Thought for the Day-Texts of Healing

The Great Fire of London, with Ludgate and Old St Paul's, Yale Centre for British Art

A Thought for the Day given at a lunchtime service of Holy Communion at St Olave Hart Street on Tuesday 2nd September 2025 based on the text of 1 Thessalonians 5.1-6, 9-11 and Luke 4.31-37 and the anniversary of the start of the Great Fire of London.

Today, September 2nd, marks the anniversary of the Great Fire of London. While many literary accounts describe the traumatic impact of the fire on the people of this City, it is the diary of Samuel Pepys—buried beneath the altar of this church—that endures as the most vivid and authoritative window into daily life at the time.

In 1983, the Irish-born psychiatrist Robert Daly published an article suggesting that Pepys exhibited classic traits of what we now recognise as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD. Daly’s aim was to show that while the condition had only then recently been formally recognised by the medical profession, its symptoms have been part of human experience for centuries.

He identified Pepys’s trauma response through a range of behaviours: manic symptoms, such as insomnia caused by “the great terrors of fire,” his irritability, and resentment—particularly toward foreigners, like the French and Dutch, and toward the City’s leadership. Pepys is notably critical of the Lord Mayor. Daly also noted long stretches of silence in the diary, where Pepys appears to suppress or avoid mention of the fire altogether.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, an online edition of Pepys’s diary—first translated and published 200 years ago this year—found renewed popularity, as readers enduring modern trauma found points of connection with his seventeenth-century experience.

The earliest surviving piece of Christian writing is also shaped by trauma. What we now call St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians—was written within twenty years of Jesus’s death and resurrection. It predates the Gospels and is addressed to a fledgling church under pressure: isolated, ostracised and threatened with violence for declaring Jesus—and not the Emperor—as King. Some members of the church had already been killed for their faith in Christ.

As Daly’s reading of Pepys suggests, trauma triggers a variety of survival strategies. These are often grouped into two broad responses. One is dissociation, sometimes called the “flop and drop” response, where we withdraw, feel numb, and struggle to engage with the world or envision a future. The other is hyper-arousal, or the “fight or flight” mode—where we become restless, angry, overactive, or throw ourselves into distractions to avoid confronting the pain.

Paul’s letter might be read as a trauma-informed pastoral response to both possibilities. He offers comfort, assuring the church that those who have died in Christ will be raised. He encourages them to grieve—but also to hope. And rather than urging speculation about the future, he calls them to live fully in the present: to encourage and build one another up, as many were already doing.

In our Gospel reading, Jesus is teaching in the synagogue. His authority astonishes the crowd. Suddenly, a man shouts—agitated, manic: “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” His trauma is on full display: fear, confusion, torment. Jesus responds with compassion and command: “Be silent, and come out of him.” And the man is healed. The people are amazed, and word of Jesus begins to spread.

Many have told me that they first came to know Christ through his reputation for healing—at a moment in their lives, or the life of someone they loved, when they felt broken. In pain. Disconnected from themselves, others, and the world. Fractured.

It is often in these moments—when trauma overwhelms us, whether we are feeling despair or rage or both—that we cry out to Jesus. And it is then that his healing touch becomes real. Because he has been there himself. Amidst the unimaginable trauma of the cross, when Jesus entered into our suffering and bore the weight of it on his shoulders. His body was broken, offered to God, so that we might be made whole—so that every part of us, and the whole of creation, might be healed.

We remember that world-changing moment every time we gather at the Lord’s Table and are invited to enter into holy communion with Christ—the ultimate act of healing, saying with him:

This is my body. Broken. And given for you.

And once we have been fed by the Living Word we are sent out to do the same. To tell of the hope and healing of the risen Christ to all around us, especially those whose lives are stricken by fear, grief, or silence. To live our lives as part of the continuing story of God’s grace. 

Image: The Great Fire of London, with Ludgate and Old St Paul's, Wikipedia Commons