to a lot. And that’s so different from what I’m kind of used to that. But yeah, that’s a comfort food for sure.
W: Love it. So what’s a bad habit that you might be willing to share with us?
D: I have so many, so many, but one that I did this morning was running with an injury. When you get injured, the only cure really that works is not running.
W: It’s rest.
D: Yes, rest. And I have ice on my foot right now from my plantar fastitis that I, anyway, that I have run on a lot this week. But I refuse to stop running because I have a race coming up. I run the–my birthday miles every year, and I’m turning 50. You know, end of October, there’s a 50 mile around the lake here. So I’m going to run that. So I can’t stop. You know, I have to do that. So that’s, that’s a really bad habit that I’ve not ever been able to break.
B: Aside from learning to rest, what’s a life lesson you’re still learning?
D: Just to get up and do stuff, no matter what it is, moving from one place to another does help me, uh, feel better. And that could be walking around the neighborhood or skating or something like that. Always works in the end. And it’s when I pull back from that, that I find out how good it works and remind myself to do it next time.
W: David, what keeps you going when your inner critic tells you to give up?
D: I look back and I say, I’ve been through a lot. Like, you know, the war, the stuff after it. And there’s so many people that have been through things like this that we need each other. And at the moments where I want to quit and the worst where I feel like it’s all too much, somebody always shows up and we have this moment of sharing that keeps me going. Because, ultimately that’s why I want to live is to share the good news of Jesus, which is death and resurrection. And when I get to experience someone else’s death and resurrection and live with them in that, and maybe even as a priest, be a midwife to them as they birth that new reality, that, that is like the best thing in the world. And it’s, it’s worth all this stuff in between.
B: Oh, David Peters, thank you so much for your ministry, your presence and sh and making your life so available, um, as a, as a service to other people’s healing. We’re so thankful for you.
D: I’m thankful for you. You guys do great work.
B: Thank you for joining us today on the Leaders Way podcast, a show for people who are not ready to give up on the world. We hope you found the episode expansive and nourishing. If you enjoyed the episode, please be sure to subscribe rate and review the podcast on your favorite platform. Your support helps us to continue bringing you sacred conversations with luminaries, scholars and spiritual leaders who are dedicated to transforming our world. For more information about our guests and to catch up on past episodes, visit our website at berkeleydivinity.yale.edu. Follow the show on Instagram at theleadersway.podcast to stay updated on future episodes and events.
Until next time, I’m Dr. Brandon Nappi, walking with you as you lead with courage, wisdom and compassion.