Michael Chen on Collective Trauma, Margins and AAPI.Liturgy

Find Michael Chen on instagram @aapi.liturgy

Michael Chen lives in Philadelphia with his wife Rachael and their two boys. He is a graduate of Princeton Seminary earned his Master of Divinity, and is currently working on a PhD in Marriage and Family Therapy at Eastern University. As a long time campus minister, he has a heart for helping people live more fully into their unique identity and vocation. In his free time he likes exploring cities and eating dumplings. Also, he is a karaoke champion.

Maggie had the privilege and honor to meet Michael at Allender Center where they were trained in Narrative Focused Trauma Care - Level II.

Michael is coming in tired and grateful. He’s coming off of a few late nights but also good conversations and meaningful work. He’s been in quarantine lock-down since the beginning (March 2020). Having married his wife Rachael in October of 2019, they enter their first year of marriage and hit the “accelerator” to get to know each other: getting to know all the quirks and dynamics of newly married life during the pandemic. They’ve hit wall emotionally and spiritually in this season. They’ve definitely triggered each other but have so much faith, trust and love in one another. He is looking froward to Philadelphia opening up a bit more. His boys start hybrid school next week and baseball season is starting up.

Maggie checks in with Michael around how he is holding the Derek Chauvin verdict. He’s angry that his Black siblings felt so much relief at something that should have been a “no brainer.” And he certainly has mixed emotions because he too felt relief. There was this sense of, “how can it be the case that something so seemingly straightforward and clear would even be in question?”

Danielle says that white folks talk about justice in a way that they are entitled to it, that justice is a right. This exposes historical narratives back to Emmet Till, people along the border, and so many others that have been murdered… But justice is not a built in right for all people. Michael adds, “and hence the relief…I don’t like that.”

Michael asks how Danielle and Maggie processed the verdict and also hearing the news of Ma’Kaia Bryant on the same day, and what a tail spin that was. Maggie agreed that tailspin is a perfect way to describe her feelings — it was a sense of not knowing which direction is up or down. She too held a mixed bag of emotion - A sense of relief at the accountability, a small measure of justice, at the guilty verdict for Derek Chauvin, as well as anger knowing how much work there is to be done with police reform, gun control and white supremacy in our country. And then feeling the overwhelming sense of, “How long, Oh Lord?” When hearing the news of Ma’Kaia Bryant. Watching videos of her showing her peers how to do hair… She wept. The only thing she could say was “How long?” Because there was no knowing of how to make meaning or sense of all that had happened in that one day.

Michael believes that, “we were not built to take in this much information this quickly without a sense of ritual, a sense of grief, or a space for mourning.” There is a feeling that our bodies can not process the amount of trauma in the news at the rate and intensity it is coming at us. He reminds himself to stay cognizant of that.

Danielle wrote an essay on April 19th about Adam, Dante and the impact of the massacre in Atlanta along with her journey to become a therapist. No sooner had she sent it off to get published when the verdict came in and Ma’Kaia Bryant was killed. She went to bed and felt like “this essay is no longer true.” She pulled the essay, edited it and resubmitted it today (April 23) to be published on May 3rd and her thought was, “Oh Lord, will I have to change this again? Will there be more stories to tell? I already know in my bones that it won’t feel right to leave a name out…” She agrees with Michael, it is too much to take in. And sometimes she says feels like all we can do is to say their name. Michael adds, which feels like another injustice or violation.

Maggie mentioned Michael’s new work with AAPI.liturgy on instagram and read a recent post about looking at trauma in a way to include collective trauma. The post says: “A group experience of pain, loss or catastrophe that shatters the social bonds that form a community, resulting in loss of trust, dissolution of roles and boundaries, and the breaking of group identity.” - Kai Erikson

In beginning to define trauma with the collective, it is expanding our idea of trauma from an individual felt embodied experience to “as individual bodies experiencing trauma collectively.” Maggie said that is in fact what we just described as we have processed what it has been like to live in our bodies even just the last few days with collective trauma.

Michael has thought for a long time that he does not know what it means to be Asian. He has grown up in a predominately white spaces in Minnesota and had taken a position in an a ministry organization as the director for cross cultural ministry, where he functioned as a mediator between white leadership and predominately Black staff. It felt like he had to do a lot of work on African-American History.

Race as a construct in his experience has been a binary between Black and white. He has been inspired by his friend Cole Arther Riley of Black Liturgies in bringing Black history, identity, literature and poetry into liturgical spaces of prayer and spiritual formation. He thinks that the people he is talking to, whether that is professors or people on instagram, are still asking the question: what does it mean to Asian American and Christian?

Michael believes that we are in a coming of age moment; people are seeking identity right now. So it is with that in mind that he started aapi.litgury with a sense of openness. He believes there is something to be explored around trauma, history and tryi