“Were You There?” Overlaying the Trauma Feedback Loop

“Affliction is a particular kind of suffering, involving physical pain, social humiliation, and despair.” – Diogenes Allen, Theology for a Troubled Believer, 119

“Because trauma is like a feedback loop, you have to tell the story, and in telling the story you will eventually have to be able for your own imagination and your own body to imagine a different ending, to imagine a space beyond that story.”
– Serene Jones, Trauma and Grace, 12

According to the scholarly storehouse, Wikipedia, “Were You There?” was first published in 1899 as part of a collection called Old Plantation Hymns. In 1940, the Episcopal Church made it the first Negro spiritual to be included in a major American hymnal. This sparks a few questions in my mind.

Why did it take so long for such a rich artistic abundance of Christian music to be slowly adopted into church hymnals? What was it about this song that moved the publishers to make it the first to be integrated, when they surely had heard of many others?

More intriguing yet: what is it about the traumatizing scenes of the cross that inspired generations of traumatized people to carry the communal memory through oral tradition for so long prior to it being written?

“Were You There” has movement, but it’s not the clappy, bouncy kind of movement as experienced with whatever your favorite praise break song might be. You’re not supposed to dance for this.  This Negro spiritual brings about a reflective movement. There might be an inner shudder, an outward tremble, a slow rocking forward and backward in the pew. They are subtle movements but they’re like undercurrents churning the heart.

The repetitive question at hand is “Where you there?” and it graduates to another level of despair each time it’s asked. Was I there, when?

“When they crucified My Lord. . .
“When they nailed Him to the tree. . .
“When they pierced Him in the side. . .
“When the sun refused to shine. . .
“When He hung his head and died. . .
“When they laid Him in the tomb.”

Each question sometimes “causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.”

This spiritual doesn’t require the broad vocal range or multiplicity of instruments to inspire the frisson (musically induced goosebumps or spine-tingling chills).

The more I sit with it, the groaning pace of the music, even if a cappella, keeps the tension going as the imagination grasps each successive stage of the crucifixion. Not until there’s been space given to trembling does the scene move to the resurrection, “Where you there when the stone was rolled away?” And many published versions don’t even include this stanza.

The original composers most likely developed these lines collectively, perhaps while stealing away to Jesus in hush or brush harbors. One person added a line, then someone else summarized another scene as they reflected on the ancient Roman lynching that resonated with their current reality.

They were untreated trauma survivors, yet weren’t stuck in emergency responses of flight, fight, or freeze as they sang. They weren’t running – at least not at that moment. There was no quick and easy way out of enslavement. It required clear thinking to develop an escape plan. They weren’t fighting – at least not at that moment. Reflexes had to be controlled until a fight had reasonable chance of victory. They weren’t frozen either. They were producing art and inviting one another to a stillness and focus that could potentially lead to self-transcendence as Jonathan Haidt writes about on page 217 of The Anxious Generation.

They were overlaying one feedback loop with another and in this way imagined a different future than their present gave evidence of. Even if they didn’t include the stanza about rolling away the stone, they know that day came for Jesus and would come for them. After all, the very first line claims Jesus as “my Lord.” The rolling away of His stone also opened the portal of their stories, my story, our stories, no matter what circumstances have entombed us.