Survivors' Voices: Where Was God? Part 2
This seems like an appropriate question for Good Friday.
(You can see Part 1 of this post here.)
After sharing my experiences of abuse with a spiritual director on a retreat, I keep asking him, “Where was God? Why did this happen?” His response was, “Take it to prayer and see how God responds.” I did take it to prayer the entire day and woke up the following morning to a torrential rain storm that continued throughout the day. My revelation during the entire stormy day was that God was angry and was weeping just like me.
I felt a thick cloud between myself and God, to the point my life itself seemed to lose meaning, and I wanted to just blank out the pain with self-harm. I could not talk about it to anyone. What had happened didn't seem to make sense and religious words lost all meaning. I literally felt ill at hearing the word "love" in the church liturgy; the word itself is so open to abuse. In my situation, the angel of darkness disguised itself as an angel of light, using religious words to justify what was unjust and plain wrong.
I am a lector in my parish, and on Palm Sunday I read the part of the "speaker" during the Passion sequence. In the part of Peter, I promised aloud that I would not deny Jesus , and then I denied anyway. It helped bring home the loneliness, abandonment, and suffering of Jesus in his humanity. I don't know where God was when I was being abused, but I know He was aware of the abuse and attentive to my suffering. I know, by my experience of surviving and healing, that God has always had a plan for my growth and prosperity. There is no longer any part of me that wishes I hadn't been abused. Even though I am still wounded, I know what I survived is essential to forming me into who I am supposed to become.
Because our abuse was at the hands of religious clergy, survivors can have our own special way of thinking of religion. I've spent most of my life looking at a variety of spiritual paths. I believe that there are no answers for what was done to us. I follow multiple spiritual paths. There are just too many things nobody has an answer to. Mostly I try to live my life as positively as I can and achieve as much as possible.
Honestly, I rarely find Jesus’ cry of dereliction on the cross to be helpful. On a deep level, it feels like Jesus was the one who hurt me—it was loving and trying to be close to Him that got me abused in the first place. So even though I’d like it to be comforting that Jesus shared in the suffering of feeling abandoned by God, it just… isn’t. And Psalm 22, which is what Jesus was praying/citing, ends on a hopeful note, praising and trusting in God, which rarely resonates with me. I tend to turn instead to Job, who maintains faith despite the extent and incomprehensibility of his suffering, and also to Psalm 88, the only psalm not to include or end on a note of praise or hope: “You have put me in the depths of the pit … Why, LORD, do you reject me and hide your face from me? ... My one companion is darkness.”
Where was God? God was in my powerlessness, in the powerlessness of the cross. I did not want to accept the cross, as I hated feeling like a victim. What happened had hurt me. I had to learn compassion for myself and say "I was abused but it doesn't determine who I am" and touch the pain with love. I now see the cross is not a sign of weakness, it is a way to face the reality of life with courage, hold onto my own integrity as a person and affirm what I value, including truthfulness in relationships.
One of the things I resent most about my experience of abuse as a child and the indifference and indignity from my diocese today is that it has impacted a deep connection I had with God. I’ve asked God often to help me, because I no longer feel like I belong in the Church. I can’t be a Eucharistic minister to the home bound or teach religious education. I don’t feel welcome by most clergy. I ask God what have I done that has caused me to be treated like this. I can’t feel God anymore, except occasionally. I know He’s there. But is He there for me?
“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces, he was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” ~ Isaiah 53:3-4
I was on a retreat recently, and one of the reflections was on meekness, an often under-appreciated virtue. One of the points made was the evangelical power that it has. Jesus suffered immensely in His Agony and Passion, even though He had done nothing to merit an ounce of it. That led me to reflect on the suffering of innocent people, and where Christ can be found in it. If we believe Jesus to be everything He is, then He is sharing in every one of our sufferings, and twofold when we are hurt or abused by others- once for us, and once for the abusers. And His response is radical meekness- suffering and dying for our sins and the sins of those who hurt us, no matter how grave.
His Agony in the Garden is particularly interesting as it’s not a single event in time- He experiences the weight of all human sin through the end of time, all at once. So the suffering we experience now and that we will experience for the rest of our lives was experienced by Christ already. Which is why many people say He suffered more in the Agony than when He was scourged or crucified. While there are many sufferings in our world that we can’t explain or find meaning for, one thing we can be sure of is that Christ experiences it too, whether He feels near or far.
I am grateful for every one of these insights shared here, and I truly respect the diversity of feeling shown. It's a different journey for each. It's a different journey for me. I so much appreciated, though, having pointed out to me that Psalm 88 is unique in it's NOT attempting to turn tragedy into hope--I'm not there, for sure. Yesterday morning I turned to Morning Prayer, and saw Psalm 88. Jesus dead in the tomb. It's a real "comfort" actually to feel something more fitting in the liturgy for a change.