Imagine yourself walking in a beautiful, fragrant garden. The garden seems empty, but waiting, as though someone very important is about to arrive. Birds sing and butterflies trace gentle arcs across the blue sky. A soft breeze ruffles your hair as you stand there drinking in the beauty of it all.
Then, from around a bend in the path, a figure comes toward you. The garden stills. Is this the important figure for whom it is waiting? You recognize the figure as Jesus. He is smiling as he walks toward you and his hand is held out in greeting.
What does he say to you? In what way does he welcome you? What does he give to you?
~*~
This is an exercise in visualized meditation that helps us understand and explore our inner feelings about Christ and our relationship to Him. For most, this is a pleasant experience as we move into a deeper relationship with Christ based on a new awareness of his love for them and his enjoyment of their company.
However, for others it is a troubling experience. When, perhaps for the first time in their lives, they come to the realization that Christ is either not personal to them, or they cannot approach him in a personal way
When being taken on this imaginary ‘walk in the garden’, I was with a group of six women. We were told to close our eyes and follow the softly-voiced instructions of our group leader. When the exercise was finished the leader asked us to take turns sharing our experiences.
As each woman gave an account of meeting and fellowshipping with Jesus, my stomach began to twist and I tried to think of some way to get out of answering. Then, one woman said she would rather not share what the exercise meant to her, and when my turn came, I said the same.
It had not been an uplifting experience for me. I was in the garden. I even saw Jesus. But I could not reach him. There was a glass wall between us and, although we turned and walked along together, the wall remained and I could neither hear his words, nor feel his touch.
For many years I kept that experience to myself. I’d known there was something odd in my relationship with God; even though I’d done all the right things. I’d written poetry and songs that brought others into a closer relationship with God. I’d led workshops on prayer and started several Christ-centered prayer and sharing groups for women and teen-agers.
In short, I was one of those who keep the Church running. And more. Raised in the church, I knew every pat answer to every question in the quarterly, but was also the one who asked the deeper questions. I taught adult Sunday school for many years. But God was not a friend and Jesus was not my brother.
I could write and speak about that relationship to others in words so eloquent it brought tears to the eyes of those who read or listened. I could write and sing about a God who is constantly reaching for us, who longs for a deeper relationship with us and a closer communion. But it was for others, not for me.
So, I sat with heart divided. One part of my heart yearned to find the God ‘they’ spoke of. The other part cringed away from God, convinced I was different; that something about me was totally out of God’s reach. That somehow, something had separated me in a way that I could never overcome. I could not articulate this to myself or anyone else. I didn’t even know that was how I felt. I just knew the words never rang true for me – for others, yes, but not for me.
As I spoke and sang in front of an audience, there was a rapport between us. This was especially noticeable when speaking before a group of women. Always there would be one who would sit at attention. Her eyes never left my face and she listened with an almost palpable intensity. At the end of the program she would come to me and share something about her life or just thank me for putting into words what she could not say.
I did not know then what drew us together. Now I do. It was reaching for a God we could see and touch. No matter that God was yearning toward us. No matter that we knew all the words and all the promises God had given us.
It was not until I was 48 years of age that the answers began to come. I didn’t know they were answers, for they began with the stunning realization that I had no childhood memories. While writing a paper for a creative writing class at a local university, my fictional alter-ego, Molly, stepped to the door of her very ‘familiar’ home and was met with total darkness. Vainly I searched my memory for the interior of that childhood home. So shocking was the realization – that I not only could not visualize the interior but could not remember who lived there or what they looked like – that I did not write again for almost seven years.
For five of those years I struggled with discovery. I asked other people if they could remember the home of their childhood. I asked my sisters and mother careful questions about that time in my life. Finally, an older sister caught on to what I was asking and, when we were alone, made the statement, “P_____ molested M_____ and me for several years, but I never dreamed he’d gotten to you as well.”
With that statement, life as I had known it changed forever. My childhood “memories”, carried for 40 years, had been made up of family stories and my own imagination. The life I thought I remembered was lived among a ‘pillar of the community’ Christian family. Dad was Sunday school superintendent, elder and Sunday school teacher. He never swore in front of us, we had grace before every meal. He took care of his widowed mother and orphaned nieces and nephews.
Mother also taught Sunday school and was active in the ladies aid and missionary society. Evangelists, Bible College students and missionaries were frequent visitors overnight or for meals. My twin brother and I sang duets for Church from a very early age. I became a youth leader as a teen and would have attended a Christian college had I not met and married a wonderful man and started a family.
Now, at the age of 48, all those memories of a fun-loving, active Christian family were suspect. I went into therapy with a committed Christen woman counselor. For two years we searched for my real childhood. I learned toward the end of that period that the memories went back no further than my sixteenth birthday when I began dating my future husband. We learned this when she asked about vacations, holidays, special occasions… What did we eat? Where did we go? How did we celebrate Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving? Sixteen summers?
The answers to those questions never came. No memories surfaced. Whatever traumas that had caused my childhood to be erased were too deep to recover. In talking with my sister I learned how much incest was suspected in my family; brothers, cousins, uncles. The dysfunctional parts of my own personal life were understood now as footprints left by however many perpetrators there were. The counselor and I worked on those, bringing resolution to many of them. Using the book, THE BONDAGE BREAKER by Neil T. Anderson, I was able to forgive all who might have been involved. And even though I could not remember the abuse, the act of forgiving brought a great deal of healing.
My mother never would admit the abuse happened or was possible. I think she believed that. I believe she and Dad raised us in a Christian home and were unaware for the most part of what was occurring in the dark. I’m sure there were clues, but incest was a taboo subject, just as was sex and procreation in the 40s and 50s. And, if your children misbehaved or, in the case of my brother, were alcoholic and rebellious, you did not let on to the neighbors.
All of this is background. But it was the answer to my divided heart. Though I could not consciously remember the abuse, my soul had never forgotten. There was still a little girl inside me who sat in Sunday school and listened to her teachers tell her about God. She sang, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so…”with, hands folded in her lap. She listened to her teachers tell her how God cares and protects those whom He loves. How he saved Daniel in the lion’s den, David from Goliath, the children of Israel from Pharaoh’s army. Molly listened and she never told them it was a lie. She never told them God did not love her. She never told them God abandoned her to a brother twelve years older than she.
She didn’t tell anyone. Her silence had been guaranteed by the memory of a litter of new-born kittens whose legs and tails had been cut off, and whose eyes had been gouged out with a knife. She thought, growing up, it was a family story she had been told, but no one else in her adult world knew it.
So Molly grew up with heart divided. She carefully put away the truths no one wanted to hear. She buried them deep in her soul and never thought of them again with her conscious mind.
But her soul knew. And it built barriers against the lies she thought she had been told. God would not take care of her. No one would. Only she could care for herself. And she did. She became so adept at playing the Church game that she fooled even herself. She learned all the right answers and all the proper responses. She was always busy. In school she was the girl who could do anything. Art, music, literature, you name it, she did it, and very well. When she began dating, she did that very well, too; all proper and Christian.
SUPER CHRISTIAN. That was the tag that hung from Molly’s heart. She was so busy being busy she didn’t have time to examine the strangely silent soul. No time to wonder why “God is Love” rang false or why she could not respond in her heart to the beautiful words she sang and spoke.
Oh, there were occasions when the emptiness threatened to swallow her up. Sometimes she would break down, become depressed, but she did not know why. Only that she felt empty and alone and ugly. Only that she must do more and stay busy building the person God wanted Molly to be. But there came a time when the questions would not be silent; when answers thundered in the distance like thunder before a storm. The real Molly would be found!
~*~
Once the grown woman discovers the secret places; the empty years and empty heart, she can understand why God has never seemed close, why she was so sure He could love others but not her. For the Christian survivor of child abuse answers come slowly. Some never come at all, but must be extrapolated from the truth she finds.
For the woman who remembers the abuse the recovery work is hard. For the one whose childhood was erased by the trauma suffered so early in life it is an almost insurmountable obstacle. Some trigger, some circumstance must occur which makes her realize her past is not as she ‘remembers’ it; something as simple as trying to write a story about her childhood.
As she begins to unravel the mystery behind her inability to remember, one of the first hurdles is her relationship to God and the Church. Who is she in relationship to God? How much of her religious instruction can she believe? What does it mean to be a Christian?
One of the most devastating discoveries can be the rage she feels against God. The rage against Him is as real as the abuse she has forgotten. How do you erase 40 years of rage? You don’t. First, you redirect it to the person who scarred your body and soul. Then, you begin to understand the abuser’s own rage and bitterness toward life – to understand the reasons he might have had for acting out his own hurt. Finally, if you are very fortunate, as the counseling years roll by, you come to the place of forgiving.
The place of forgiving is not an easy place. Nor is it a quick fix for alienation from God. As you say the words, nothing noticeable happens. You do not feel the weight lifting from your shoulders. You do not feel your soul bursting open with joy. You go home. You fix dinner. You go to Church and listen to the sermon.
But now you know what is happening. When Satan’s voice whispers in your ear, “God doesn’t love you! He could never love a dirty, miserable kid like you!” you recognize the lie. And though the feeling is not there yet, you ACT on your knowledge of the truth. That’s faith.
The abused child seldom understands faith as an adult. She may think it is part of that warm, fuzzy feeling she cannot experience. It is not. Faith is walking the walk and talking the talk when everything in you shouts, “No!” It is living your life according to the truth you know, not the lies you feel. It is hanging on, somehow, when the ground falls out from under your feet. And it is also seeking the God you know is loving and faithful no matter what Satan’s voice whispers in the night.
The Christian survivor of abuse may always feel that divided heart in this world. Scar tissue runs deep. But the vicious sting has been removed. No longer can Satan turn the truth of God into lies believed by little Molly. No matter that she must accept the truth on faith and knowledge rather than feeling. She can take within her soul all of God she can hold at any one moment and wait in anticipation for that time when she will ‘know as she is known”! Wait for that moment when God will stand beside her as she watches the reel of life unfold. When together they will see the bad being worked for good and the good of those around her. God will wipe the tears from her eyes and her divided heart will be whole.
