Response of the Church

Dear Rich:

I experience life very much on a relational, feeling level. When I found my voice and was able to tell my story, I thought the Christian and Missionary Alliance would be so outraged about what had happened to me that they would do whatever it took to bring about justice. Their silence, their ongoing choice to ignore the abuses, was as wounding as what had happened to me as a child.

There is another piece of the telling of my story that has been wounding. For the eight years I was at Mamou, I experienced severe abuse by at least five staff people. Yet I had remembered none of it. My journey has included the recall of this trauma through "recovered memory". I gave my story to the independent investigative body and they chose to not use any testimony that came out of "recovered memory." I have corroboration on my story, but there was no other person willing or able to tell the stories that would corroborate mine. So, once again, I felt not believed and silenced. I felt, as I often feel, that I couldn't do it right - I couldn't even remember what had happened to me in an acceptable way to be believed and to have justice happen. It has taken a lot of work in therapy to be at peace with this.

It should be easier to see justice happen when we tell the secrets. Maybe our journeys and our stories will make it easier for victims to be heard in the future. And that is why we need to keep speaking out - telling our stories.

Hope

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Dear Hope,

A well-known Christian lawyer/mediator from the Chicago land area who has engaged in countless mediation sessions between "the church" and victims of clergy abuse once told us that almost to a person, the vast majority of those abused by the clergy come to the church wanting and expecting the church to "just be the church" to them. They want leaders of the church to meet face to face with them, to listen to the victims, to show appropriate outrage (I think that's called "righteous anger" in the Bible), to show compassion, and to act biblically in light of the truth that emerges (i.e., to engage in confession/truth telling, repentance, appropriate discipline, restitution and so forth). In far too many cases, the church throws up its institutional walls to protect itself and refuses to hear any "laments."

Your hope/desire that the C&MA would be outraged at our reports was dashed for years. I remember you saying once that what the C&MA top leadership should do at their next Annual Council was to sit on stage in sack cloth and ashes and shred their garments in grief and lament over what happened to innocent children in their boarding schools. It took years and years for the top leadership to get even near that point. We experienced some joint lament at our retreat last spring in Atlanta. Why did it take so long?

I would like to share an experience I had this past week at a seminar for Methodist clergy from Northern Illinois. Dr. Terence Freithem, Professor of Old Testament at Luther Seminary in St. Paul Minnesota was sharing with us on the topic of "The God to Whom We Pray." He spent some time on the "lament" psalms in the Book of Psalms. He gave us a little handout as follows:

The lament psalms serve several important purposes for those who pray them:

Channels the grief/pain, provides boundaries for it, when center no longer holds.
A structured way to work through time of suffering, from complaint to petition and finally to praise.
Names the enemy, gets the "stuff" out on the table, out in the open.
Provides language to speak when language fails, whether one's own or that of others. Know the laments well enough to use those that best fit the situation (e.g. Ps. 55 for situations of abuse).
Gives sense of community in a time of isolation, someone else has gone through hell.
Encourages a sense of genuine relationship with a God who is open to prayer and interaction; the kind of God with whom nothing need be held back, the kind of God who is genuinely affected by what we say.

So much for the structure and function of lament psalms. What I found very, very powerful given our situation of coming to mission boards/denominations and being stonewalled for years is the quote that follows.

Walter Brueggeman, O.T. Professor in "The Costly Loss of Lament"; Journal of Studies of Old Testament, 36 (1986), pp. 57-71: On pages 60-61 - "one loss that results from the absence of lament is the loss of genuine covenant interaction because the second party to the covenant (the petitioner) has become voiceless or has a voice that is permitted to speak only praise and doxology. Where lament is absent, covenant comes into being only as a celebration of joy and well-being. Or in political categories, the greater party is surrounded by subjects who are always 'yes men and yes women' from whom 'never is heard a discouraging word.' Since such a celebrative, consenting silence does not square with reality, covenant minus lament is finally a practice of denial, cover-up, and pretense, which sanctions social control...Where there is lament, the believer is able to take initiative with God and to develop over against God the ego strength that is necessary for responsible faith."

Page 64 - "A community of faith which negates laments soon concludes that the hard issues of justice are improper questions to pose at the throne, because the throne seems to be only a place of praise. I believe it thus follows that if justice questions are improper questions to God, they soon appear to be improper questions in public places, in schools, in hospitals, with the government, and eventually even in the courts. Justice questions disappear into civility and docility. The order of the day comes to seem absolute, beyond question, and we are left with only grim obedience and eventually despair. The point of access for serious change has been forfeited when the propriety of this speech form is denied."
Does this sound familiar or what?

Rich Darr, Survivor of Mamou

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