Aubrey Buster
Resilience
As I reflect on my experience in the CACE seminar on Gender and Mutuality led by Christine Jeske and Jamie Goodwin, I keep returning to a concept that I have learned from fellow scholars working in the study of resilience.
Resilience studies focus on the ways in which some people are able to demonstrate “positive adaptation despite significant experiences of adversity or trauma.”[1] There are many ways in which people cultivate and develop traits and tools associated with these (unexpected) positive adaptations. I am a biblical scholar, specializing in the study of the Old Testament. Recently, scholars in my field have begun exploring how resilience is a concept that can illuminate the function of the Old Testament.
As summarized by Anja Klein, resilience possesses three components: 1) the experience of significant risk or adversity; 2) the utilization of resources to cope; 3) a positive outcome.[2] Old Testament scholars such as Rebecca Poe Hays and Judith Gärtner have described how the way in which stories are told in the Old Testament, the images that are used, and the presentation of the character of the God who hears them all contribute to the formation of resilience within the Israelite community who wrote and recited them.[3]
These stories do not only retell the happy or easy parts of Israel’s history. As Rebecca Poe Hays writes,
“The telling of stories—especially stories of our ancestors’ failings and our relationship to those failings—is a key aspect of how the book of Psalms moves audiences from trauma to healing and resilience.”[4]
Thus the stories that communities narrate about their past and how that past connects to their present and future do not only need to be the stories of the community’s successes. The Old Testament provides a model of how one can recount both stories of great triumph and stories of great failure or suffering in community. And it affirms that both kinds of storytelling can contribute to the formation of community resilience to present and future adversity.
But who you tell your story to also matters. Key to the success of resilience-oriented storytelling is the ability to tell these stories (and hear others’ stories told) in a safe and supportive environment. To know that one is heard and that one’s experiences will not be simply discounted. In the Psalms, the key figure who hears these stories is God. And God, according to the testimony of Israel, is a figure who hears, takes these stories seriously, and responds. The human listening community and their response can also contribute to or detract from the way in which the storytelling process contributes to resilience.
In our seminar, we practiced this art of storytelling. Christine and Jamie offered us story-telling formats, which developed as the seminar progressed from recollected memories (told in the present-tense with an emphasis on place) to the imagined re-writing of our collective stories through strategic change statements.
These storytelling moments allowed us to see where we were, feel heard, and then move together towards hope for the future. Our stories were not always good ones. In fact, most of them were stories of pain, difficulty, and hurt. But they were heard, recognized, and affirmed.
Change requires will, strategy, and effort. It is often difficult. Our ability to tell our stories together, however, crafted a small community of solidarity and resilience.
As the Psalmist concludes Psalm 106, a particularly difficult Psalm recounting Israel’s sin and suffering in the wilderness and in the land, I hope that we too can arrive at the end of our stories and say:
Praise be to the Lord, the God of Israel,
from everlasting to everlasting.
Let all the people say, “Amen!”
[1] Suniya S. Luthar and Dante Cicchetti, “The Construct of Resilience: Implications for Interventions and Social Policies,” Development and Psychopathology 12 (2000): 857–85.
[2] Anja Klein, “Resilience and Return in Isaiah—Using Resilience Theory in Hebrew Scripture Theology,” Religions 14 (2023): 318.
[3] Rebecca W. Poe Hays, Reading Resilience in the Psalms: Trauma, Healing, and the Strength to Survive (Oxford University Press, 2026); Judith Gärtner, “Empowering through Lamentation: Resilience as a Habit of Thought in the Hebrew Bible,” Hebrew Bible and Ancient Israel (Forthcoming).
[4] Rebecca W. Poe Hays, “Telling Stories for Healing and Resilience: A Trauma-Informed Reading of Psalms 105 and 106,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 53.3 (2023): 140.