Joseph: A story of resilience is the follow-up to my 2015 book, Abraham: A journey through Lent, and it is published today by SPCK. As a taster I'm posting Chapter One here. You can get Joseph direct from SPCK, at Christian bookshops and on Amazon etc. SPCK currently have a special offer on Joseph, and they are also making the e-book of Abraham available absolutely free! I wrote Joseph before COVID-19 turned our world upside down, but in this new world the Joseph story is, I'm afraid, only more relevant.
CHAPTER ONE THE DREAMER
GENESIS 37
Dear Dr Warner, …
… we regret to inform you …
… a surprisingly strong field …
… best wishes for your job search …
I sighed as I added the latest rejection letter to the growing pile. In my innocence I had imagined the field of Old Testament Studies to be small and rarefied in my adopted homeland. Nothing could be further from the truth! The United Kingdom, it appears, is awash
with academics determined to spend their careers arguing about variant traditions in the book of Esther and teaching Baruch to spotty undergraduates. And they are all currently looking for jobs, and they are all prepared to commute from Land’s End to northern
Scotland to do them.
I moved to London from Melbourne, Australia, five years ago to get married, and I have been applying for jobs here ever since. You know, I’ve always rather loved those books where the heroine meets a ridiculously charming foreigner, romantically tosses her life in to travel to his country and marry him, and then caps off the whole adventure by writing a book about it. I’ve enjoyed reading those kinds of books, but it never in my wildest dreams occurred to me
that one day I might actually write one. Nevertheless, that’s exactly what I did. In my previous book, Abraham: A journey through Lent, I told the story of meeting my now husband (I called him ‘R.’), leaving my home and job and family in Australia and travelling to the UK. I told it alongside the story of Abraham’s journey from Ur in the Chaldeans, via Haran, to the land that God promised to give him and his family in Canaan. Along the way, I encouraged readers just like you to tell the stories of your own lives, too, alongside Abraham’s story.
In this book, my plan is to pick up my story where I left off – after the honeymoon ends – and, taking Joseph (the ‘Technicolor Dreamcoat’ one) as my companion, to tell the story of the next part of the journey – including the job applications! You don’t need to have read
Abraham: A journey in order to read and enjoy this book, but I will refer to it from time to time, just as I will refer from time to time to Abraham himself. Indeed, one of the things I have learned over these last years is that what happens at the beginning of a story plays an
awfully big role in what happens later on.
Why ‘resilience’?
Have you ever had to struggle to find a job, as I’ve been doing lately?
There are several reasons why being unemployed is a challenging
experience. I’m fortunate enough to have married a husband who
has supported me while I’ve been looking for work, so that I haven’t
had to worry about the most pressing challenges of finding food and
shelter. I’ve also picked up bits and pieces of teaching from time to
time, and I’ve had plenty of writing to keep me occupied. Even so,
I’ve found that being more or less unemployed has been difficult
in all sorts of ways. Especially in a new country, it is isolating to
be without a work community and to lack work-based avenues for
meeting new people and becoming acquainted with the professional
‘scene’. But perhaps the most challenging aspect has been the actual
process of applying for jobs. As you may also have discovered for
yourself, every time you write a new application, you have to become
emotionally attached, to some degree, to the job you’re applying for.
You have to imagine yourself into the new job – try it on for size in
your mind – and generate some excitement about the new life you
would have if you were to be successful and get it. Your application
must say that this is the job that I really want (and would be perfect
for), not this or that other job, and in order to say so convincingly,
whether in your application letter or in person in an interview, you
must actually come to believe it. Each time you apply for a new job,
you have to prepare yourself for the emotional rollercoaster that
is inevitably coming, being willing to allow yourself to get excited
about what this potential new life might be like, while at the same
time preparing yourself for the likelihood that you will be unsuccessful
and that your potential new employer will not only reject you,
but also cut off the glossy new future that you’ve hesitantly (or wholeheartedly!)
allowed yourself to believe in.
I’ve been trying to decide whether I think that, if I’m not going
to get a particular job, it is better to be short-listed or just rejected
immediately. It’s a bit six of one and half-dozen of the other. Not
being short-listed can be a real blow. But while being offered an
interview is a great boost to the morale, it means travelling further
along the emotional trajectory I’ve just described, and the eventual
rejection can feel all the more devastating when it comes from somebody
in front of whom you’ve made yourself vulnerable at interview.
Short-listed or not, applying for a series of jobs like this over a long
period of time requires one to have some internal reserves. You need
to be able to withstand repeated rejection and to find a way of resigning
yourself to the loss of a procession of bright, shiny new futures.
I’ve now spent six years in London looking for work. Various
smaller things have come along, but not the job I’ve been looking
for, despite the fact that I’ve made any number of applications and
turned up for a succession of interviews. It is strangely disconcerting.
In my Australian life, I’d only officially applied for jobs twice.
The first application, at the end of my law degree, led to five job offers,
and I had the luxury of choosing between them. Later, when ill
health meant that I couldn’t practice law any longer, I applied for and
got a teaching job in the law school where I’d studied. After that, jobs
seemed to come and apply for me rather than the other way round!
The opportunities I needed had an extraordinary way of turning up
just exactly at the moment I needed them, even when my health was
at its worst. It became part of my self-understanding of who I was
as a child of God that the next thing would come and present itself
when it was needed. On the other hand, I was absolutely rubbish at
romantic relationships. I simply couldn’t put a foot right. Now the
tables are turned – I have a husband, and I can’t get a job! What has
happened, and who am I?
Of course, things could be far, far worse. I could have been kidnapped
by my siblings, trafficked into slavery and then sexually
abused like our hero Joseph. Finding it difficult to secure a full-time
job is one thing, but Joseph’s story begins with a full-scale disaster, as
the patience of his 11 brothers with their frankly objectionable sibling
finally gives out, and they sell him to some passing traders en route to Egypt.
The two scenarios I’ve drawn – on the one hand, my protracted
search for validation through employment, and, on the other, the
acute trauma of betrayal and loss of personal freedom, agency and
homeland suffered by Joseph – are illustrative of different kinds of
personal challenges. One kind involves coping with an extended
experience of difficult or testing circumstances. The other involves
surviving a major disaster and then finding a way to come to terms
with its impact. Each of these kinds of challenges can be stressful,
or traumatic, in its own way, and both make demands on those who
experience them. One of the great conundrums of our time is why
some people seem to handle, or recover from, such experiences relatively
well, even perhaps seeming to blossom or grow in the face
of the challenge, while others are knocked about or even defeated
by the same set of circumstances. The trait, or skill, exhibited by
those who cope well with challenging circumstances is called ‘resilience’.
There has been a huge amount of research done into resilience
in recent years, and nearly all of it suggests that resilience isn’t just
something you’re born with, but is something you can learn and
develop.
‘Resilience’ has become a buzzword in recent years. If you start
looking out for it, you soon find yourself seeing it everywhere. Everybody
wants to discover how to build their resilience and how to be
more resilient than the next person. Indeed, resilience has become a
bit faddish. And like every fad, it has its dark side as well as its benefits.
One of the ‘fads’ that preceded resilience, you might remember,
was ‘mindfulness’. Both resilience and mindfulness are enormously
valuable in and of themselves, and even though both may sound very
‘twenty-first century’, they both have origins in Christian tradition
and in the traditions of other ancient religions. But in the wrong
hands, each can be used as an abusive weapon instead of a supportive
tool. Let me give you an example: as mindfulness training started to
proliferate in the corporate world, people began to suspect that corporate
bosses had more than the simple well-being of their employees
in mind. Did they really just want to improve the lives of their
often stressed or exhausted employees, or was their primary concern
to equip those same employees to work even longer hours, being even
more productive? In a similar way, a danger of the increased interest
in resilience is that resilience becomes just another ‘skill’ that is
measured and weighed and demanded of people, so that those who
do not cope can be criticized for lacking it, while ideals of resilience
can be used by the powerful as reasons for withholding fair treatment
or justice from the more vulnerable.
Earlier this year, I read a disturbing news story. A Syrian refugee
couple and their two daughters, who fled Syria and came to
the UK in 2012, appealed to their local council for help after they
had been evicted (through no fault of their own) from their privately
rented home. The council refused to help, saying that the
family was ‘resilient enough’ to cope with the experience of homelessness.
Now, I can’t comment on the rightness or wrongness of
the council’s decision not to help, but the idea that any family,
let alone a refugee family, might justifiably be expected to possess
sufficient levels of resilience to sail through an experience of
homelessness seems extraordinary! It also seems just a little bit
abusive.
This is going to be a book about learning and developing resilience.
But it will also be one in which I will encourage you to think
about some of the darker aspects of our society’s current fixation on
resilience. Whom does resilience benefit, whom may it harm, and
where does it sit in a life of faith? It will also be a book about stories.
I’ll tell you the story of what has happened to me since I set out on my
Awfully Big Adventure to live in London, and especially the bits of it
that have required resilience. I’ll also encourage you to think about
some of your stories and the role resilience plays in your life and how
you might think about building it up. Along the way, I’m going to tell
the story of Joseph. It could be thought of as the quintessential resilience
story, in which the younger son who is hated by his brothers
and sold by them into slavery flourishes so that he becomes the second
most powerful man in Egypt and his childhood dreams of his
family bowing down to him all come true.
No story is ever quite what it seems on the surface, though, is it?
Is the story of Joseph one for us to emulate, or is it a cautionary tale?
Or a bit of both? Let’s get started and find out.
Meeting Joseph
Then Judah said to his brothers, ‘What profit is it if we kill our
brother and conceal his blood? Come, let us sell him to the
Ishmaelites, and not lay our hands on him, for he is our brother,
our own flesh.’ And his brothers agreed. When some Midianite
traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the
pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver.
And they took Joseph to Egypt. (Gen. 37.26–28)
How well do you know the story of Joseph? Is it one of your favourites?
Do you perhaps know the Andrew Lloyd-Webber/Tim Rice version
better than you know the Genesis original? When I worked with
the Joseph story with a group from my church, we discovered that
many of us know the musical better than the biblical story, and that
we found it difficult to read Genesis without images from the stage
show dominating our imagination. Partly as a result of this influence,
but also partly as a result of the way the story has traditionally
been read, Joseph has occupied a position quite like that of Abraham
in our imaginations. If Abraham is thought of as a towering figure
of faith, then Joseph is seen as a model of wisdom and righteousness.
Joseph is the character who overcomes all manner of adversities,
who is blessed with special foreknowledge and understanding from
God and who uses his gifts to save a foreign nation as well as the
brothers who so cruelly betrayed him at the beginning of the story.
If you’ve read Abraham: A journey, you’ll know that Abraham is a
far more complex and compromised character than we sometimes
acknowledge. Will something similar prove to be true of Joseph?
Joseph’s story begins in Chapter 37 of Genesis. We learn
that Joseph’s father, Jacob, settles with his family in the land of
Canaan – the land that God gave to Abraham, and where Abraham
and his son, Isaac, Jacob’s father, had lived as aliens. Now, Jacob’s
family is large and unconventional (in another context we’d probably
call it ‘unbiblical’) – he has twelve sons and apparently a number
of daughters (although only one, Dinah, is named) by four mothers.
Reuben (Jacob’s firstborn), Simeon, Levi, Judah, Isachar, Zebulun
and Dinah are the children of Jacob’s first wife, Leah, while Gad
and Asher are the children of Leah’s maid, Zilpah. Joseph and Benjamin,
the two youngest, are the sons of Jacob’s second wife, Leah’s sister
Rachel, while Dan and Naphtali are the children of Rachel’s maid,
Bilhah. Confused? Good – you should be!
‘This is the story of the family of Jacob,’ says Genesis 37.2. But
right from the very next verse, most of the attention in the story is
directed toward Joseph, Jacob’s second-youngest son. Whose story
is this going to be? We typically call Genesis 37–50 the ‘Joseph story’
or ‘saga’, but it is true that the story is also about Joseph’s father and
brothers – and at certain points, some of them are going to prove to
be almost as important as Joseph.
Apparently, the young Joseph was a thoroughly objectionable
character; I have a great deal of sympathy with his brothers! Joseph
was a snitch who used to tell tales about his brothers to their father.
He was also his father’s favourite, and to be honest, Jacob seems to
have been part of the problem. Jacob unwisely displayed his favouritism
openly, sending Joseph out to spy on his brothers and marking
him out by the gift of a special robe. To make matters worse, Joseph
was foolish enough to tell his brothers about his dreams in which his
family would bow down before him. Joseph’s brothers were understandably
jealous and resentful of Joseph. They hated him.
The story goes on to tell about how Joseph’s brothers sell him
into slavery, but it might be worth pausing at this point to recognize
that, as bad as Joseph’s experience is about to become, his childhood
could not have been easy. Undoubtedly, he had an inflated view of his
own importance (whether that view was justified is one of the central
questions of the story), but even so, the text suggests that, as a
youth, he experienced antagonism and ostracism from his brothers
and sisters. As much as I sympathize with them, my experience of
being bullied at school does give me a degree of sympathy for Joseph
also. He receives signs of his own specialness in his dreams and in
the favouritism of his father, but he is not sufficiently socially aware
to be able to navigate life with his siblings in a way that wins from
them anything but jealousy, resentment and hatred.
I’m glad to be able to report that I was never tempted to tell my
family or my schoolmates that they would one day bow down before
me. Nevertheless, I was brighter than many of my classmates in the
small country town where I grew up, and I was keen to work hard
and do well. Like Joseph, however, I lacked the social intelligence
that might have cautioned me to hide or modify some of the things
about me that made me different from my classmates – so they bullied
me. Even, I’m afraid, some of the teachers bullied me! Looking
back, I can see how I might have been insufferable, but that schoolyard
treatment had an impact, and I learned to see the world as a
threatening and potentially dangerous place. I look at children and
young adults today and wonder how they cope in a world in which
students take ‘the playground’ home with them at the end of the
school day through social media – and where popularity and selfworth
are measured through numbers of online ‘friends’ or ‘followers’
and where the anonymity of the screen encourages casual
cruelty. I might not have survived such a world, because my coping
mechanisms weren’t very good. I tended not to tell anyone when
major instances of bullying occurred, because I was too embarrassed.
I also didn’t really know how to modulate my behaviour
effectively, so I mostly just kept on going and trying harder, in the
hope that people would eventually decide I was all right. I was finally
saved when my mother happened to witness me being bullied by one
of my teachers. As soon as they could, my parents arranged for me
to go to a boarding school in a bigger town. At least I wasn’t bundled
off to the highest bidder and taken away by camel train – but, like
Joseph, I was sent away.
Did you have your own experiences of bullying when you were
younger, or do you have concerns now for your children? If you
were bullied at school, what kind of coping mechanisms did you
develop? Did they work? How have your experiences in the schoolyard
impacted on your adult character and your way of looking at
the world? Is the world, for you, a safe place in which you move from
one appealing opportunity to the next, or is it a more threatening
place where any interaction with other people has the potential to
hurt you or undermine your self-confidence? These early experiences
can have quite an influence on how we respond to challenges
in later life. You may, of course, have experienced serious abuse as a
child, whether sexual or some other kind. If that is the case, you will
not need me to tell you that those earlier experiences have impacted
your way of being an adult in the world – and I hope that you have
been able to access the necessary help and support.
The effects of trauma
People respond to traumatic events or circumstances in their lives
differently. Modern trauma theory has been developed out of
research into the effects of war on returned service personnel and
the effects of sexual abuse on children. In both cases, it is possible for
individuals to make the transition to ordinary domestic adult life
without too many serious consequences, but equally in both cases,
such experiences can have an enormous impact on the ability of the
individual to adapt – and some never manage to adapt.
I should stress that being affected by trauma is nothing to be
ashamed about, and that it is something over which an individual
has absolutely no control. It is simply the case that individuals are
affected differently. In fact, the effects of trauma are readily recognizable
as the body’s automatic self-protection systems coming
into play. In a situation of trauma, when a person is overwhelmed,
the body’s automatic reaction is to go into ‘fight or flight’ mode and
either to prepare to run away or to defend itself. When that happens,
certain parts of the nervous system go on high alert, while
other parts of the body effectively close down. There is little need
for complicated speech or thought or for digestion or temperature
regulation while the body is under attack, so the parts of the body
responsible for those activities close down temporarily, while in
other parts of the body, the blood starts to pump and adrenalin
to flow.
For some people, with particular experiences of being overwhelmed
in the past, the automatic response will be neither ‘fight’
nor ‘flight’, but ‘freeze’. This is what an animal does when it ‘plays
dead’. Essentially, most or all of the body’s functions close down,
and the person stays rooted to the spot. The freeze response may
be accompanied by dissociation. When this occurs, the traumatized
person may be aware of the overwhelming event happening, but of
watching it from some distance away. So, for example, a child who
experiences regular sexual abuse may ‘watch’ herself being abused
from the other side of the room or from a position on the ceiling. Just
like the ‘fight or flight’ response, ‘freeze’ and ‘dissociation’ are natural
ways in which our bodies act to protect us from a situation which
threatens to overwhelm us.
All of these bodily responses are normal and helpful, because they
allow the body to cope with the ‘overwhelm’ of the senses that a person
experiences in the moment of traumatic injury. The long-term
problems arise when, for some reason, the body doesn’t or isn’t able
to return to normal – to re-associate or turn off the fight or flight
response and re-engage normal bodily functions of speech and
thought, etc. The person who is stuck in ‘fight or flight’ moves into
a kind of functionality in which basic day to day motor functions
occur more or less automatically, but in which higher functions of
thought and movement are impaired. Because of a tendency to disassociate
in ‘fight or flight’ as well as in ‘freeze’, it is often difficult for
such a person to remember or tell the story of the traumatic event.
The person impacted by the traumatic event very often has no real
memory of it, because the event was never truly experienced. Instead
of remembering, the body stores – and from time to time throws
up – shreds of recollection as flashbacks. These can be terrifying.
This is particularly so because one of the effects of trauma is that it
‘collapses’ time, so that it seems to the person having flashbacks that
the events being ‘replayed’ are not stored safely in the past, but happening
in the present. Thus, a traumatized person can experience the
traumatic event over and over again, while any attempt to describe
it may resemble a confused collection of impressions rather than a
coherent narrative.
‘Um, it was the Ishmaelites – no, wait,
it was the Midianites …’
There is a marvellous scene in the very first episode of the BBC sitcom
Rev. The Reverend Adam Smallbone needs to find a way to
choose among the large number of parents who want to have their
children admitted to the parish school. He suggests a Bible test and
sets up a role play in which his Reader, Nigel, takes on the role of
prospective parent, while Adam himself administers the test (with
the aid of a ridiculously bright desk light). Nigel, who the viewer
soon discovers is almost as great a trial to his vicar as Joseph was
to his brothers, accepts the role with relish, but complains that the
questions are far too easy. Eventually, once Nigel has responded to
the half-question ‘Where, today, would you find …?’ with the correct
answer ‘Modern-day Iraq’, Adam fires off a trick question: ‘Who
sold Joseph into captivity?’ Nigel is initially stumped, but eventually
replies confidently, ‘The Midianites’. ‘No, it wasn’t,’ trumpets Adam.
‘It was the Ishmaelites.’ ‘I think you’ll find it wasn’t,’ responds Nigel,
somewhat less confidently, and they both have to get out their Bibles.
Nigel is right to doubt himself on this one – I have my Bible open
in front of me right now, and I honestly can’t say whether it was the
Ishmaelites or Midianites who sold Joseph into slavery.
Let’s back up a bit, and remember the story to that point. On one
of the occasions when Jacob sends Joseph out to spy on his brothers,
his brothers see him approaching. ‘Here comes that dreamer,’ they
say, and they cook up a plan to kill him. Reuben, the eldest, seems
to sense a personal opportunity. He counsels his brothers against
killing Joseph and suggests they simply throw him into a pit in the
wilderness and leave him there. Reuben secretly wants to curry
favour with his father by being the one to restore Joseph to him.
In any event, the brothers agree – they strip Joseph of the offending
robe, throw him into an empty cistern and settle down to enjoy
their lunch. Before too long they spot a group of Ishmaelite traders
headed south toward Egypt. This time it is Judah who speaks up:
‘What profit is it if we kill our brother and conceal his blood? Come,
let us sell him to the Ishmaelites and not lay our hands on him, for he
is our brother, our own flesh.’ His brothers agree. Well, I guess that
is one kind of brotherly love! However, according to Genesis 37.28,
some Midianites then pass by, pull Joseph out of the cistern, and for
twenty pieces of silver, sell him to the Ishmaelite traders, who take
Joseph down to Egypt. In the next verse, it appears that the brothers
have been too focused on their lunch to notice any of this. Reuben
returns to the cistern, presumably to carry out his earlier plan, and
discovers that Joseph is missing. He tears his clothes and returns to
tell his brothers the news that Joseph is gone. The brothers slaughter
a goat and soil Joseph’s distinctive robe with its blood; then they
take it to show their father, Jacob. Jacob quickly recognizes the robe
and jumps to his own conclusions about the facts of Joseph’s demise,
from which his sons do not disillusion him. He tears his clothes, puts
on sackcloth and mourns his dead son ‘for many days’, refusing any
comfort from his sons or from ‘all his [unnamed] daughters’. In the
very last verse of the chapter, the reader is told that the Midianites
had sold Joseph in Egypt to Potiphar, one of Pharaoh’s officials and
the captain of the guard. No wonder Nigel was confused.
Well, however obnoxious Joseph was, he can’t have deserved to
have been stripped naked, thrown into a cistern, traded between random
sets of pirates, and trafficked to Egypt. The confusion that is
undeniably there in the story about exactly how all of this happened,
and upon which the writers of Rev are playing, is, ironically, typical
of a trauma narrative. Traumatized people often have serious difficulties
telling the story of what has happened to them, and one of the
added indignities of trauma is that often the victims of trauma are
not believed because of the gaps and inconsistencies in their stories.
I’m not meaning to suggest that the author knew this and deliberately
made the story confused. Most scholars think that the confusion is
probably the legacy of a couple of different versions of the story being
told together here. All I’m noticing is the irony that the recounting
of this trauma story happens to display markers that we now understand
to be typical of the stories of traumatized people.
Trauma and resilience …
So that is how Joseph’s story begins. One way of reading the rest of
Joseph’s story is to understand everything that happens next as a
consequence of Joseph having been sold into slavery by – well, by
whomever it was. Of course, the trafficking of Joseph was caused by
the antagonism between him and his brothers, which in turn was
caused by Joseph’s arrogance and Jacob’s unwise favouritism, but it
is possible to think about everything that happens to Joseph from
this point – and everything that he does – at least partly as being a
consequence of his having been trafficked. At each point in the story,
we will be asking why Joseph acts in a certain way, or why he doesn’t
do something you might have expected him to do, and what part his
traumatic experiences might be thought to have played.
I’m afraid that at this point I ought to make a confession. I have
a job. Yes, all of those applications eventually bore fruit, and I got a
job. Not the job, you’ll understand. One of the problems with this
job is that it is short-term. It is so short-term, in fact, that it hasn’t
really stopped the round of applications and interviews; no sooner
did it begin than I needed to start thinking about applying for the
next job. But this short-term job that I found has turned out to be the
reason for this book, and the theme of this short-term job might just
turn out to be, I suspect, the dominant theme of the first five years of
my big adventure in the UK. That theme is ‘trauma’. I have a job as
a researcher on a project that is designed to resource clergy to help
guide their congregations through the after-effects of trauma. My
interest in resilience has come about as a result of my work on this
project.
It was uncanny that the project got underway just as a series of
major traumas hit London and the UK. Within weeks, and over only
a period of a few months, we experienced an attack on Westminster
Bridge, another on London Bridge, bombings in Manchester and a
London tube station, an attack on a mosque and, perhaps most dramatic
and horrifying of all, the Grenfell Tower fire. As a research
team, we have spoken first-hand with people who experienced these
disasters and with clergy whose unenviable responsibility it has been
to minister to their people through them.
Our interest in resilience has come about as a result of this work,
as one of the outcomes of an experience of trauma can be increased
levels of resilience. Trauma, as I’ve already said, affects people in different
ways. It can be absolutely devastating, and in Chapter 2, as I
tell the story of Joseph’s early experiences of slavery in Egypt, I’ll
say some more about the painful, and sometimes bizarre, effects of
trauma. But trauma, if one has the opportunity to respond to it well,
can also have some positive effects. Going through the process of
trauma and coming out the other end can be a little like experiencing
the refiner’s fire – the final product may in some respects be stronger
and more beautiful than the original. There is a wonderful practice
as part of Japanese work with porcelain called Kintsugi. Kintsugi
involves treating broken pottery with a special lacquer dusted with
powdered gold. The repaired product features seams of gold that
shine in the light and that function to make the pottery stronger.
It is also nearly always more interesting than the original. Trauma
can be a little like that, if you imagine the gold-work as seams of
resilience running through broken, but re-assembled and repaired
people. Perhaps you have experienced this for yourself? What would
you identify as the golden seams running through your damaged
life? Are you aware of them – perhaps even proud of them? Are you
aware of them giving you strength, or making you more interesting?
In Abraham: A journey I described my experience of living with
ME/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (and feeling too exhausted for either
work or fun) for getting on toward 20 years. It was a dreadful experience
that I wouldn’t wish on anybody and that, at times, felt entirely
meaningless. Yet overall I can’t entirely wish it had never happened,
because of the gifts (or seams) of patience, empathy and reflection it
brought with it.
So, resilience can be something that comes unbidden as the result
of suffering. Most research on resilience is at pains to say that it can
also come as the result of concerted, conscious efforts to cultivate
it. While there are nearly as many definitions of resilience as there
are practitioners in the field, most describe resilience as a ‘process’
that can be learned and honed, rather than as a ‘trait’ that one either
possesses or lacks. One helpful guide to resilience and resilience-building
that takes this approach is the American Psychological
Association’s publication ‘The Road to Resilience’ (you’ll find the
details in the list of further reading at the end this book.) The APA
says: ‘Resilience is the process of adapting well in the face of adversity,
trauma, tragedy, threats or significant sources of stress … It
means “bouncing back” from difficult experiences.’
Like many other commentators on resilience, the APA identifies
a series of ‘factors’ that people can cultivate in order to build their
levels of resilience. The APA’s factors range from building and maintaining
good relationships with family and friends to exercising,
paying attention to one’s feelings and generally taking good care of
oneself. Some of the factors regularly suggested for the building of
resilience seem, like these, to be matters of general common sense.
Others, such as aptitude for flexible retelling of one’s life story, for
example, may not be things that would suggest themselves to people
in the ordinary run of things. Over the course of this book, we will
visit and explore a wide range of these factors and how they might,
or might not, help to build levels of resilience.
Your resilience journey
I wonder where you are coming from in your journey to resilience.
You may be living in the aftermath of a terrible event involving
tragedy, bereavement, injury, injustice or betrayal. If so, the fact that
you have picked up this book may (but see below) mean that you are
ready, or on your way to being ready, to take deliberate steps in your
thinking and in your actions, to move toward healing and either to
return to your life or to begin the hard work of building a new life.
You might be ready to start (consciously – the process may already
have begun) to sew seams of gold into your broken self.
Alternatively, you may be in the middle of a long or protracted
ordeal that demands from you patience and fortitude just to keep
going. For some of you, that description could be applied to your
work situation. You may require resilience just to keep on getting
out of bed and going to work every day, because your work environment
is tense or abusive, or because it is, by its very nature, dangerous.
On the other hand, your work may simply be boring and
repetitive or may not make good use of your skills. Perhaps, like me,
you are having trouble finding appropriate work to do and perhaps
the financial consequences of that are a cause of stress. You might
be living with chronic illness, or caring for somebody who is ill, or
visiting someone who is in prison (or serving a prison term yourself).
Living with long-term illness requires huge amounts of fortitude,
especially if you hope to keep your closest relationships intact!
Perhaps your ordeal is loneliness, or some other form of longing
or grief, that saps your energy and seems to drain your life of all
colour.
On the other hand, you might come to the topic of resilience
from another vantage point altogether. If one of the two previous
categories applies to you – if you have experienced an acute event,
or you are living with chronic stressors – your need for resilience
skills and aptitudes will be pressing. But if you are fortunate enough
to be simply getting on with life as normal, you may still feel that
your life could be greatly improved if you had the skills to navigate
and respond to ordinary stresses and strains and to ‘bounce back’
quickly and cheerfully.
Wherever you currently fit on this spectrum of experience, you
stand to benefit by thinking about how you can build your resilience
and by putting the theory into practice. Ironically, you may
find that doing resilience work comes more easily if you fit into
one of the first two categories – if you are recovering from a major
event, or living through a protracted period of challenges. That is
because you will have more to gain in the moment and because
experience of disasters and hardships tend of their nature to promote
resilience. That old aphorism ‘whatever doesn’t kill you makes
you stronger’ is pretty much on the money. But don’t let that put
you off if you’re currently getting along pretty well; we can all do
with learning about, and practising, resilience in our fast-paced,
demanding world.
There is one word of caution, however, that I’d like to speak for
those who are currently living in the wake of trauma. Listen carefully
to what your body is telling you about your readiness to embark
on conscious resilience-building. It is important that you don’t try to
short-change yourself by moving on to a new challenge too quickly.
One of the things that we sometimes neglect in our Western culture
is to give ourselves time for proper lamentation and grieving over
disasters and tragedies. Both body and mind need time to process
major shocks. Some writers in the field of trauma use Psalm 23’s
imagery of ‘walking through the valley of the shadow of death’
about the period following a traumatic event. They emphasize the
fact that this ‘walk through the deepest and darkest valley’ may take
a long time – even years. Only traumatized individuals or communities
can know how long their walk through the valley needs to be,
and only they will know when it is nearing completion. These writers
also stress that there is no alternative to doing this walk in its
entirety. One cannot go over, under or around the after-effects of
trauma, but only through. You can’t speed up the recovery process,
and attempts to bring it to an end prematurely will likely mean that
the unresolved trauma hangs around, becoming a new ‘friend’, that
will find a wide – and sometimes very odd – range of ways of making
its presence felt.
You shouldn’t take that to mean, if you are currently walking
through the valley, that you should stop reading. There is a great
deal to learn about the experience of trauma and recovery in Joseph’s
story. You can very usefully learn more about the trauma-response
process that you are currently experiencing and also take a peek at
the new directions in which you might choose to walk, when eventually
it is time for you to leave the valley – when you might also choose
to take Joseph with you as companion and support.
Then Jacob tore his garments …
If we in the West today tend to be allergic to displays of grief and
mourning, and resistant to tending sufficiently to our trauma
wounds, that is not a criticism that could be made of the ancient
Israelites! Chapter 37 of Genesis ends with a particularly graphic
display of grief and mourning. When Joseph’s 11 brothers present
their father with Joseph’s distinctive robe, which they have soiled
with goat’s blood, Jacob immediately recognizes it as Joseph’s and
his mind fills in all the missing details of Joseph’s fate. ‘A wild animal
has devoured him: Joseph is without doubt torn to pieces,’ Jacob
cries. (Gen. 37.33) Then follows an extended description of Jacob’s
lamenting for his son.
Then Jacob tore his garments, and put sackcloth on his loins,
and mourned for his son many days. All his sons and all
his daughters sought to comfort him; but he refused to be
comforted, and said, ‘No, I shall go down to Sheol to my son,
mourning.’ Thus his father bewailed him. (Gen. 37.34–35)
Note that Jacob’s lamenting comprises both words and actions. He
tears his garments and dons mourning garb, and he mourns. During
the period of mourning, he refuses to be comforted by his children,
but maintains that his mourning will end only with the end of his
life. Of course, Jacob does eventually end his period of mourning for
Joseph (even if he doesn’t recover fully from his grief), but in the early
days, his mourning fills his entire reality. Even compared with other
biblical stories, this account of Jacob’s mourning is quite extensive.
We are not very good, as Western, twenty-first century Christians,
at lamenting. This is true of churches, on the whole, as well as
of individuals. Often our congregations avoid or dodge the reality
of disaster by continuing to sing praise songs on Sunday mornings,
even after highly traumatic community events. Yet, lamenting after
disasters is an important part of the recovery process, of walking
through the valley of the shadow of death. If you are not quite sure
how to go about lamenting, there is a good book I can recommend –
the Psalms. There are more ‘lament’ psalms than any other single
kind of psalm (see Psalms 13, 88 and 120 as just a few examples).
Every single one is an authorized official complaint to God. Make
them to him with as much unguarded emotion and undignified display
as you can muster! Make them in private, and if you are brave,
make them in church where your pain can be witnessed, acknowledged
and shared by the congregation at the same time as it is heard
and seen by God.
If you look closely at the psalms of lament, you will see that most
of them end with statements of faith, praise or hope. (Psalm 88 is
a glorious exception – grim to the very end.) Scholars have argued
about why this is so, but their best explanation seems to be that the
very act of lamenting is effective in moving the emotions of the
lamenter, so that by the end of a psalm, the person praying it is able,
once more, to express faith, praise or hope in God. Once again, it
will be up to you, when you are using the psalms in your lamenting,
to determine whether you are yet ready, or able, to pray these final
verses. Don’t go there before you are ready, but stay in the valley of
the shadow of death until you sense that it is time to emerge.
What’s in a name?
And meanwhile, what of Joseph himself, who is not dead but sold
into slavery in Egypt? I am not going to pretend that Joseph was
enlightened to the extent that he knew that he needed to spend time
recovering ‘in the valley’ after his betrayal at the hands of his brothers.
Nevertheless, the story, ironically, seems to build that downtime
in for him. The next chapter of Genesis, Genesis 38, doesn’t
mention Joseph at all. Instead, it focuses on Joseph’s brother Judah,
the third-eldest of the brothers. Joseph re-enters the story in Genesis
39, but Genesis 38 is all about Judah – the ‘brotherly’ brother who
reasoned that if they were going to dispose of Joseph, they might at
least make a profit out of it! (Gen. 37.26–27)
In the next chapter of this book, we will read the two next chapters
of Genesis. It might seem a little early to be getting to the sex
scenes (!), but Chapters 38 and 39 contain two stories of seductions:
of Judah in Genesis 38 and of Joseph in Genesis 39. As you might
guess, the two seduction stories are related – even though each is
about a different brother. You could easily read the two stories and
not notice the parallels, but I will help you to draw them out.
There is something else that you might not notice, and that I may
need to draw out of the story for you. It has to do with names. We’re
dealing with three ‘J’ names here: Jacob, Judah and Joseph. That can
be a bit confusing, but there is something rather important about
two of these names. You might remember that Jacob is sometimes
known by another name: ‘Israel’. Jacob was given the name Israel by
the mysterious creature with whom he wrestled through the night
at Peniel (Gen. 32.28). The name Israel has two other associations
in the Old Testament. Sometimes Israel is used to refer to the whole
of God’s chosen nation, and sometimes it is used to refer to just the
northern kingdom, which was centred on Samaria, as distinct from
the southern kingdom, Judah, which was centred on Jerusalem.
‘Judah’, of course, is also another of our three ‘J’ names. The fact that
our story uses two of these significant geographic names is a hint
that there is something more to it than just a small, family-oriented
drama. This is not just a story about brothers – it is also a story about
nations (nations who have split from one another and who experience
‘sibling rivalry’ just as brothers do), in which each of the characters
represents a large body of people. The story operates on both
levels at once. At one level it asks, ‘which brother will succeed Jacob
and become the patriarch to lead the family into the next generation?’
If you have read Abraham: A journey, you will know that all
of Genesis is built on this recurring theme: ‘which son shall be chosen?’
At the other level, the level of nations, the story asks ‘which
nation will come out on top – Judah (south) or Israel (north)?’ In the
story, Judah represents the south (Judah), and Joseph represents the
north (Israel). In the next chapter of this book, we will begin to see
the political story that is developing as Judah and Joseph battle it out
to be both chosen son and chosen nation.
Perhaps this political element of the story hasn’t come as a surprise
to you. After all, each one of Jacob’s sons becomes one of the
12 tribes of Israel, and each tribe is eventually given its own allotted
portion of land, with the half-tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh (the
sons of Joseph) receiving allotments of land in the north, and the
other tribes in the south. So it is entirely possible that you already
associate Joseph with the north in your mind. But it may equally be
possible that you have previously overlooked the political and geographical
elements of the Joseph saga, as the 12 sons – but primarily
Joseph and Judah – struggle for pre-eminence.
Before we leave this discussion about names, I should say that
there is one name that has not come up at all so far in this first chapter.
And that name is ‘God’. God is by no means entirely absent from
Joseph’s story, but is absent from Genesis 37 (unless you consider
God to have been responsible for Joseph’s dreams, to which we will
turn in a moment). Unusually, not even one of the characters speaks
God’s name in Genesis 37. I should confess that God does not play a
terrifically obvious role in the whole Joseph saga, and this is a theme
that we shall be returning to, and pondering, over the course of the
book.
However, that is not the case for Chapters 38 and 39 of Genesis,
our focus in the next chapter. Especially in Genesis 39, it is as if God
storms out of nowhere to become, suddenly, the name on everybody’s
lips. And that is something that we shall need to ponder also.
But just for now, I want to whet your appetite for a little bit of mystery
(as well as the sex scenes!) by telling you that God is referred to by
a different name in Genesis 38 and 39 than in the rest of the Joseph
saga. Elsewhere, the Hebrew word used to refer to God is ‘Elohim’, a
native Canaanite word meaning ‘gods’ (yes, it’s plural), but used in
the Old Testament as a proper name for God (that mostly takes singular
verbs). ‘Elohim’ is translated in most English translations simply
as ‘God’. In Genesis 38 and 39, however, God is referred to almost
exclusively as ‘YHWH’. This unpronounceable collection of consonants
(scholars pronounce it as ‘Yahweh’), based on the Hebrew verb
‘to be’, is the special divine name that is first made known to the
Israelites in Exodus 3. ‘YHWH’ is translated in most English translations
as ‘the LORD’ and when read aloud in Hebrew, is often pronounced
‘Adonai’ (meaning ‘Lord’) in order to avoid speaking the
divine name. There is just one exception to the use of this special
name in Genesis 38 and 39 – in Genesis 39.9, Joseph speaks of God
using the name ‘Elohim’. If you look up Genesis 38 and 39 in your
Bible, however, you will see the name ‘the LORD’ everywhere (especially
in Genesis 39) and the name ‘God’ in this one place only.
What does this use of the special divine name YHWH in Genesis
38 and 39 signify? And how, if at all, does it relate to the three
‘J’ names and the two levels of the story – family saga and national
history – that are connected to those names? That will be for us to
wrestle with in Chapter Two.
The Dreamer
To draw an end to this first chapter, I want to return to its title. The
dreamer of the title is, of course, Joseph. His story begins with his
two dreams of greatness. In the first, Joseph and his brothers are
binding sheaves in a field when the brothers’ sheaves of wheat bow
down to Joseph’s sheaf. In the second dream, the sun, the moon and
11 stars (corresponding to Joseph’s 11 brothers) bow down before
Joseph. Joseph tells the first dream only to his brothers, but he tells
the second to his father, Jacob, also. The dreams, predictably, make
Joseph’s brothers hate him and stir up their jealousy, but Jacob stores
the dream away for future reference – and you might like to do the
same.
Already, though, you might be thinking about Joseph’s dreams
a little differently from the way you thought about them at the
beginning of this chapter – seeing them now as more than just
the puffed-up (or even divinely inspired) aspirations of the second
youngest son of a large family. The political battle for supremacy
between the tribes is also being signalled here. The first dream
even uses the language of kings and kingdoms: ‘reigning’ and ‘having
dominion’ over people. Right from the beginning, this is a story
of political intrigue and machinations.
This dual nature of the story – family story and national history
– is going to help us to think about trauma, and resilience as
response to it, in a very broad way in this book. We will be thinking
both about the resilience of individuals and the resilience of whole
nations – in some chapters one more than the other, and in other
chapters, both.
But just for now I want you to think briefly about resilience and
dreams. Do the two go together? Is having a dream necessary for
building resilience? We will need to read on to start to develop
answers to those questions, but another lot of questions you are
equipped to answer right now. Do you have a dream? What is it?
Have you shared it? Is it a dream that family and friends can get
behind, or is it more likely to stir up envy or hatred? Probably you
have a number of dreams that operate at a number of different levels,
as in Joseph’s story. To what extent do they help you to keep on putting
one foot in front of the other – to ‘bounce back’ from adversity?
The dream with which I am beginning this book is my dream of
finding a full-time, permanent job in my newly adopted homeland.
Previously, my dream had been to find a husband. With that dream
now realized (see Abraham: A journey for the full story!), my dream
has changed. Of course, there are other dreams also – that R. and I
will make a home near my new work, that we and our families will
be healthy and challenged and fulfilled, and that we will live out our
days in the service and love of God. Oh, and knocking away in the
back of my mind somewhere is a long-neglected dream of turning
into a sultry jazz diva. As I’m writing, these are all still dreams. Will
they be fulfilled? I will need to keep writing and you to keep reading.