Occasionally I invite someone to guest post on this site. I am doing so this week and the posts will be a little different. Heidi Basley wrote me recently and I was taken by what she had to say. She has been on a personal journey that has opened space for trauma survivors and within it is considerable reflection on theological / biblical themes that resonate wider. I asked if she would be willing to write three posts. They are by necessity longer than the posts that normally appear here. Read and let them resonate / guide.
Here is her introduction:
Heidi writes like she walks—with people.
She’s a theologian, trauma witness, and spiral-form thinker who doesn’t lead from a stage but walks among the traumatised like family. Her calling is clear: to move with those the world didn’t stay for. Not to fix. Not to rescue. But to listen, name, and stay—with Presence. Her life’s work is grounded in a deep conviction: trauma survivors are not a problem to be solved. They are a people group still waiting to be seen, known, and trusted with breath. Heidi is the founder of traumaneutics.com—a home for theology that breathes, where naming is healing, and presence is the only credential. The website is currently under construction—a space still forming, just like the people it’s being built for. But the spiral is already open. And you’re welcome in it. She writes from gardens and graveyards, waiting rooms and worn carpets—the places where theology usually stays silent. And from those places, she speaks what she has seen: that Jesus is still naming. Still sending. Still coming. Her voice carries the ache and the hope of someone who knows trauma from the inside, but also knows what it means to be met, undone, and apostolically entrusted. This isn’t content. It’s witness. If you’ve ever felt like your story was too fractured for theology to hold—you may find, in her words, a breath you didn’t know you were waiting for.
May I comment here rather than under any single post from Heidi as my response is a personal one and not addressed to any topical framework.
An odd association offered itself earlier as I scanned Heidi’s writing. A voice from decades ago, the Mennonite theologian, Norma Kraus, who offered one of the loveliest thoughts on the meaning of the cross. He said that the cross was a monumental act of solidarity from God, with us. He tracked with what I see here in many ways, I suspect.
I am having a sombre morning, having just been told that Walter Breuggemann died yesterday. Responding to the news from a friend, I wondered where the next generation of Poets might emerge from. Finally, wrote Walter, finally, when all other voices have failed, when the King has sold out to power, when the priests fall to corruption, when the prophets fall silent, finally, God sends his poets. A role he elegantly and eloquently fulfilled for over sixty years, in a hundred books. The poet knows that they only succeed when they begin by occupying a tiny space in the consciousness of the reader. Poets begin where we begin. But poets seldom go where we would go without them. Poetry is the penetration of the prophetic and the energising balm of the pastoral. There is no armour against poetry because it does not attack us. It insinuates itself and brings its oxygen with it. Or, for Heidi, perhaps, its fish.
So, a few minutes ago, I asked whence now, so late in the day, the poets. Then I came on one of my rare visits here, and saw Heidi’s pieces, and thought, perhaps…
Norman is unlikely to object to becoming Norma, I hope.
Hi Chris,
Your words landed with quiet fire. I’ve read them several times now—and each time, something inside me steadied.
You named something I didn’t know I needed someone to see. I’ve written these pieces from aftermath, not theory. From the place where poetry and theology blur—not because I tried to make them beautiful, but because they both rose out of the same fracture and meeting place. So to have you speak of Kraus… and then Brueggemann… and then me, with that single word—“perhaps”—was more than resonance. It was recognition. And I don’t take that lightly.
I’ve often felt the double bind of having known the institution from the inside and yet being left outside by it—formed by it, and discarded by it. So I write from what remains, with Presence, with wounds, with nothing tidy to offer. And when you said the poet brings oxygen—or maybe, for me, fish—something inside me exhaled. Because yes. That’s what I’ve been doing. Quietly. Without knowing if anyone would ever taste it.
Thank you for your tenderness, and for listening with memory, not just analysis. You joined me at the table. I felt it.
And just to say this too—because it matters. I’m not writing to a field, as if from outside it. I’m writing among it. I’m writing with dust still on my feet. And when someone turns and recognises the voice, not as a dispatch but as a shared breath, it changes everything.
For me, theology has to be embodied—even when it’s written on the page. If it doesn’t carry the body, if it doesn’t hold breath, memory, ache, and nerve, then it doesn’t carry the weight. And I’d rather burn it than let it live disembodied.
Warmly,
Heidi
Thank you, Heidi. You have the point, no claim was made directly, little was asserted, why should it be, given that poetry is the art of the implicit. I’ll do a little tribute to Walter soon which will allow him to speak for himself. But his great skill was as a narrative negotiator, bridging the great distance between the ancient texts and our present needs. He was a very long way from fundamentalism and had little patience with the forms of reading that result from its dogmas, that freedom of impression is wonderful when it is done well. At its simplest, I love his work because he makes the reading an art form, at times indistinguishable from music, although he was perfectly capable of the odd bark or roar.
But I hear the resonance in your shaping of phrases, the rhythms, the ductus, the dynamics. All thoroughly aesthetic considerations that we miss when indulging in modernist literalism. These are the words that relationships are made from. Little might be transacted, or a great deal, but yes, the presence is the very thing. It is not just a nice way of putting something, it is not about style and it does not survive pretense, presence is the very thing. It creates the conditions that foster what Walter would call ‘reception’.
Chris thanks …To speak from the poetic is not simply to express.
It is to dwell.
It is to live where the prose of certainty can no longer hold.
Where rhythm carries what doctrine has dropped.
Where theology becomes not statement, but breath.
Some have said that poetry is where presence hides when all else fails.
But perhaps it is more than refuge.
Perhaps it is the very shape of divine speech in dismantled places.
In the Scriptures, God’s most unsettling self-revealing often comes not as law or lineage,
but as lament, parable, song, silence.
The psalms were not background.
They were architecture.
The worm-language of Psalm 22 was not peripheral to Jesus—it was His choosing.
His way of locating Himself inside the human dislocation.
Poetry, then, is not an addition to theology.
It is a form of it.
The kind that bears fragmentation without losing faith.
The kind that does not explain God,
but names where God still is.
Some voices are shaped there.
Not by transmission, but by fracture.
Not inherited, but inhabited.
Formed not through instruction,
but through the breath that still speaks in the absence.
This is not ornamentation.
This is structure.
This is survival architecture.
To speak from this place is not performance.
It is residence.
It is where God still breathes in the tremble.
Where language doesn’t justify,
but attends.
Where the voice is not passed down,
but risen from the ground where no one expected it to live.
And if the cadence sounds familiar,
it is not because it was taught,
but because the wilderness still sings.
Hi Martin, just to say I’ve been pondering your post form 1 May over Pentecost, much with resonance with other impressions and considerations from myself and others. Not all of them I like. And others that I can’t make sense of, yet.
You write it’s time to change the broken European vehicle for a flawed but functional Chinese model? I’m not too bothered, just now, about German car making being in decline, alongside the German/Franconian mode of administration of church, and thereafter of secular-political relationships… after our politics too sold out industrial manufacturing and a political concern for the nation’s and the people’s future and welfare for short-term stock yields. All politics for the gain of those who can live off rents and their portfolio! Why should we do anything different here to the US and the UK etc?
Those house-owning German cars driving families for whom, here in Germany at least, white Evangelicals have created their nice and cosy family churches, a bit more than a generation ago, for an ecological niche, don’t get it quite yet that they’re next in line for political-economic consumption and destruction.
What ended up on top of the pile over Pentecost, for me at least, was the question of networking (not yet existing) house churches amongst the poor and (newly) empoverished. Would that be the house church model–that exists in China alongside a national, i.e. government-controlled, Christian church. Flawed models but some that could work in the new and emerging political situation we’re facing in Europe and what once was ‘the West’? Meanwhile, we hear there would be fresh political pressure on Christians in China, and I still can’t see how we can make it work in the current situation we’re facing here in Europe, too.
There’s a both personal and practical side with this, as I am in between jobs and struggle to find an opening–even hope–for work within my learned profession, which is with parish ministry with German-Protestant churches. At least the state, administration and its new illiberal politics, doesn’t stop pursuing the likes of us. German poverty administration is relentless and has become truly punitive and scary as poor people struggle already for their survival. (Even contemplating this murderous reality, meanwhile takes me to a place where I start asking my Father in heaven to take me home soon.) We will see what comes from all this.
Sorry for posting all this insufficiently nice stuff in the wrong place as the other had been closed for further contributions. (And this again resonates in too many ugly ways with the situation I am currently experiencing. The Lord knows!)
Thanks for posting the comment Dieter. So much is in flux, so much been thrown in the air – will it all settle down and be perfect? Not likely… we might all prophesy in part and all needs to be weighed but I am pretty sure ‘not likely’ is accurate though an understatement.
Theology in flux. A few minutes ago I was writing the beginnings of an extended article. An aside part I was writing about ‘justification’ and ‘sanctification’ suggesting that when we separate the two with a scalpel we do something artificial then I wrote maybe when we insist on a temporal sequence we probably miss it also. For some they might be on a truly sanctifying path… and maybe later understand the justification part.
Life is simply messy. I don’t know what to make of the flawed Chinese model. Deeply flawed but somehow how do we travel in it (or at least influenced by it)?
And your situation – not nicely wrapped up as you say. I come back again and again to Heb. 11 – stories of awesome outcomes and of ‘being sawn in two’… but all stories of faith.
Thanks, Martin. Hebrews 11 helps, and though yesterday, ‘being sawn in two’ felt very much like it, this can change again even today or tomorrow, as God can save us this way or another, as He wills it. How we travel, even the next steps towards whatever could be another next place to set up tents, seems today’s question. A lot has been thrown in the air…
Surely, both our Christianity and secular politics here in Europe and the previous ‘West’ were sawn into two, and the struggling and pain of those who can’t hold on on top, in both church and state, as the previous settlement fades is getting weaponised against those currently still weaker than themselves–but not their children. At the demise of our shared-European ‘Christian’ culture, may we not prove to future generations that its nature had been one of white supremacy, after all, and at that one that requires ethnical cleansing. In the worst case, contemporary white fasicsm might even be laying the foundations for a 1994 Rwanda global trajectory, may God have mercy! These too, are questions of our sanctification and justification by God’s grace in Jesus.