Four Rivers Winter Edition 2021

Fr Walter Firth, author of this book talks with Rev’d Gemma Le Mesurier

Interviewer: Fr Walter, thank you for your time today. You have recently written a book called ‘Tales of Trauma’, if you can just briefly summarise what this book is about….

Fr Walter: ‘Tales of Trauma’ is a collection of twelve stories where people have done wrong things. Usually they involve people that we have tended to hold us as religious leaders or created a hero-cult status around or have some sort of positive view of. Those twelve stories are chosen because they show us of how we shouldn’t be, how we make mistakes, they’re not the stories that we should normally hold up as ideals. So that from these 12 stories where things didn’t go right, we can learn how to be better people, more pastoral, more caring, and more open to seeing how to be there for others, so that we can hopefully create a world of how things should be. Frequently we’ll pick up stories, we’ll talk about the heroes, the good guys – might have made mistakes, could have worked for the baddies at one point – all of that disappears by the end of their stories, and that’s what we celebrate: the hero. After all, you read something like Harry Potter, and how many people go “he is one very naughty boy who should have been in trouble for breaking all the school rules”?

You read C.S Lewis’ Chronicles of Narnia, how many people actually like the final book, ‘The Last Battle’, when they find out that one of their hero characters from ‘The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe’ stopped believing, and so she’s not there in the train station when everyone dies to get to heaven, where all the characters who actually believe end up at the end. We all like just sitting in the happy stories, and whilst they are pleasant in the moment they never give us a deeper understanding of self, or push us to try and be better because we’ve understood something deeper about who we are as humans.

And you said all these religious hero figures in these tales of trauma – they are Biblical religious figures, or also extra-Biblical?

The stories are all picked from the Old Testament, or the Hebrew Scriptures, and then for us as Christians there are little comments or info-blocks throughout the block that may show where some of that ties back in in later New Testament writings.

So you say from the Hebrew Scriptures. Is there a reason why you chose characters from the Hebrew scriptures, and not characters from the New Testament?

One – Who we are as Christians comes out of the stories of the faith that made up the Jews of Jesus’ day. And even in today’s world where people have come to Christianity, if they have come from a Jewish background, you very quickly realise that a lot of other Christians don’t actually know some of the stories, or that Christians have gotten really excited about particular stories, which are usually ignored by synagogues and Jewish families.

So, that was part of it. The other part of it is that the Old Testament was shared orally for so long as story, so they’re told in a way that you can easily imagine sitting around a fire, or a meal table, and telling the story of these people, whereas by the New Testament what we have kept as canon for the New Testament – they’re not written as story for people to just sit around. The Gospels are! And depending on which Gospel and which passages you’re reading, you can really see that story element of them, but there’s only on main character of the Gospels, because they are telling one person’s story, which is Jesus, and all the other New Testament writing is usually designed to try to push a community to model particular behaviour, so there isn’t the story element. So if I wanted story element from New Testament people, I’d have had to actually go to extra-canonical Biblical sources to write up about the people that are actually floating around in the background. Even the apostles, who become the early saints of the church – all of their stories are expanded on, and what they do, how they give their lives to Jesus, how they become committed to the cause – nearly all of that isn’t in the text we have kept, because that wasn’t the purpose of the text to be put in the Bible – that was about Jesus. And I wasn’t comfortable with writing in a fantastical style around the personage of Jesus, because I didn’t want to make him more human than he was, or create frailties and damage that aren’t there in that text, or at the other end make him too godly, and have to make everybody else in the stories failed humans, so that the people, they don’t get confused as to how these characters came to be. Whereas by going to the Old Testament, there is enough story already there that slight modifications, extra detail, they pad out what could have or would have been shared orally as people were telling story.

That makes a lot of sense. Having said that, is this book appropriate only for a Christian audience, or would other people also get benefit from it?

You do not need to be a Christian to gain insight from this. The stories, because they are taken from Old Testament writings, naturally tie in with the Jewish, Christian and Islamic faiths. They could be viewed as faith stories, or, for somebody who is not of those persuasions, they can just be historical or fictional characters that are expressing particular shapes of human breakage.

There’s the freedom in that because I haven’t tried to say these people are real, you have to believe them, and that everything they did is 100% right – they are characters in stories; they can be treated as such. The fact that we have taken these stories and made them part of our faith story and our sacred text doesn’t remove that fact, that they are characters.

What do you hope that this book will achieve?

I hope that it leads us to be more open to caring; to reconsidering how our actions and attitudes affect others; to be more supporting and have an understanding of what others may have gone through. People have experienced abuse and trauma and, for a multitude of reasons, their voices are silenced, muted, or discouraged in the world and in our churches. When people hear their stories expressed and voiced by the Scriptures, this can enable them to find and gain their own voice, for if the Scriptures talk about it, their taboo to talk about it is removed. My other hope is that by holding up these stories so publicly, we remove the ability of religious leaders being able to plead ignorance and ‘past apathy’ towards abuses and prevent future abuses, as much as we can, from occurring, and if they do (particularly outside of our control), then that as a community that can be a place of comfort and healing.

The sounds really good. So who do you think this book would be helpful for?

I feel that this book is helpful for individuals and groups, and can be used in a variety of ways. It can be used with young teenagers once they’ve been exposed to sexual consent issues – a current complaint across the Western world: I think every week there’s a story of some girl, teenager or woman who is talking about the level of nonconsent in the world that they are a part of. You could use it for personal growth and reflection, as an individual. You could use it as a one off story to help initiate conversation around Safe Ministry training, or abuse or dealing with trauma. Or you can use it (whole or in portions) to form a Bible or study group to better reflect on how to be and how to do ministry around these topics. However, in saying that, we just need to be careful that if we are using it as a group, or as leaders over people who are younger or vulnerable, that we have an idea of their stories, so that we’re prepared to be able to minister to them should something come up, because whenever we engage in actual conversations with real people, or talk about issues of vulnerability, pain or brokenness, there’s always the potential that somebody will want to disclose their own stories, be it to share and contribute, or as part of their own healing process and journey, and we do need to be aware of that before we put people in that situation.

It sounds like it will be a very important and valuable book. If people want to get a copy, where can they acquire one?

Well, the easiest way to acquire a copy is to jump online and do a search for “Tales of Trauma Walter Firth” and it will come up. It can be purchased through Koorong direct, Amazon, or Book Depository, or directly to Arkhouse Press themselves. If people prefer to walk into a bookstore, they could just do that and order a copy. So it sounds like it’s quite easy to get your hands on a copy. Excellent! Thank you very much! Your welcome!