Healing Intergenerational Trauma as the Path to the Peace of God Which Passes All Understanding
Oct 15, 2023
The Rev. Carol L. Kessler, MD, MDiv, DFAACAP, FAPA
What a mighty God we serve
What a mighty God we serve
Angels bow before Him
Love Him and adore Him
What a mighty God we serve
We serve a mighty God, who is ready to restore right-relationship every moment that we remember whose we are.
And we are a human people, whose misdeeds harm ourselves, our children and our children’s children because we haven’t learned what Ezekiel reminds us today – “What do you mean by repeating this proverb concerning the land of Israel. The parents have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are on edge.” Ezekiel recalls how it has been said that the harm of sins is passed from generation to generation and Ezekiel declares that this proverb shall no longer be used. For all lives are God’s. And our God of love, peace, and justice holds the life of the parent and the child, and says that it is only the person who sins that will die. The parent will die and the child will be free to embrace life anew. Ezekiel mourns that the people of Israel find this way unfair.
Is it???? cries Ezekiel. No!!! God’s ways aren’t unfair. Your ways are unfair, says Ezekiel. God says that those who turn away from right-relation will suffer the consequences in their life time. Those who repent and turn toward right-relation will live.
Our God yearns each moment for each of us to turn to love. To be welcomed home.
Like John did, when he invited all to the river. Like Jesus did, when he invited all to eat and drink.
Yet the chief priests and elders thought Jesus’ and John’s ways unfair. When Jesus entered humbly into the place of power – the temple of Jerusalem – he saw God’s house converted into a den of thieves and knocked over tables. You can’t buy redemption! The chief priests and elders respond – Who do you think you are??!! Jesus asks those who claim holy authority – Who gives John authority – heaven or earth? They can’t respond. They are looking for an answer that will be politically correct. And Jesus says, that those seen as the embodiment of sin – the prostitutes and tax collectors – are entering God’s kingdom of love before the leaders of the temple will.
How dare John invite those horrible people to bathe in the river and be declared clean?! How dare Jesus eat with them?!
Our world loves to divide into wrong/right; victim/perpetrator; winner/loser.
And the history in our elite institutions honors the story of the winners/the victors. How dare you teach about the details of slavery,… of Jim Crow;..about the joy found in love outside of heterosexist norms?!, some white Christian nationalists declare today. As a psychiatrist I see teachers who state that Moms for Liberty ask the principal for a record of all books to ensure that their legacy won’t be marred. While my Puerto Rican husband shies away from entering a store, expecting to be treated as a potential shoplifter. We eat sour grapes for we dare not acknowledge what is and has been, so we can’t turn around.
We dare not bear the pain of seeing that are white ancestors colonized and enslaved. Their deeds need to be talked about and laid to rest; it’s too heavy a load to keep secret.
For silence equals death.
I know this deeply. My parents grew up under Hitler – who upheld church, children, and kitchen and used power and money to build a pure white race, killing Jews, disabled, homosexuals, political dissenters. Roma/”gypsies” – the Untermenschen/underclass.
After the war, Nazi crime was branded upon the generations that followed. When Jewish peers found out that I was German, they’d ask, “What did your parents do to stop the killing? Didn’t they smell the burning flesh?” A roommate at Brown University declared – “You’re German. I don’t like Jews either.” I’d go home to my parents, who’d been children at the time of the Holocaust to interrogate them.
It was only decades later, that a Union Seminary professor, Beverly Harrison, talked about the ethical dilemma of social class/strata that breeds shame. She asked us to interview our parents to hear what they felt ashamed about.
At that time, and even now, I carried shame for being “German.” My therapist would say, but you’re not even German, you were born here, in the U.S. I went to German school weekly, where we were told, “You’re ashamed of being German, but remember Goethe, Bach, Beethoven…”
“You don’t get it!”, I thought as I lived my life acutely attuned to my privilege and to crimes committed by the U.S. And so, as a physician and pastor I went to the concentration camps of my time – jails; prisons; the Salvadoran refugee camp in Honduras and the residential center confining unaccompanied minor asylum seekers in Westchester County. To be with the “untermenschen” and to cry out for justice.
To shed the Nazi stain.
It was only in middle age, prompted by my seminary professor that I sat and heard my parents’ stories and learned that they were much more than Nazis. They were what are now called Kriegskinder – the forgotten generation that never spoke of their wounds since they were not targets of mass extermination.
Thanks to Beverly Harrison, I came to know my parents beyond the dismissive – “There was a war when I was a child.” My mother knit socks and made bandages for soldiers in school. She gathered herbs for their wounds. Only devout Nazis could teach and if you didn’t say, “Heil Hitler”, you were beaten. She was the child of farmers. When harvest came, food was taken for the Germa n army. If you kept more than the minimum you were an enemy of the state. My father’s oldest brother died at age 19 years as a German soldier in France. His second oldest brother joined the S.S. “:It was like becoming a Marine,” my father explained. After the war, SS-branded Uncle Artur was held prisoner of war for years in France. Most who tried to escape were shot in the back. He somehow did. When my cousin brought him to the camp years later he panicked and shouted, “Get out of here! Now!” Terror-stricken. Still bearing the S.S. tattoo.
He was my favorite uncle. I didn’t know he’d been in the S.S. until I was a young adult. As a child, he sang as we wandered the Black Forest. He cultivated orchids. He loved his cat and was a devoted husband and father. “He was never cruel,” my cousin says. He never visited castles as a tourist. “They were built with slave labor,” he would say.
I know he repented. I hope he had peace in his soul when he died.
Recently, I learned of Bert Hellinger who was in the German army and after the war became a Catholic priest who lived with the Zulu people for a decade. He returned to Germany to develop a healing space for Nazi and Jew, in what has become known as family constellations. Children of SS and children of Holocaust survivors gathered to invite each other to become representatives of their families. To invite the ancestors to take their place. To witness the harm that had been done. To give a place to the one who had killed and the one who died. To look upon the whole mess. To feel the pain and make space for mercy and love.
I was graced to gather in a family constellation led by one who learned from Hellinger, Suzi Tucker. There, I told my family’s story out loud for the first time, in fear and trembling. Suzi formed a circle around me and had each one gathered say, “Thank you for telling my story. I am well.” There is no need for my teeth to be on edge.
Jesus came inviting those in power to gather with those on the margins. “Who do you think you are?!”, the leaders shouted.
God is present each moment, inviting us to lay down our swords and shields. To acknowledge the sins of our ancestors and ourselves. To tell our stories and to open the way for love, peace and justice.
Let us go forth in love.
Create in me a clean heart O God
And renew a right spirit within me
Cast me not away from thy presence
And take not your Holy Spirit from me
Restore unto me the joy of thy salvation
And uphold me with thy free Spirit.