Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today

Embracing Travail: Retrieving the Cross Today. By Cynthia S. W Crysdale. New York: Continuum, 1999. 208 pp. $24.95 (cloth).

At the end of Embracing Travail, a new constructive ethical/theological work on the atonement, Cynthia Crysdale tells a poignant story. She picks up her daughter from a summer camp, and in the midst of an energetic retelling of the camp's activities the eleven-year-old suddenly asks: "I don't get the part about Jesus dying for my sins. What does that mean?" Crysdale recalls how hard it was to answer that question, even after years of explaining the atonement to students, and writing on that topic.

Embracing Travail is a theology written with the realization that all our theologizing can sound similarly hollow and impenetrable. This book highlights our existential questions on atonement, interweaving biographies and personal anecdotal material with theological reflection on the meaning of the cross in light of feminist consciousness of the many ways in which atonement theories have been harmful to women and other oppressed groups. Working from Valerie Sawing Goldstein's pioneering work, Crysdale explores further how the cross can be approached by multiple paths-recognizing the sin of pride for one person, and the refusal to be a self by another. We can identify both with the crucified Christ and with the crucifier, depending on our circumstances. At some level, she claims, we all become both victims and selfperpetrators.

Crysdale sees pride and self-denigration as equally sinful. "Passive compliance is a sin as much as pride," she says. "Discerning complicity, recognizing the role one plays in one's own demise, realizing how one has actually destroyed one's own lord of glory by accepting the denigration of others is a complex and difficult road to follow." This is of course not a new idea, though Crysdale develops a dense discourse in original and creative ways, underscoring the religious legitimation of the culture of self-sacrifice.

Crysdale is attempting to bring balance to an atonement theory that has emphasized repentance, and sacrifice of the self, without any refinement. But this is also a work in dialogue and continuity with orthodox formulations. And in arguing for this double-sided approach to atonement Crysdale claims that the victim of abuse needs to move beyond her status as victim, to embrace the pain in the power of the cross, to prevent further escalation of the chain of sin, and further damage to her own self.

She tells the story of a woman whose life went from one chaos to another, the victim of childhood abuse, too many children and too little support. "Helen had to come to terms with her own victimization. This involved naming her pain, recognizing that her father's behavior had demeaned her. Healing in her case had to begin with naming this victimization, with embracing the pain of the past and living with it in the present." Her complicity was her sin.

The grammar of self-sacrifice in Scripture is complex. Genuine sacrifice of the self when freely chosen is redemptive, and we all admire Martin Luther King, Gandhi, and Mother Theresa for their form of courage and selflessness. But those of us who have been subject to the imposed sacrifice of self can testify that this tragic perversion of the gospel precludes any free sacrifice, or Christian freedom. Crysdale brings out some of these complexities, but sometimes seems to be emphasizing too much the individual at the expense of corporate entities, be they the communion of saints or powers and principalities. What Crysdale claims is an individual responsibility to claim freedom I would argue is as much a corporate ecclesiastical responsibility to grant freedom, to loose from bondage.

Thus we might still ask whether complicity is really sin. To accuse the victim of abuse of sinning sounds at first like another way of blaming the victim. But Crysdale is careful to insist that that is not what she intends, and that the "embrace of travail" is a part of recovering from such victimization and ensuring that the chain of inflicted sufferings does not continue. The grammar she is attempting to emphasize here is that of responsibility in the cross as a means of healing. Whether that is a shared or individual responsibility, and the extent to which long learned habits of complicity may be labeled sin will be a part of the ongoing discussion on atonement.

Crysdale does touch also on other reactions to suffering, like those of revenge and jealousy, giving examples of cycles of sin. Self-destruction leads to contempt of others, to furthering a person's insecurity, to blaming others, to mistrust of friendship. But there is a solution. "The wounded person, rather than passing on the pain, embraces the pain and seeks healing. Such healing enables him to forgive, and such forgiveness frees his perpetrator from defensive living."

This work is timely. Christian faith has increasingly become a source of pain to those most in need of its healing power and hope. Crysdale begins a discussion of why this might be so. Embracing Travail will be a very valuable contribution to atonement theology, and to classroom and church discussions. It will be a model for doing theology in a new way, not working within any overarching paradigm, but calling on multiple voices and sources, personal and historical. In drawing out the ethical dimensions of theology and the theological aspects of our moral lives this book will also count as a contribution to a newer cross-disciplinary approach to theologizing.