S2E10: Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton-Chen on Advent and Holding Tension

Dan Allender, PhD - is a pioneer of a unique approach to trauma and abuse therapy that has brought healing and transformation by bridging the story of the gospel and the stories of trauma and abuse. He helped found the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology in 1997 as well as the Allender Center in 2011 to train leaders and mental health professionals to courageously engage others’ stories of harm.

Rachael Clinton-Chen, MDiv is a trauma practitioner, speaker (preacher), and pastoral leader. She serves as the Director of Teaching and Care for The Allender Center at The Seattle School.

Together Dan and Rachael host a weekly podcast for the Allender Center which you can find  here: 
The Allender Center Podcast. You can follow the Allender Center on instagram @theallendercenter

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Checking in with Dan and Rachael about how they are doing under COVID. Rachael says she’s doing surprisingly well in the midst of it all but definitely feels the fragmentation and the exhaustion; moments of despair and moments of joy that almost feel wrong because they expose the disparity between the two. She and her husband Michael are trying to tend to the small as if it is one of the most sacred and powerful things that they can do while also holding the larger reality of what’s playing out in the world as the larger cultural context. She said she is really ready for a pause, which she believes Christmas in a pandemic will offer. 

Dan just wanted to say “ditto” to everything Rachael said. He says this time is crazy and none of us know how to live but we’re living. We’re all dislocated; at home but exiled. With the prospect of goodness in the New Year and the possibility of a vaccine, the coming hope actually makes our struggle today that much harder not easier.

Danielle feels that deeply and asks are we ready to sprint to the finish or do we still have to pace ourselves for more ahead? 

Maggie wonders how do we engage Advent and the Christmas season as we both live in and feel the push and pull between hope/joy and grief/sorrow right now?

Dan holds no nostalgia for this season--Christmas was not a particularly happy holiday for him growing up; his father was a baker which meant Thanksgiving through the New Year he was usually working as early as the age of 8. It was tense and intense as his family’s ability to make a living largely depended on this season. He didn’t look forward to this time of year. 

He also says that the assumption that this is a joyous season on the basis of Scripture is ridiculous; this is a season in which Joseph and Mary are being sent back to Bethlehem for governmental purposes in order to raise taxes. This is a season of tension, exhaustion and fear. It is one of wild, crazy unpredictability. As a therapist also this is not a season he looks forward to because it is a time of deep familial tensions and people between their expectations.

“I enter this season pretty regularly with a sense of exhaustion and despair much like I believe the coming of Jesus is meant to be.” Dan believes that most of us ruin Christmas in part in order to have a sense of similitude between what the moment was that the God man arrived on this earth. 

Rachael thinks Advent has been co-opted by Hallmark, even down to the words we use when we talk about this season. “Hope,” “joy,” “peace” and “love” in a biblical sense are held with tension. They are more complex and robust than we often use today. There is a sense of waiting in exile for God to arrive with a deeper awareness of our need. These words then are the heart cry of what we long for as we live in the juxtaposition of what does not feel or is not true of our Christmas. 

For Rachael, Christmas has been a season that has held the robust tension between deep sorrow and deep delight. Growing up in a big Italian family they’d roll meatballs, make homemade sauce… They were together in a way that brought so much delight; to be in the midst of 50 people with all the noise, the fights, the chaos and the laughter. It was the passion of people being together. And it is a season that holds the stories of the stresses of life, including financial stress. 

She says this year feels more akin to the biblical story of the context of Jesus breaking into the world. She believes we have an opportunity to let the ache of advent permeate us more truthfully. Our joy is in the one who comes to be with us; no one can take that away even in a global pandemic, even as police brutality continues, even as socio-economic disparities are heightened, loved ones are lost… There is so much heartache at this moment in time. And yet, there is something inside her that says, “May we encounter something of God who comes to be with us even in the brutality and the heartache.” A God that says, “I am with you and there is something redemptive about your humanity that