The Precious Blood of Jesus
Written by Ashley Schumacher, M.S.
“Glory be to Jesus,
Who in bitter pains
Poured for me the life-blood
From His sacred veins.”
There is something unsettling about blood. It stops us. Calls our attention. Often it alarms us, drawing us toward a wound.
Blood often reveals what was previously hidden. It appears when something has been pierced, breached or torn open, indicating that something beneath the surface has been touched.
We instinctively understand this from a physiological level, but how often do we pause to reflect on this as a spiritual, communal, and trauma reality?
Trauma is often associated with wounding and vulnerability and can therefore seem frightful to encounter at every level- emotionally, psychologically, physiologically, and yes, spiritually. Like the body, these other forms of trauma reveal places where safety and integrity, or wholeness has been ruptured.
In this month of July, dedicated to the Precious Blood, I find myself reflecting on a profound paradox at the heart of our Faith-both in creed and lived application: That which frightens us is also our life source, a sign of life- albeit wounded, but life still and therefore hope. At this liminal space of trauma and rupture and faith and redemption the image of the Precious Blood takes on new meaning. There is a movement here that is impossible to hold without reverence.
In clinical spaces, therapists often sit with the aftermath of trauma rupture. In every domain of the person and spiritually within the Body of Christ, trauma is not only an event or isolated individual response to stimuli, but at its root, a relational rupture- both personal and cosmic simultaneously. It is a fragmentation of our created nature from its telos- its relational essence, source, and end.
During this month, what if we were to gently, ever gently, allow ourselves to look upon, to sit with what initially feels frightful, to see where there may be deep woundedness there is still possibility and life. What would it be like to entrust all our trauma personal, communal, systemic, and immerse them in the Precious Blood- not only in prayer but through the therapeutic encounter?.
”Blessed through endless ages,
Be the precious stream.
Which from endless torments,
Doth the world redeem…
“Lift ye then your voices;
Swell the mighty flood;
Louder still and louder
Praise the precious blood.”
More than a pious and devotional thought- this is at the heart of Catholic-integrated trauma therapy, where the wounded heart is held and accompanied in looking upon the frightfulness of trauma rupture and tenderly invited to understand and experience these wounds differently so that they are not something to be avoided at all cost, but like St. Thomas, we place our hand in His, with the therapist as support and witness into.
“Louder still and louder…”
So that we may live freely from wounds redeemed, and become once more conduits of the Life-Blood moving through our relationships and through the generations to come.
“Praise the Precious Blood.”
