#MeToo - What of Forgiveness?

Source:hellogiggles.com

The easiest way to deal with the wounds of abuse – any abuse – is to think nothing, (never mind say nothing), either of the past or of the present. You just ‘deal with it’, a very apt expression, but one which, if acted upon, can be toxic. For one thing, it is a lie. You never ‘deal with it’, so why, at any point in history, do we pretend that this is possible? 

The #MeToo movement is epoch changing, not only because it goes some way towards validating the suffering of the victims of abuse, but because it gives us all permission to re-connect with and, in some measure, own, our pain. We do this privately, in our own dark corridors of remembrance, and in solidarity with others in the #MeToo movement. We also do it in solidarity with other generations.

Abuse, as we well know, is not an emerging phenomenon. It has been around for centuries, so it helps, I find, to try to place one’s own pain in the continuum of the abuse suffered by the perpetrators and by those who preceded them. This does not exonerate the abusers. Neither does it oblige, still less enable, me to forgive them. As if forgiveness was purely a matter of understanding contextuality, cause and effect, and thereby accepting the abuse as inevitable. But this is how women, and I think many men who may have been physically abused in childhood, try to come to terms with what a generally abusive childhood or youth still does to them.

There are two serious flaws in thinking that we can ‘deal with’ abuse and the effects of abuse. First, it tends to ignore the fact that abuse is not limited to the sexual and physical. Sexual abuse, for women, is more often reinforced by what seems at the time a natural and ‘deserved’ shaming of the person concerned. Perhaps it is the same for men. If an adult implies that we are ugly, stupid and to be laughed at rather than with, we accept it as a given. ‘Put downs’, the many chance remarks deemed as OK, but deeply wounding, enforced compliance with how we should look or behave, all in the context of dishonest and manipulative relationships, build a toxic mix of shame, anger, fear and self-loathing.

Very few sexual predators will genuinely want their victim to feel that they are beautiful, intelligent, unique and loved. On the whole, they will either intuit, or possibly know, that their victim has been conditioned to believe none of these things. This makes them fair game. It gives the abuser ‘permission’ to behave as he or she does towards them. Furthermore, and as we all know, abuse is not limited to the sexual. Emotional abuse will, often as not, occur between members of the same sex, first in family contexts and later in social and professional life. By then, it is more commonly known as bullying.

As Christians, each time we say the Lord’s Prayer, we ask to be forgiven as we forgive those who have sinned against us. To be honest, I find it almost impossible to pray these words when I think of my own abusers, as well as of the hundreds of women coming forward in the #MeToo solidarity movement. What does forgiving actually entail for us? As I have never really found an answer to this question, I tend to mentally ‘bracket’ the words Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us as I am saying them, and hope God understands, but I don’t just leave the people concerned in a kind of limbo. Later, I ask God what he thinks those of us who have been sinned against are supposed to do with our recurring memories, with our feelings about these people, and with our own anger and shame.

There seems to be no answer to such questions. But I do believe that we pray to a God who not only understands but shares the feelings which prompt them. There are many ways we could visualise this sharing. Being present to the words Why have you abandoned me? spoken from the Cross is one of the most obvious, although not always the most efficacious when it comes to having our negative feelings about forgiveness validated in the moment.

Perhaps a better way is to see the wounds we still carry, because they are far from healed, as part of our transfigured inheritance. They become what makes us worthy of honour in the presence of the Lamb (Rev.14:1). In them we share in Christ’s glory, beginning with the shame and agony of his dying and death, but moving with him to his embracing of us in his risen life. This is not a pious metaphor, or some kind of mental cop-out. It is something which can take a life-time to learn, or it can be learned in a single revelatory moment of understanding.

Such an understanding gives us the greatest freedom. This does not mean that we are given permission to indulge, even momentarily, in gratuitous hatred and desire for revenge. It means that we too are forgiven for finding it impossible to ‘forgive’. But such freedom brings responsibility. We are now ‘responsible’ for our abusers, lest they fall into the abyss. This means that we must be willing to receive what is needed for us to have a transfigured way of seeing them, so that we can ‘hold’ them. It does not mean persevering with, or reviving, destructive relationships. It means allowing ourselves to have deep compassion for those who abuse us, or for their memory. We ‘hold’ what we know of them, as best we can, in the ‘safe space’ of the mercy and forgiveness of God, a space which we ourselves are also occupying. Even if the feeling of compassion only lasts for a moment, it will never completely go away, for His mercy endureth for ever.

Sick At Heart

It takes a while for living compostable material to rot down and become the stuff of life again. It’s best not to examine it too closely while this is happening. Perhaps this is what the Church of England was thinking during the decades spanning the abuse of vulnerable people by one of its prelates and by another highly regarded individual whose integrity was compromised by, presumably, the toxic mix of sado-eroticism and religion.

Eroticism and religion have long been known to serve each other, when allowed to. Only read some of the poetry of John of the Cross, for example, and the worryingly sadistic reaction it led to at the hands of his deeply religious tormentors. They were afraid of its power and equally afraid of the poet’s ability to contain and focus that power in a God-ward direction, something they were not able to do. Powerful life-giving spirituality can make others envious, especially if those others are already powerful in a worldly sense, but exercise their power in a formal religious context. Power can be erotic and, in this respect, is always dangerous.

Religion, and Christianity especially, has always played dangerously with erotic power, especially in the form of sadism. Sadism is highly flammable stuff which, for some reason, is easily ignited in the religious mind. Think only of the still enduring fascination with medieval graphic portrayals of the suffering of Christ, rendered in the visual language of modernity. Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ, comes to mind.

Perhaps all this is part of a processing of our own dark fascination with perverted religion, as it combines with violence and with sexual sadism of one kind or another, not to mention personal charisma and the vanity which accompanies it. Some would say that if the Church as we know it is to survive, it must keep a cap on all this dark stuff, even if its highly placed prelates and senior figures are revealed to be actively part of it. The more cynical might just write them off as ‘collateral damage’. But it won’t do. Rottenness will never do. This suggests that a radical change in the way the institutional Church is currently perceived is needed now more than ever.

It takes time for things to rot but once they have reached a point of no return, excision remains the only possible option. This is beginning to happen in the Church, largely thanks to the courage and persistence of the victims and through the action of the police. It did not happen as a result of the niceness or kindness of Church leaders. When it comes to abuse, whether in the Church or anywhere else, niceness and kindness are not enough. Niceness and kindness do not stop the rot. Many of us are sick at heart for the rottenness of the state of the Church and for its complacency in regard to rampant injustice, and some of us are angry. We are angry about the citadel mentality which dominates so much of the Church’s life, at least in that which pertains to those with power and influence. It is a mentality which is not simply limited to protecting the interests of abusers.

If you are a woman priest in certain provinces of the Anglican Communion, or simply a member of a sectarian group within it, you will very soon feel powerless in the worst possible sense of the word. You are not part of the citadel, the largely male inner sanctum which holds to status and to the power which comes with it, but which is seldom used for the common good. You will be someone who is denied a voice. All the more so, if what you say or do troubles its peace of mind and general complacency in regard to arcane laws and an unworkable authority system which is ill designed to nurture gift among all God’s people and so allow Christ to speak to our society. You will know what it feels like for ranks to close and exclude you from the inner sanctum of the powerful, though all may smile and many will be nice to you. If you are a member of the LGBTQ community, you will experience the same thing.

For people belonging to either or both of these groups, serving the institutional Church is not life in its fullest sense. It is not life as Christ promised it. It follows, quite obviously, that the institutional Church is not Christian in the sense that Christ would have wished it to be, so it is not working very well. It is not freeing people into Christ. Rather, it has been reduced to a largely self serving and introspective system with something rotten at its heart.

To be a Christian is to be a liberator, one who empowers others as Christ did. So it follows that those who hold power within the institutional Church must look first to the victims of abuse, and of institutionalised misogyny and homophobia, in order to set them free. They will do this by seeking their forgiveness before beginning to enact the kind of radical change which will enable the victims of every kind of abuse to live in the fullest sense of the word. For this to be possible, radical change is needed both within the Church’s own political system, the power games of superficial niceness played out by a select few, and in its spiritual life which is perceived by many as pallid and meaningless, bearing no relation to the dangerous freedom offered to us in Jesus Christ.

This suggests that if the Church is to survive at all, its survival and its future life will begin with speaking and acting with integrity. The abuse scandals, and the institutional misogyny of the past twenty or thirty years, have led to many people losing all confidence in the Church’s integrity, and hence in the Christian gospel itself. What people are looking for today, in the life of the Church, as well as in public life in general, is integrity. This has been the message of Glastonbury 2017: Give us integrity and we will start to re-engage with politics. It is a message which the Church needs to hear for itself.