The story has been told too many times–a woman, a girl, gang raped by a group of males. Often beaten as well. Left for dead.

I cannot bring myself to call them men. Anyone who would do this to another human being is a monster, not a man.

Men must have some moral code. To rape teenage girls and then hang them is such an atrocity, such a clear sign of a broken system–a system that has made it clear that in India it is open season on women and children.

As appalling as the crimes themselves?

A police force that turns the other way, tacitly affirming that the victims lack any protection from the law.

We in American may look at these stories and choose to believe that it could only happen there, not here when in fact the torture and murder of African Americans in the South during decades of racial oppression proves differently.

These terrible crimes need only two contributing factors–hate, and a government that refuses the protection of the law to its most defenseless citizens.

We expend our words extravagantly about the wisdom of our poets, our beloved memoirists, but it sometimes seems as though we pick and choose our stories.

I heard yesterday about Maya’s “abusive childhood” and the years she spent in silence. But I heard little to indicate we as a nation are willing to examine the take-away of the very things that defined Maya and her titular caged bird.

Because the issue of caged birds is a thorny problem.

Angelou went mute for years as a child because she felt responsible for the death of her abuser.

She was not. He was. He was responsible for violating her and the law and then in turn the law was responsible for a completely inadequate response.

We tout the years of silence instead of decrying a lost childhood and a deeply riven justice system.

Not much has changed. I am convinced that it might have been more effective for me to choose years of deliberate silence over the quiet futility of decrying our inattention to sexual assault survivors.

Except for this: my daughters deserve to watch me fight for them. They deserve to let me carry the futility and the anger just a little.

When so many of us refuse to carry it at all.

The year I found out my adopted son was a felon I fasted a lot. It was survival fasting–not so much about food or no food, more about please, God, help us survive this.

He did.

But at my low points I still questioned whether fasting helped.

Meriam Ibrahim reminds me why we fast, so I decided to…fast again.

Governments protest. Lawyers appeal. Journalists report. A young mother languishes in jail, facing torture and death.

Such pain and uncertainty defies description.

It seems a small thing to beg God to spare her.

Please. For her little ones. Please…

When I read the accounts of Jesus feeding thousands of people, his abundance and miraculous powers are preeminent.

But there are other things as well. He says that the disciples need to feed them.

He demands the impossible of the ordinary.

He has not provided (that we know) consistent meals and snacks. He waits until they are truly hungry.

He exhausts the resources of the ordinary.

He predicts that without Divine intervention they will “collapse on the way.”

He knows the limits of the ordinary and is willing to push those limits.

We are so ordinary.

I am particularly ordinary.

And I need to face my ordinary hunger, my ordinary need…

For this God, this extraordinary Savior. Jesus, who defines himself and winnows us by proclaiming that in his body and in his blood is the fulfillment of every human hunger.

With or without a little boy’s ordinary lunch, Jesus satisfies, Jesus is able to feed, every human heart.

It is profoundly telling that we allow/promote a woman’s prerogative to overexpose her body for sexual purposes for years, but do not provide safe harbor for that same woman to tell the story of her childhood victimization.

I don’t care if Hugh Jackman dressed up like Wolverine for Halloween (..and no one noticed..), but I do care if Bryan Singer sexually assaulted teens and no one noticed.

The same rule applies to Ms. Anderson:

Not only do we need to examine why her body is of interest to millions of men, but we also must question why the identification and prosecution of her abusers is of interest to none.

If Anderson could not tell her story until now, how many other victims have been forced into silence?

And at what cost?