I think about her often – though I never see her anymore. Memories of our shared childhood linger. When I close my eyes I can distinctly picture her eyes, I can hear her laugh, I remember sharing soup during Junior Soldiers and I remember long bike rides. But most of all I think about the times we used to wrestle. Those times, rolling around on the ground in the most non-threatening, non-violent way ever, grappling, gasping for air and hoping to gain the upper hand, were my favourite times with her. We were akin to Simba and Nala – in this case her Nala consistently pinning my Simba to the ground. The wrestling was followed by uproarious laughter. But now those memories are no longer couched in the cute and positive images of the Lion King – instead they have become violent, tarnished by real life. They have been sullied. Sullied by events of which I was, then, totally unaware. Those moments have been ruined by the horrid and lurid acts of someone within her own family. Her experience was my introduction into family violence – an introduction that still failed to prepare me for the onslaught of familial abuse I would witness amongst my friends: terrible cases of violence, sexual violation and verbal assault.
Amidst the horrifying stories of intrafamilial violence and abuse there is a sliver of good news. Generally, in Canada, violence within family violence structures is decreasing. Not rapidly, but slowly and surel, it is trending downward. Yet, the improving situation only serves to demonstrate how far we still have to go. There are still far too many instances of seniors being manipulated by family members, children being beaten, spouses being raped. This is obviously unacceptable.
As far as we need to go to eradicate violence within families, our distance from a good theology regarding domestic abuse is sometimes equally distant. Like when a well-meaning, but theologically misinformed youth pastor told me, regarding a case of family violence: “everything happens for a reason.” This was a pathetic attempt to say “God is in control.” It projects fatalism – no matter how hard one tries, the future cannot be changed because it is all planned, scripted in advance. Combine this fatalism with the belief that God is sovereign and one is left trying to figure out why God wrote this act into the play of life; why did my friend have to be violated by a family member? God, what do you have to say to that?
There is an even more malicious partner to this faulty theology: “everything happens for a reason, and the reason is usually a direct cause-and-effect relationship with mistakes we have made in the past”. So a woman hauntingly claims that God has been punishing her through her husband’s fists for 20 years because of sexual indiscretions during her teenage years. This kind of belief generates a sick karmic superstition – and begrudging acceptance of whatever punishment is meted by a family member. ..or there are the cases when a church confuses forgiving and forgetting and, in the name of grace, acts recklessly by ignoring telltale signs of familial abuse. This is happening right in our midst and sometimes it is compounded when a church entrusts other vulnerable persons to the leadership of an abuser. The effective simile from Proverbs, ‘as a dog returns to its vomit, so a fool to its folly,’ describes the cycle of victimization. Forgiving and forgetting are not the same, and a sensible theology will not allow the church to forget what the victims of familial violence have gone through.
Above all, we have to recognize that healing comes from God and that the church plays a crucial role in that. In Philip Yancey’s book, Prayer, he includes this powerful prayer which came through the clear, wavering voice of a young woman: “God, I hated you after the rape! How could you let this happen to me? And I hated the people in this church who tried to comfort me. I didn’t want comfort. I wanted revenge. I wanted to hurt back. I thank you, God, that you didn’t give up on me, and neither did some of these people. You kept after me, and I come back to you now and ask that you heal the scars in my soul.”
May we, the Salvation Army, be people who tenderly pursue, who silently persist, and who continually love. And may we ardently refuse to accept violence and abuse in the family or any dangerous theology that justifies it or perpetuates it. May we be an interface of justice, acceptance and love for those who have been abused as well as those who perpetrated the abuse.
Fondly do we hope; fervently do we pray.
