‘Trauma theology’ is relatively new as a theme in theology, and it does not necessarily require for its outworking the constructive reconsideration of a whole sequence of interrelated areas in theology such as have been proposed in this most welcome and adventurous book. It is distinctively ‘feminist’, not simply because its fundamental interpretative theological key deploys ‘Marian’ tradition in the form of ‘the Annunciation-Incarnation event’, but because it arises out of experiences peculiar to women. Their bodiliness matters, not construed so as to render them inferior, marginalized, denied the Eucharist if ‘birthing and bleeding’, quite apart from being denied ‘priestly ordination’ (p. 165), but rather because reconsideration of certain aspects of their existence provokes not only their personal recovery of bodily integrity, but even insight into Trinitarian theology, and the transformation of liturgical and sacramental theology.

To begin with, however, it is important to note that recognition of ‘trauma’ emerged post 1980, when ‘military trauma’ began to receive serious and well-funded attention. ‘Trauma’ as ‘rape’ is hideously familiar enough in war, but that apart, trauma is also closely associated with sexual and domestic abuse and violence, all within the range of ‘ordinary experience’ of whatever kind, characteristically overwhelming the ways in which people may cope with life’s mischances (pp. 4–5). The physical and sexual abuse of children does not fall within the compass of this book; nor, indeed do the lives of children as such receive explicit attention in the reconstructed theological perspective of the author. Given the range of ‘life’s mischances’, it is unsurprising that there is no single definition of ‘trauma’, but it is now both recognized as a common-enough element of human experience, and to have distinctive characteristics. For Dr O’Donnell, ‘rupture’ is key both to understanding and to recovery, rupture in bodily integrity, in time and memory, and in cognition and language. Recovery needs the restoration of bodily integrity (safety); becoming able to remember and narrate what happened in a way that makes sense; being able to narrate not only to oneself but to ‘a community of witnesses’. What may follow could be reconnection to others beyond such a community, even perhaps being open to the possibility of ‘growth’, even of making a kind of ‘gift’ to others by ‘advocacy’ for others recognizing and recovering from ‘trauma’ (pp. 6–7). The identification of such possible features of ‘recovery’ does not entail either that each will be experienced, or the necessity of their occurrence in a particular sequence. Recovery may be somewhat haphazard. Dr O’Donnell charitably refrains from more than minimal criticism of the sheer incomprehension of the far from unfamiliar experience of ‘reproductive loss’, met with a ‘theology’ that blamed/blames those living with ‘trauma’, or demands more than can be asked of them. In effect, one might say that she came to accept that ‘forgiveness’ of such response (for example) might just amount to the practice of ‘restraint’ that will at some point in ‘recovery’ daily face down her unquiet sorrow – in effect, as she has done in rethinking her own theological perspective, her own ‘gift’ to the ecclesial body she was able to rejoin as she recovered love of her own body.

Dr O’Donnell indeed does not overwhelm her readers with her own anguish at the beginning of her book, however, though begins in her first chapter to express her own sorrow at her experience of ‘multiple reproductive losses’, her anger when people assured her that all things were working together for the good, or that she needed to have more faith (p. 2), or was repeatedly asked when she was going to have a baby, or promised that she would have a living baby in her arms by next Mother’s Day (p. 190), itself an occasion which needs the most careful liturgy after consultation and preparation, which it rarely receives. For a time, she found anything but a ‘community of witnesses’ in her ‘ecclesial body’, grieving through the discovery that as with other women she too bore death within herself (experienced as physical and emotional pain), having to give up her own younger self and her dream of her future, with a longed-for family in a particular relationship which collapsed (p. 190). Her recovery as she now understands it, depended above all on rethinking Christian liturgy, somehow discerning in her understanding of her tradition that such liturgy ‘holds within it an unclaimed memory and experience of trauma, and an instinct for trauma recovery’ (p. 191).

Dr O’Donnell’s achievement in search of resources has taken her the first three chapters to identify long-forgotten ways of understanding the Eucharist and its linkage to the Nativity of Christ, and the inextricability of the two raises some interesting questions – which she does not pursue. The first of which is whether the former as it were generates the latter, eucharistic theology provoking insight into the Annunciation-Incarnation event which reciprocally sustains the Eucharist – the theology for which she is an admirable advocate. The second question might be how both relate to absence of the crucifix or to its presentation of Christ in royal resurrection mode in the first millennium in Western art at least. One might indeed venture to suggest that the loss of such art, and that with which it was integrated, occurred when theology, penitential practices and crucifix imagery of the second millennium so shifted the emphasis to the ‘Passion-and-sacrifice’ theology as to focus and fix attention on ‘trauma’, rather than on what might be offered: ‘generative and life-giving ritual, focussed on nourishment and life’ (p. 126), with mutual, self-giving, responsive love the key to ‘sacrifice’, rather than the glorification of suffering and those who suffer, let alone any appearance of validating violence as a way of accomplishing things (p. 113).

Chapters 4–6 include a number of constructive proposals about what amounts to a ‘reformation’ of a particular eucharistic theology (including an understanding of ‘priesthood’) and some tentative suggestions about how ‘sacrament’ should be construed, though she does not include among the ‘sacramental’ the many forms of worship which are non-eucharistic, despite giving herself a clue by taking as a principle the understanding that the ‘epiclesis’ is not the transformation of x into y but rather the revelation of the Divine already present (p. 91). So far as her own agonizing experiences are concerned, she found in the work of Serene Jones (drawing on the insight of Luther–Moltmann on the significance of Christ’s Passion within the Trinity (pp. 161–62) both ‘what it means to hold a place of death within oneself, even as one lives’ (pp. 194–95), and in that find even comfort, a ‘solidarity’, ‘a sense in which God is with us’ (p. 162) as the ‘epiclesis’ as the Divine already and always present suggests. Apart from the value of the book as a whole, there are some unmissable pages on the Annunciation-Incarnation as Trauma (pp. 167–69, 175–79), and beyond Mary’s recovery, an all too brief reflection of how one might then understand some traditional Marian doctrines (p. 181).

A complex, refreshing, boundary-shifting book.