What Lies Beneath the Violence?
A Meditation by Rev. Cameron Trimble
“Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house...” —Isaiah 58:6-7 (NRSV)
I’ve been meditating on a question that will not let me go: What lies beneath the eruptions of violence we’re witnessing around the world right now? The brutality in Israel and Palestine. The grinding war in Ukraine. The deportation of immigrants. The erasure of black history. The attacks on LGBT+ people. The arrests and disappearing of Palestinian protesters. The surges of antisemitism. The latest attack in Boulder. Each act stuns us, but none of it is new. These moments are not eruptions from nowhere—they are tremors from tectonic plates of grief and trauma long ignored.
No harm happens in isolation. Every act of violence, every wave of hatred, is shaped by a relational field thick with history, ideology, displacement, dehumanization—and a profound, unmet longing for dignity, belonging, and repair. When we forget this, we risk collapsing into moral bookkeeping—who’s right, who’s wrong—rather than metabolizing the deeper pain and grief that fuels it all.
Palestinians in Gaza have endured more than 75 years of dispossession and occupation. The death toll, infrastructure collapse, and starvation are not incidental—they are expressions of a system designed to control and displace. People in Gaza are not just grieving deaths—they’re grieving dehumanization.
But—and here’s the complexity—Jewish communities are also carrying deep, unresolved ancestral trauma, including the Holocaust, pogroms, and centuries of being cast as the perpetual “other.” For many Jews, the fear of annihilation is not theoretical—it is lived memory. So when violence erupts, especially as a targeted attack like the Oct 7 massacre, it activates this trauma—and many feel existentially threatened all over again.
Now imagine these griefs entangled. Imagine them talking through one another’s wounds, not with words, but with fear, reaction, survival instinct, and retributive logic.
And amidst that, we have:
State power (Israel, the U.S.) backing certain, incomplete narratives,
Militant resistance (like Hamas) emerging from despair and anger,
Diasporic grief (Palestinians and Jews worldwide) trying to make sense of it all.
When grief is suppressed, it doesn’t disappear—it festers. It seeks release, often in the form of scapegoating and supremacy. This isn’t a pattern unique to this moment. It is the same grief logic that drives white supremacy, that has justified colonialism and slavery, and that rationalizes violence across history.
Hate crimes are not born in a vacuum. They emerge when:
Systems are unresponsive to suffering.
People feel they have no institutional avenue for justice.
Pain turns into dehumanization of “the other.”
Binary thinking (victim/perpetrator, good/evil) dominates the discourse.
This is not to excuse the violence—it is to understand what feeds it.
When Palestinian people in the U.S. enact violence against Jews, they are often not simply acting as individuals with malice, but as nodes in a wider field of unresolved trauma, misdirected rage, and social collapse. They are channeling grief through supremacy logic, which is exactly the pattern they themselves have suffered under.
But this happens on all sides. If we continue our case study, for every Palestinian radicalized into hatred, there are Jewish settlers in the West Bank setting fire to Palestinian villages under military protection. There are governments using the grief of the Holocaust to justify the starvation of children.
That’s what violence does—it colonizes the grieving process, feeding off it and turning it against itself.
Fr. Richard Rohr once wrote, “If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” The transformation of pain is not tidy work. It asks of us more than blame—it asks for courage, humility, and the refusal to let trauma do our speaking for us.
So what can we do?
We must refuse purity. There are no blameless entities in these tragedies. There is only a shared trauma field metabolized differently through different histories, narratives, and asymmetries of power.
We must rehumanize the dehumanized—on all sides. Hate cannot be detoxified through more hate.
We must refuse the binaries. It is, for example, possible to hold the grief of Jewish people and the grief of Palestinians without pitting them against each other.
We must interrupt the seduction toward resolution. There is no neat ending here, no checklist for peace. There is only the slow work of repair, of listening, of refusing to let trauma drive the bus.
This is the slow, sacred work. The work of spiritual maturity. The work of healing—not just bodies or borders, but the field itself.
I’m still trying to sense my way into the roots of this. What are your thoughts?
We are in this together,
Cameron
Reflection Questions
Where have you witnessed unresolved grief masquerading as hatred—in your own story or in the world around you?
What helps you stay tender and open-hearted in the face of complex or painful truths?
How might you practice holding multiple truths, multiple griefs, without collapsing into silence or defensiveness?
A Prayer for the Day
Prayer for the Entangled Wounds
God of all who mourn,
We carry grief too vast to name—
Grief that spans generations, borders, and histories.
We grieve lives lost, dignity stolen, and stories silenced.
Give us the strength not to look away.
Give us the wisdom to listen to wounds, not just to words.
Soften our instinct to judge, and sharpen our instinct to love.
In this age of confusion and violence,
Teach us the way of mercy.
Root us in compassion,
So we may become people of repair.
Amen.
Spiritual Practice
Tending the Field
Notice the relational fields you inhabit—your workplace, your home, your community, even your social media feed. Each one carries a web of unspoken tensions, histories, hopes, and wounds. Ask yourself: What is ungrieved here? What pain is being misnamed or misdirected?
Then, bring one moment of gentle disruption. Not a correction, not a condemnation—but an act of presence. This could be a question asked with humility, a memory named aloud, an apology offered without prompting. A story shared that adds complexity instead of clarity.
Our job is not to resolve the field. Our job is to tend it—to infuse it with honesty, curiosity, and care. As Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön writes, “Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others.” Bring your presence as a balm, not a sword.
And if the grief feels too heavy to bear alone, remember: it never was yours alone to carry. Let it move through you, not against you. Let it teach you how to love more bravely.
Upcoming Events That Might Be of Interest…
June 14, 2025 - On June 14—Flag Day—No Kings is a nationwide day of defiance. From city blocks to small towns, from courthouse steps to community parks, we’re taking action to reject authoritarianism—and show the world what democracy really looks like. Find a protest in your city HERE. I will be out there with you!
July 20-25, 2025 - The Art of Wilding: A 5-Day Expedition in Wyoming for Women Leaders. Click here to learn more.
August 11, 2025, 2pm ET - Dr. Andrew Root and I will be hosting a 6 part series on Spirituality in the Secular Age based on his research. The dates are August 11, 18, September 8, 15, and October 6, 13. Mark your calendars! More on this soon.
September 4, 4:30pm ET - I will be collaborating with the Anderson Forum for Progressive Theology to host a conversation with Thomas Jay Oord on Open and Relational theology. It’s a FREE event. Register here.
October 15-18, 2025 - Converging 2025: Sing Truth Conference (all musicians invited!) at Northwest Christian Church in Columbus, OH. Register here!
I drafted a Strategic Framework for Congregations as we move into the coming years of increased authoritarianism around the world. If interested, you can download it here.
If you are a leader or member of a congregation looking for consulting support in visioning, planning, hiring or staffing, please consider Convergence.
Thank you for this grace-filled essay detailing our so human frailties from which we create and cause such deep harm. To read and reread your words, share them with my congregation, my community, is my commitment this day. It’s a call so easily set aside: this is hard. What else is there? Please keep writing through all this chaos: I will keep reading and working for love. Yes, together. Shannan
Thank you for this blessed reflection. Even the consciousness of our present global human reality is 'trauma' itself.