When the Father Does Not Come, Part V

Survival, Shame, Revenge, and the Theology of Divine Absence

XIII. The Clinic

I said at the outset that this question usually arrives without a film attached. It arrives in a consulting room, often decades after the event, and often disguised as something else: pain without a lesion, a sleep that will not come, a body that flinches from examination. The neurobiology of such presentations is by now well described, and I have reviewed it elsewhere [58]. My concern here is what the patient is asking of the physician, and I think the film answers with some precision.

The physician is always a late witness. By the time the history is told, if it is told, the father has long since not come, and nothing the physician does will alter that. What remains possible is what Stephen does. To read a patient’s history as a text is to give it the kind of attention that changes the standing of what is said [59]. The first clinical act in the presence of such a history is belief, and belief in the sense defined above: a willingness to bear some of the cost of its being true. Herman’s stages of recovery begin with safety and pass through remembrance before they reach reconnection, and none of them can begin with a clinician who is waiting to be convinced [9].

From my analysis I draw three prohibitions for the clinician.

1. Do not supply a theodicy. No sentence of the form “everything happens for a reason” passes Greenberg’s test, and none belongs at a bedside. This holds for the refined versions as much as for the crude ones [53].
2. Do not ask for forgiveness on the perpetrator’s behalf. It is not the clinician’s to request, and a patient who is urged toward it will reasonably conclude that her anger is unwelcome in the room.
3. Do not use the patient’s strength to close the file. “You are so resilient” can be heard as “so nothing further is owed to you.”

There is also a caution about religious language. For many patients the religious vocabulary of childhood is bound up with the injury. Sometimes the perpetrator used it, and sometimes its promise of protection is the promise that was broken. Restoring the image of the protecting Father by pastoral insistence repeats the original confusion of tongues: an adult’s reality is once more laid over a child’s experience [23]. The clinician can follow where the patient’s own speech goes and must be content when for a long time it goes nowhere near God.

Finally, the clinician should expect Betty. The composed, obliging, faintly apologetic patient who gives no trouble has sometimes learned to be that person under conditions we would rather not imagine. The mask is an achievement, and stripping it would be a second violation. What can be offered is a room in which, eventually, it is not needed. What survivors say they want from justice is very nearly what they want from medicine: to have the truth acknowledged by someone with standing, and to have the weight of it shared [46]. Absalom told his sister to hold her peace. The physician’s whole task in this encounter may be to say the opposite and reveal the wound beneath, calling it for what it is.

XIV. Conclusion: You Did Not Get All of Me

At the center of trauma lies one memory: no one came. The violated child called, inwardly or aloud, and was not rescued. The survivor of historical catastrophe looked at civilization and found it brittle. The believer looked toward heaven and met silence. Out of that silence come shame, guilt, rage, concealment, memory and sometimes revenge.

The Good Liar gives us a woman who answers the silence by becoming the author of the judgment that history denied her. There is magnificence in her refusal to disappear, and heartbreak in its necessity. She had to be her own witness because the witnesses failed, and her own judge because judgment failed. Providence could not be seen, and so she became that as well. I have argued that her judgment was more measured than Scripture’s own avengers managed, and that it was nonetheless a counterfeit of the thing it stood in for. It could expose Hans. It could not restore what he took.

The film appears to know this, because it does not end in the emptied house. Its last images separate the two liars completely. Hans lies in a hospital bed without speech, and Lili is among her family. Here Fackenheim’s reading seems to me the true one [30,31]. Her greatest victory over Hans is that he did not determine how her life would end, and his punishment counts for less than that. Trauma tempts us to imagine that the perpetrator stands at the center of the survivor’s story forever. His act said: I have the power to define what happens to you. Her sixty-six years answer that he did not finish the story. Revenge stays tethered to the perpetrator, and her life exceeds him. If the film has an eschatology that is not counterfeit, it lies in her return, and the punishment has no part in it.

Survivor guilt whispers that happiness betrays the dead. I think memory makes another demand, which is to live. The demand rests on no claim that the catastrophe had meaning, or that everything happens for a reason, or that suffering strengthens. Those formulas are unbearable. One lives because the man who did the harm has no right to the years that remain. The dead need witnesses and are not served by additional corpses. And tenderness after brutality contradicts the metaphysics of the abuser. The survivor owes history no heroic life. Simply living is enough.

One image from the tradition holds what I have been trying to say about this peace. When Phinehas takes a spear and performs with his own hand the judgment that no court had issued, God grants him “My covenant of peace” (Numbers 25:12). The scribal tradition, recorded in the Talmud, requires that the letter vav in the word shalom in that verse be written broken, with a gap in its stem (Kiddushin 66b). The peace given to the one who took judgment into his own hands is a real peace, and it is written with a fracture that no scribe is permitted to repair. I have written before about that broken letter as a theology of wholeness that carries its wound [60]. It is the right letter for the final scene. Lili’s peace among her family is real, and it is written with a broken vav.

What, then, of God? The survivor does not prove that God was present, and she does not explain why God was absent. She lives, and her life leaves the question open. Post-traumatic theology may have to remain in the space she makes, where facile faith and facile despair are both refused, and to give up the hope of an answer to the absent Father. Job never receives an explanation. Wiesel never lets the accusation lapse. Rubenstein will not rescue providence at the cost of moral sense, and Fackenheim will not let the catastrophe own the future. Lili will not let the man who violated her girlhood own what is left of her life.

The Father did not come. The dead did not return. The past was not repaired. Yet the survivor stands, and theology may begin again there. Its starting point is a human being who stands during what should have destroyed her and declares, by continuing to exist: You did not get all of me.

Part V of a five-part series.

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