Holding Trauma, Sustaining Hope: The book of Revelation as a pastoral resource for Trauma-Informed Meaning-Making

This article investigates how the Book of Revelation, when approached through a trauma-informed and phenomenological lens, functions as a pastoral resource for communities navigating catastrophic loss. The question is practically urgent: pastoral practitioners increasingly encounter survivors whose theological frameworks have collapsed under the weight of violence, bereavement, and collective rupture. Situating Revelation within its first-century pastoral genesis and engaging it through interdisciplinary dialogue between trauma psychology, biblical scholarship, and African American reception history, the study demonstrates that the text functions not as predictive apocalypse but as symbolic wisdom literature designed to sustain communal endurance, facilitate meaning reconstruction, and maintain relational bonds across the boundary of death. The article introduces the concept of relational eschatology — the lived experience of continued connection across death, mediated through Christian symbolic and liturgical practice — as a generative framework for pastoral engagement. It concludes that Revelation's apocalyptic imagination, responsibly interpreted, provides a symbolic grammar capable of supporting narrative coherence, identity reconstruction, and adaptive meaning-making in the aftermath of trauma, with direct implications for pastoral care, chaplaincy, and faith-integrated practice.