Forgiveness and Freedom: Sexual Abuse (Main Forum)

So. I know a little bit about sexual abuse. Well, not me personally. I mean, not as part of my own childhood. But I know about it because it happened to two of my three children. Until all the hoopla about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church came up, I thought I was far past any anger or resentment about what happened to my children, but I was SO wrong! This post is about getting beyond the anger. It’s about forgiveness, from my own experience. We humans lie to ourselves so well and so thoroughly. We think we have everything under control, but we don’t. The anger and the outrage of so many in the Catholic scandals have brought me face to face with my own limitations. Forgiving is what we, or rather, God, does to give us, as individuals, freedom from the past. It takes place in our own hearts. It does not excuse the reality of the wrong. It does not involve forgetting. It is also not the same thing as reconciliation, which involves the person who committed the wrong being accountable for the hurtful behavior and making amends. You can’t force reconciliation. You can accept the grace of forgiveness. I pray every day for that grace in my own life, in the lives of my children, and in the lives of all those who have been so deeply harmed by any institutionalized church, school or government. Without it, the victims are victims forever. With it, the victims become the victors.

I wasn’t raised a Catholic. I was raised the daughter of a Seventh-Day-Adventist pastor and teacher. I went to SDA schools until I graduated from college the first time in 1978. Then, I went all haywire and married an SDA scion.

The man I married was, short of dropping names, descendant of a big cereal family. Both he and a substantial number of his cereal progenitors, were . . . well, whacky. Ever seen the movie, “Road to Wellville?” Check it out sometime. It’s a corker. The man I married was the older sibling of a childhood friend. The family was very liberal by SDA standards. Their kids got to do all kinds of things my parents wouldn’t let me do. I thought that was pretty neat. They were also pretty smart, in a socio-pathological kind of way. One time, four of their eight kids showed up at our door on a frigid, rainy October Michigan night. The youngest was an infant. My husband-to-be had been playing chicken with them in the cornfield across from our house, trying to run them down with a car. Like I said, whacky.

But they had a good game going, these folks. They had clearly convinced themselves, and they certainly convinced me, that they were superior: superior to me, to everyone in our “rules-based” community, and probably to God Herself. I believed it. Then I grew up and went to SDA college and somehow, managed to find the guy who’d been driving the car in the cornfield. I forgot about that little incident when he convinced me, based on his extensive knowledge of who I’d been as a child, that he was my “soul-mate.” Jeez! What a joke! I was 21 and he was 31. He knew everything about what made me tick. I thought I’d found the love of my life. His father (NOT of the cereal dynasty) warned me. He said, “If you marry him, you will regret it for the rest of your life.” But what did he know? Right? He didn’t know that I could love ANYONE out of ANYTHING (and Lucifer said, “I will be like God.”).

His father was right.
Fast forward to Easter Vigil 2010. Meanwhile, I’ve become a Catholic. My dear Andy Greeley had it right when he said some folks have a Catholic imagination and some have a Protestant imagination. I had the former.

With many missteps, I more or less raised my kids to be Catholic. I remarried a cradle Catholic (his religion, my faith) and my oldest child was confirmed, then promptly stopped attending church and began investigating witchcraft. The next week it was Buddhism. The next week it was voodoo. Both she and my middle child had been horribly abused by the Scion of the Cereal Dynasty. The simple fact is, we will never know exactly what happened to my children. They remember him reading “Mein Kampf” to them. He gave them drugs when they were barely toddlers. And then there was the sexual abuse. They have never been able to get past what happened. They both suffer from severe emotional distress. I can’t blame them.

The law took them out of the hands of the man who called himself their father when they were 4 and 6. They’ve had more therapy than any child should ever have. They’ve been given every opportunity to heal. It’s been a very rocky road. Sometimes, it seems they will never really heal. But there are hopeful signs.

As my daughter and I walked to the Easter fire this year, we talked about the sex abuse scandal in the Catholic church. About how the media are making such a big deal of the “Catholic” crisis, and how it isn’t denominational, but cultural. It comes from thinking we own our children, rather than understanding that we are here to serve them. My daughter told me all the news about the “Catholic” crisis had inspired her to do a web search of SDA abuse. She said she’d found multiple sites that sounded a lot like the Vatican message. “Suck it up.” “Move on.” “Get over it.” She said it was the fourth or fifth link that led her to a group dedicated to helping victims of SDA clergy abuse.

Next morning, in meditation, I found the gospel of Luke (Luke 6:27-37). Jesus tells me to love my enemies. To do good to those who hate and abuse me. To bless those who curse me. That as I wish others would do to me, so I should do to them. To give without expecting return. Never to judge another human person. To forgive as I would wish to be forgiven. What the HELL was He talking about?

I got to thinking about the horror my own children, and all those other victims of abuse, clerical or otherwise, have suffered. All the little ones. The ones about whom Christ said, “If anyone harms one of these, it would be better for him if a millstone were hanged around his neck and he were thrown into the depths of the sea.” That’s how I used to think about my cereal ex, or anyone else who hurt these precious little ones. After all my “enlightening” life’s experiences, I found a lot of anger and judgment still lurking under the surface.

And then, I realized what the hell He was talking about was me. I remembered something I’d read by a very wise Buddhist writer. She’d said that forgiveness isn’t about excusing the harm or forgetting that it happened. It was about freeing oneself from being bound by the harm of the past. You do that by recognizing that the person who harmed you has one thing in common with you. He or she is human. Infinitesimally small and uniquely precious.

I remembered a photo of the cereal whacko. But he wasn’t a whacko in the photo. He was a little boy. About four years old. And the look in those eyes was full of such pain. The same pain I’d seen in the eyes of my own children after he’d hurt them. Human. Limited. Frail.

Wrong? You bet he was! But still, human. By the grace of God, I learn to forgive him a little more every day. As for my children, they have to find their own way to this place of peace and freedom.

There are lots of other occasions I’ve had to be righteously indignant about the wrongs another person has done to me, or to someone I love. Some things worse than what the cereal magnate did to my kids. Like selfishness that amounted to murder. I’m not anywhere near forgiving those folks. But I offer up my small self every day to God to give me the heart I need to do so. And even when I can’t find anything close to forgiveness, I remember what another friend told me. That if you can’t find any common humanity with someone who has wronged you, you can still pray that he or she comes to know the value of him- or herself in the eyes of God, in this world, or the next.

Forgiveness is available to each of us. It is between us and God, not us and the person who wronged us. Forgiveness is not forgetting. It is freedom. Desmond Tutu, who has seen and experienced plenty of wrong in his own life and that of his people, has written eloquently on the freedom forgiveness can bring. You can find his wisdom at: http://www.writespirit.net/authors/desmond_tutu/desmond-tutu-on-forgiveness

There is no minimizing the harm that happens to children who have been abused by suggesting that forgiveness is possible, or even necessary. God knows, I’ve lived with the anger for a very long time, and perhaps, will live with it, in both this world and the next. But there IS hope for victims. There IS a way for them to find peace and freedom from the pain of the past. And that way is forgiveness. My prayer is for all the children who have been victimized by sexual violence, that they find the grace to know the Person who heals all ills and who stands in the place of any figure of authority, parent, priest, pastor or teacher, and contends on behalf of His little ones, and through His spirit, to find forgiveness for those who have wronged them and freedom from the pain of their past.