Make Meaning, Cope Well (Part 1: Spiritual Questioning and Meaning-Making)

Objective: Get knowledge about the spiritual questioning and meaning-making process that commonly arises from experiencing stress and/or trauma and about reconstructing life narratives that support healing and growth.

Outline: Introduction, stress- or trauma-related spiritual questioning and meaning-making, disorientation and reorientation, reconstructing a life narrative, key points, resources

Note: See the companion post here: Make Meaning, Cope Well (Part 2: Religious Coping Methods)

Life challenges and the quest for meaning

Difficult life experiences often lead to spiritual questions, which then result in a quest to put one's internal (and, sometimes, external) world in order. People often turn to the Divine when human resources have been stretched beyond capacity. Both stress and trauma prompt people to make meaning.

Outgrowing your understanding

If trauma is a stressful experience that overwhelms a person's ability to cope, is it surprising that such an experience might require rebuilding afterwards?

Trauma researcher Stacy Smith writes, "A traumatic event may overwhelm the soul's ability to contain it and fit it into the larger spiritual consciousness. As a result, processing a traumatic event almost always leads to a search for new meaning and purpose as well as a need for the soul to expand enough to contain the trauma."

Like the hermit crabs pictured above, after experiencing trauma, people typically outgrow their pre-trauma framework for understanding themselves, others, and the world. The cramped feeling caused by living within their prior understanding (which now feels outdated) eventually spurs them to revise their understanding to accommodate their experience.

Smith notes that this process is frequently a spiritual one (whether or not a person would consider themselves spiritual or religious) and observes, "Once these beliefs have been reassessed, the new understanding becomes a tool to help the person process the trauma. In this way, the need to understand things at a spiritual level serves as an impetus for addressing and recovering from trauma." Smith and others suggest that the often uncomfortable spiritual questioning process that takes place after a traumatic experience prompts a person to make meaning to lessen the discomfort, thereby creating the very conditions for a person to heal and grow.

Not a malfunction

As I quote in my post, "Update Your Stress Mindset to Thrive," Kelly McGonigal, PhD states: "Human beings have an innate instinct and capacity to make sense out of their suffering. This instinct is even part of the biological stress response, often experienced as rumination, spiritual inquiry, and soul-searching. Stressful circumstances awaken this process in us. This is one more reason why a stressful life is often a meaningful life; stress challenges us to find the meaning in our lives." Put differently, the spiritual questioning and meaning-making prompted by stressful circumstances is not a malfunction, it's a feature of being human.

McGonigal discusses the process described above from a different angle than Smith. First, McGonigal's research on stress shows that meaning-making can happen after stressful circumstances, not just after trauma. Second, she points out that if people never encountered stress, which results in meaning-making, then they might not appreciate (or even discover) meaning aspects of their lives. Stress can be beneficial and can help us to enjoy more meaningful lives.

Experiences that provoke boldness, finding the words

American theologian Walter Brueggemann's work to understand the Psalms and make contemporary and practical the spiritual practice of praying the Psalms illustrates a process of spiritual questioning and of turning to one's spirituality during periods of disorientation and is useful to understand and assess a process in which one integrates very stressful or traumatic experiences into one's life narrative.*

Brueggemann outlines the typical human experience as marked by periods of "being securely oriented," "being painfully dislocated," and "being surprisingly reoriented." In Praying the Psalms, he notes that it is periods of dislocation or disorientation that lead to the most vibrant prayerful expression in the Psalms and asserts, "our common experience is not one of well-being and equilibrium, but a churning, disruptive experience of dislocation and relocation." Brueggemann also notes, "Psalms offer speech when life has gone beyond our frail efforts to control."

Brueggemann observes that scholars of many disciplines have emphasized the importance of the experience of disorientation in individual and communal development and ultimate flourishing. Regarding "experiences of life that lie beyond our conventional copings," Brueggemann emphasizes, these provoke the boldness to communicate with God in the midst of our pain. Additionally, Brueggemann asserts, the Psalms offer us a model and, even words to use, which speak honestly of "the powerful, dangerous, and joyful rawness of human reality."

Spiritual questioning is normal

The need to ask spiritual questions and to make meaning is profoundly human. Far from being abnormal or evidence of a spiritual failing, spiritual questioning after a stressful or traumatic experience is a common human response and a potentially helpful one. Beyond being helpful to the healing and growth experiences of people throughout the centuries, as stress researcher Kelly McGonigal observes, stress can create meaning in our lives and, as theologian Walter Brueggemann notes, some of the most authentically human, passionate, and beautiful prayers, art, and literature have been birthed out of stress or trauma.

Normalizing disorientation

The Psalms feature regular human emotion. Basic life experiences and emotions described in the Psalms are similar to the essential experiences of people who might pray the Psalms (regardless of time or place).

We, too, can go from normal, everyday life (orientation) to disorientation and then, eventually, to finding ourselves in a place where our challenging life experience has been integrated successfully into our life narrative and we find a new and renewed appreciation for life, for God, and for life with God (reorientation).

Brueggemann observes that the Psalter contains psalms that represent each of these internal experiences (orientation, disorientation, and reorientation) and asserts that praying these psalms can help people to learn how to lament and to share their pain honestly with God who hears and sees (cf. Genesis 16:13). Entering into authentic, honest conversation with God can be an example of leaning into positive religious coping methods (see "Make Meaning, Cope Well: Part 2: Religious Coping Methods").

While more can be said about praying the Psalms and the journey from disorientation to reorientation, the main point of this post is that disorientation resulting from challenging life experiences and eventual reorientation is a normal part of the human experience. Despite the shame that many people may feel when they experience disorientation, from a theological/spiritual and from a scientific/research perspective, spiritual questioning and meaning-making are normal processes after significant stress or trauma.

Reconstructing a life narrative

After a challenging life event, we may well have to pick up broken pieces and decide what to do with them, determine how our former beliefs fit or don't fit into our new life narrative.

During college, I attended a study abroad program in a place with a history of identity-based violence. I visited a church that had lost a stained glass window due to a car bomb. Instead of trashing the rubble, church members had reused the broken shards of colored glass to build a stained glass window, featuring the Resurrection. Memorials and monuments communicate messages. In this case, through their new window, the community reminded themselves and testified to contemporaries and to future generations that healing is not about forgetting the past. Instead, healing is about gathering up the broken pieces, persisting in worship together, and viewing a painful past in light of God's actions to heal and restore, indeed, to bring life from death.

After you finish reading this post, I recommend "Make Meaning, Cope Well (Part 2: Religious Coping Methods)." It reflects on how religious/spiritual coping methods can be helpful or harmful. Helpful religious coping methods open a person to potential reorientation after challenging life experiences, whereas, unhelpful religious coping methods disconnect people from potentially supportive relationships with God and other people and perpetuate disorientation.

Conclusion

After significant stress or trauma, it is appropriate to grieve and lament. It's also important to make meaning. Choose healing religious/spiritual coping methods that help you to develop a reconstructed life narrative that supports your healing journey rather than one that pulls you into despair.

Key Takeaways

Spiritual doubts, questions, and the need to make meaning of life experiences are common after stressful or traumatic experiences.

After challenging life experiences, we may enter a period of disorientation that, hopefully, will resolve into reorientation. Engaging in meaning-making may nurture the right conditions for further healing.

*Note: I use Brueggemann's model for understanding the life of faith as illustrated by the Psalms to understand spiritual questioning and healing after challenging life experiences. Some readers may initially object to the idea that humans have real agency and the ability to impact the healing process by their own decisions and actions. Other readers may object to my interpretation and use of Brueggemann's model for this post, arguing that Brueggemann situated his original text within a perspective that emphasizes God's Sovereignty and ultimate control over the human experience of disorientation and reorientation. It is my hope that such readers will look beyond their initial objections to see how I use this model as part of an ongoing dialogue about real human experiences of pain and suffering and a possible response that integrates the spiritual and theological into a conversation about practical mental health needs and to see why I believe that it is both helpful and legitimate to do so. A full explanation is beyond the scope of this post, but suffice it to say that Brueggemann, himself, broaches the important topic of divine and human initiation in his "Preface to the Second Edition." I encourage readers to read this preface for themselves and to reflect on the ongoing evolution of Brueggemann's understanding of the Psalms and of the topic of divine and human initiation in dialogue as well as a potentially related understanding of human agency. Brueggemann's work holds in tension human initiation and God's initiation. He writes, "I learned, early on, that the only way to pray dialogically is in response to the faithfulness and generosity of God who takes all initiatives. I have learned only later, that it is the dialogic courage of laments, complaints and protests that are crucial to the tradition of the Psalms." While simultaneously marveling at the way that the Psalms invite humans, also, to take the initiative in dialogue with God, Brueggemann further notes, that in the human-divine encounter whereby each party may initiate, "God is shown to be a full participant in a life of lively dialogue," by which, Brueggemann appears to emphasize that the Psalms testify to those who would read and pray them that God does not stand apart from humankind, transcendent, unmoved, and immovable, but rather, that God is impacted by the cries of God's people, for one cannot be a full participant in dialogue, without the possibility of being transformed by the encounter with the Other. Brueggemann continues to hold that, ultimately, God is the initiator of what healing may come and of the shift from disorientation to reorientation, while also making room for human decision and action. Likewise, Gordon T. Smith, president and professor of systematic and spiritual theology at Ambrose University College and Seminary in Calgary, Alberta, explains, "When it comes to the life we have in God, God is the actor. It is all of God. It is all gift. But this does not mean the human person is passive or a nonactor. We can and should take human agency seriously. However, the genius of human action is that it is an act of response to and participation in the actions of God." In citing these two theologians, I mean to situate this post within the traditional Christian understanding of God's initiating action and our human action in engaging with God in periods of profound disorientation and in our need for healing and wholeness. I believe that humans may partner with God in a healing and meaning-making process and this post assumes this.

Resources

Praying the Psalms: Engaging Scripture and the Life of the Spirit (Walter Brueggemann)