hope is not the final word

For many years, it was the story that contained me.

It was the story that came out of my mouth soon after I met someone new. The story that I told as a way to share who I am, why I am the way I am.

Soon after it happened, I found I couldn't stop talking about it, especially when it became clear that no one with any power over the situation was going to do anything. 

I used the story to talk about the rates of sexual assault against women in the early 2000s as part of my high school speech class. 

I got special accommodations in college so that I wouldn’t have to meet a male professor alone in his office; instead, these professors would be required to meet me in a public place if I asked for it. I’ll always be grateful to one of my best male friends in college who went with me to speak to the dean, to help me ask for this support. I’ll always be grateful to the dean who said yes, even though it was outside the scope of usual accommodations.

I worried about the story as I went to seminary and started internships with faith-based organizations. Would my trauma cause me to traumatize others? Or: would it open me up to more hurt? My supervisors at my internships-- both women-- gently helped me work with male volunteers and church members, connecting me with people who would help me heal. They themselves helped me claim a calm, fierce, funny resilience.

I mentioned it as one of the defining moments of my life when I was applying for clinical pastoral education spots. My work as a chaplain included investigating my hurt, identifying how my distrust of male people with power in faith-based institutions had morphed into my own identity as a person of faith who could be trusted by those who might also be turned away. I came to understand that I’d gotten tattoos and a nose ring for at least two reasons. First, I needed to claim my body and help it feel beautiful to myself again. Second, I wanted to be a visible sign of a “different kind of faith leader” -- one that would listen to those who were hurting or had been hurt by the church.

I decided to share this story with many in my first and second calls in ministry. And then I saw how sharing this story made others afraid and anxious. If the church could give up on me, someone who was called to ministry, would the church give up on them too?

That was the story that could harm… could break open communities.

What if the church, an institution that is supposed to care for one another, gave up in the face of evil?

What happened to me was evil: When I was seventeen, I was assaulted by my youth group leader while our youth group was on a mission trip. 

Another youth group leader walked in on the assault as it was happening. It was no longer possible to ignore the criminal acts of grooming and inappropriate interactions that the youth group leader had been engaged in. 

I knew I wasn’t the only one who had been harmed. I knew it was happening to me. I didn’t have the words or framework--as a teenager who already felt the pull to ministry-- for how to stand up to this trusted adult.

Still: I thought I would be believed and heard -- when adults actually saw and heard my body being harmed.

In the following weeks, though, whatever power I had was stripped away from me. 

Our minister followed the suggestion of a lawyer and declined to press charges. The youth group leader was allowed to retire from his volunteer position and remain in the community. The leadership of the congregation was confused when I resigned from my weekend custodial job and when my sister wrote a scathing letter to them, demanding justice. My parents did the best they could, struggling to figure out how to stand with me when our faith community abandoned us.

My church abandoned me. They called what they did an extension of God’s grace -- an act of radical forgiveness for the man who hurt me, but:

This abandonment was also evil.

The church where I had been baptized and confirmed, 

The church where I learned about Jesus who listened to children,

The church where I discovered my call to ministry and justice and care,

The church where I sought to know a God of love and peace. 

Instead, the church leadership at the time said I must have been a complicit and consenting partner in the abuse.

Even now: I think about the great abandonment and I’m broken open. 

There is no describing the physical and psychological pain of an assault on a young adult by a trusted adult.

But worse: I think back to the congregation, and my heart rate skyrockets, my blood quickening in my veins.. 

In what scenario could I have imagined that an entire community dedicated to the gospel of Jesus Christ would have chosen the reputation of a predator over the safety of a minor?

Broken open, I lost everything: all sense of confidence in the church, any reasonable expectation that the church as a whole could and would do what is right and just and faithful when faced with suffering.

In my calls in ministry, I have had to fight for other young adults to be heard, especially on hard issues. I’ve made a name for myself in my denomination calling on the church to be brave, even if it might mean people get upset. It has mattered less to me if people have gotten mad at me or thought I’m too pushy.

What do I have to lose--the church? 

I cannot lose what has already been lost.

In seminary, as I wound my way through the ordination process, I wondered if I was really called to ministry, if I was good enough to be set apart in this way. Still: I felt I couldn’t not do it. 

In fact, I moved from the first part of the ordination process to the second part at a denominational meeting at the church where I’d grown up. I could speak to the gathered community about my faith and sense of call, and I did. Candidates for ministry then leave the room while the gathered community discusses and votes upon a candidate’s viability for ministry. In my absence, this particular community questioned if I did actually believe in Jesus Christ. Was I committed enough to the church?

No one asked if the church was committed enough to me. No one mentioned that I had clawed my way through a season of abandonment. 

When I later heard about this discussion, I could only shrug. 

Of course the church would argue if I was good enough, if I believed enough. 

In college, I explored other denominations and faiths, only to discover that the faith tradition that baptized me is in my bones and sinew. I can only be this; I cannot give up on this denomination, this church.

In my last year of high school, I had to navigate a teacher who attempted to cross appropriate boundaries-- and watched as the school district held this man accountable. A secular institution was more willing to be just, more willing to stake their claim on the side of young adults who were groomed and harmed. There was the grace of God.

In the last decade of my life, I have felt the story of my assault loosen its hold on me. It gave way to a deep mistrust of the church as an institution. I carry with me a kernel of sadness, a sense that the church just won’t do what is right unless forced to. 

In many ways, this devastates me. In any community of faith of which I am a part, I feel a sense of foreboding, that I am just waiting for the community to share that they will not be brave on behalf of those who are hurting. 

In other ways, this expectation has freed me to be as honest as possible with communities, to be courageous in the face of injustice, to insist more loudly that the church must be bold. 

Because, I do not need to fear that my beloved church will give up on me. They already have. In the most broken moment of my life, the community that promised to love and care for me in the name of God walked away.

And still: I survived. 

I survived and thrived because other people of faith and goodwill stepped in. 

They walked with me to meet with lawyers. They walked with me to meet with deans and professors. They mentored me. They held my hands in panic attacks. They tended to healthy boundaries. They looked me in the face and reminded me again and again that while that church failed me, God had not.

These days, sometimes people go months or years without hearing this story about me. These days, I am not afraid of white men with power over me. 

Instead: these days, part of my role as a person of faith in the world is to stand up to the powers of the world. I’ve risked arrest and inserted my body into potential harm on behalf of others in order to help dismantle systems of oppression. 

This is one way I’ve reclaimed my body; it was taken from me nearly two decades ago. 

Many of my mentors have suggested that Christian writing needs to end on a note of hope-- for surely the gospel is one of impossible hope in the reality of deep pain. 

I reject this need for hope to have the last word. 

God is not just in the places of hope.

God is in the places of despair. 

Indeed, I do not need God to have the last word. Instead, I need God to be in the worst parts. I need God in the lonely, abandoned moments. 

I have new stories to contain me these days: stores of resilience and faith and even hope. Stories of how even when the church gives up on people, God never does. Never.

But:

I still carry around a kernel of loss and loneliness. I will always carry it with me. 

It doesn’t define me; it’s simply there, letting the rest of me -- a more whole version of me-- contain it.