The Desolation Dinners
The Desolation Dinners
Ryan Ramsey
On Balms and Bandages After Betrayal
Sometimes we crash rather suddenly into a moment that craters our world and untethers us from the familiar orbits of our life. In the spring of 2019, my wife and I were broken open and languished by a storm of crises and loss that threatened to hurl us into a collective tailspin.
In the midst of our chaotic, spinning season, five friends converged in a backyard that summer to take inventory of the many wells of pain.
There were sudden job losses. Betrayals, abuse, and ruptures involving congregations. A marriage careening toward its end after abandonment and infidelity. We found ourselves traversing wild terrain and barreling upheaval, but we were gathered from east and west for a few months of evening commensality.
Our spirits failed within us. Our bodies were haunted by injury, exhaustion, and sorrow. Our limbs ached for nourishment. And our wounds required the balm of ritual. It was a backyard in Colorado where God “turned our deserts into a pool,” as the Psalms declare, and gathered a weathered community around a table, where we could settle.
The difference between surviving alone and surviving together is often the difference between the dimness of despair and the flickering of imagination. The gift of friendship—elusive and increasingly endangered today—is strong enough to subdue the waves of existential tumult that drag us further out to sea.
It is no coincidence when the hand of deliverance ushers our hearts away from shame’s isolation and toward the ritual of a shared meal.
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Over the course of a short time nearing the end of his life, Jesus experienced double crossing, denial, neglect, and institutional malfeasance. In some ways, perhaps, these may all be labeled as different expressions of the same experience: betrayal. Journalist Claire Gillespie defines betrayal trauma as “trauma stemming from mistreatment by a caregiver and / or a trusted person, like an intimate partner.” It can also happen “when an institution . . . harms the individuals it claims to serve.”
Judas, infamously referred to as the betrayer in Matthew 26, reduced Jesus to currency. He traded in the life of his Messiah for his own gain. The psychological weight of such a choice proved too much to bear. We see this kind of betrayal reenacted all the time along a broad spectrum of severity. If you’ve experienced the devastation of someone you loved and trusted choosing their own stability over the risk of maintaining solidarity with your courage and character, you’ve tasted the poison of being “traded in.”
If Judas traded Jesus in, Peter preserved his own life by pretending he had never encountered Jesus’ transforming presence or been healed by the depths of the Promised One’s loving gaze. In a moment of consuming fear, Peter opted to erase his history and intimate friendship with the Son of Man—a betrayal that heaped bitter grief upon his life and vocation. Many of us have been similarly erased in the context of community, when the stakes of choosing to support and stand with us became too high for others we entrusted ourselves to. It is hard to overstate the immensity of pain on the receiving end of someone’s decision to deny you after years or decades of relational investment.
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That summer, we shared our heartache and took turns allowing tears to be collected as the sun descended over a scene of communal grief. We all pitched in most nights to prepare the food. In addition to the five of us, we sometimes welcomed other guests. The days paced along at a predictable cadence that allowed us to trace the movements of our lives and the new orbits of grace we were each gently being invited into. As the summer continued, these Desolation Dinners produced a certain synergy that was wholly nourishing.
Samuel Han
Given that we gathered multiple times a week, the space between us became a gift the five of us needed to receive. We shouted in protest over the injustices we absorbed. We reeled in lament and shock over the decisions of former friends to tolerate abuse in faith communities at our expense. We broke for one friend as she watched her husband betray her for someone else while he attempted to blame the infidelity on her, due to his dissatisfaction in the marriage.
Over time, the company of stabilizing presence and simple meals became a bandage of sacraments gently covering our wounds and ruptures. The table provided critical triage until we were strong enough to live forward again. The safety, sacrifice, and solidarity of friendship in seasons of crisis was a lifeline. In a culture that continues to mete out chronic loneliness, I’m afraid it’s also more and more a luxury.
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In the aforementioned article, Gillespie interviews clinical psychologist Melissa Platt, PhD. She details an important observation Platt made in interviewing veteran soldiers from the Iraq war for a study on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). When assessed for the disorder, the veterans answered “no” to many of the test questions even though they clearly felt intense emotional pain. Platt explained, “It seemed like the PTSD interview was not always asking the right questions in situations in which the trauma was perpetrated by a commander, fellow unit members, or anyone else the veteran trusted or depended on for survival. Since then, my career has focused on understanding and treating betrayal trauma.” In the ocean-deep ache of trauma and loss, it is not uncommon to find the memories of betrayal reverberating on the sea floor.
In most cases, one betraying relationship is enough pain for a lifetime. The wound is equal parts haunting, enduring, and depleting—especially when it transpires in a faith environment. Even for the most resilient, there may be deep disenchantment that accompanies the grief. Prior to the first betrayal injury, there is a blissful naiveté embraced regarding relationships and community. It is the innocent and beautiful childlike schema in us that asks, “surely the people who love me today will always be there for me?” But betrayal is so destabilizing that those victimized face schemas much more daunting and grim: crippling shame, hypervigilance, self-doubt, and hopelessness. The journey of recovery is slow, plotting, and rife with barren landscapes, cratered and dry.
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In the garden, once again Jesus is failed by those closest to him after such an urgent plea: “. . . I am deeply grieved to the point of death. Remain here and stay awake with me.” (Mt. 26:38) Three times in Matthew’s account, the disciples neglect to remain present and awake with Jesus in the midst of crisis. This kind of repeated neglect registers in us as its own version of betrayal. In Jesus’ lament, we hear echoes of our howling cries to be cared for. We remember the searing absence of friends or loved ones. In my darkest hour, you were silent. When I needed you to remain with me, you checked out!
In the grand finale of his tour of traumas, it is the institutions surrounding Jesus that have their turn. The governing authorities and the religious establishment, seemingly coconspiring with the crowds, offer their judicial curses in culminating fashion. Jesus forgives the collective self-deception that brought his death in Luke 23, but that does not mean we carry on undisturbed.
In a 2014 article on institutional betrayal, authors Carly Parnitzke Smith and Jennifer J. Freyd describe the vital capacity of institutions for either healing or harm. “Institutional effects arise in a staggering array of events from unfair or exploitive workplace policies, to legalized withholding of rights from classes of people (such as the right to marriage or healthcare), to the systemic destruction of a culture or people through genocide.” In the context of the church, we continue to reckon with the reality of injustices perpetrated by those most responsible to nurture and protect. As David French recently wrote, “When Christian institutions prioritize self-preservation, they contradict the spirit of the cross.”
Jesus bore our betrayals. The challenge many of us face in the aftermath is the fight for re-enchantment. If every new pathway of friendship or union is fraught with the possibility of not just disappointment but profound injury, how do we press in? If every potential prospect of spiritual community contains the familiar ingredients of subtle and swift deterioration, who can we open our hearts to? There are only so many times a soul can withstand burn wounds from a community or organization before it becomes agnostic about the supposed gifts of white-knuckled commitment.
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It was a table that foreshadowed our hope. Just as Jesus broke the bread and offered the cup in the company of friends, it was a summer of sorrows around a dinner table that regenerated us. There were no simple solutions for our woes or hollow promises made about the duration of pain we may continue to traverse. But over each meal, we each extended a reliable, loving attention. We were embassies to one another.
On the night before he died, Christ hosted a feast in fellowship with friends who would—in unique ways—pour him out. Does this make Jesus the preeminent fatalist? The first and ultimate in a long line of white-knuckling faithfuls?
Perhaps the Table reminds us not that our Lord cared most about “getting the job done” or merely the preservation of an institution, but that in offering his disciples a lasting memory of their dignity and belonging, he embodied for us what we need the most in the hour of desolation.
Ryan Ramsey
Writer & Pastor
Ryan has been published in Fathom Magazine
Photography by Samuel Han