The girl-child mama ties her daughters to her–kites, they rise
Aloft in the summer breeze
Curl, swirl, dip, and sing
Bird-children
While faraway grandmother
Ponders apogee
The furthest point one can be from another.
Apogee
Reply
Tag Archives: Jesus
When you get lonely
Go for a run in a safe, well-lit place
Sing your God songs, loud if possible
Kick around in the Gospels, the Jesus stories, the Bible project, CS of course
Ask Him direct questions
We love you sooo much
But He is love–
oceans-are-small-compared-love
No-story-too-small-love
Big-sky-love
Lonely awful die-for-us love
Lend us a child like you, Love
Arms wide open love
The stars are more than fire love
In the dark sky they admonish/love
He will never leave you, never walk away
Protect your ass, you mean
Recently I took an online “course” designed to protect Christian ministries from lawsuits arising from child sexual abuse.
I knew it was going to be annoying, but it was worse than I had anticipated.
Here are some (but definitely not all) of the curriculum deficiencies:
- There was very little information about helping victims of child abuse
- Many of the recommendations were protective of the church over the child
- There were broad, unsubstantiated allegations about the victims of child abuse and their families which included saying that they were mentally disabled and prone to familial dysfunction
- The course stated and repeated that the adult survivors of child sexual abuse were not emotionally stable, neither able nor willing to process and recover from childhood trauma
- The methods of ferreting out both abuse and abusers were shot through with harmful stereotypes and inadequate information
- The course taught the participant to favor in-organization reporting over direct and immediate reporting to law enforcement, legal guardians, and child protective services
- The test reinforced curriculum biases
I contacted the company directly after I took the course and asked them for information on their source material and bibliography.
No answer.
I am not a rape victim, but I was targeted by at least one pedophile when I was young, and I have children who are childhood sexual assault survivors.
I am not “low IQ,” and my children are all smarter than I am. Had any of us been “low IQ” (term taken directly from course material), we would still deserve help from the law and relief from abuse.
Our individual and collective intelligence was not the reason my children were molested by my adopted son, but it also did not save us from protracted and compounded grief.
First from the felonies,
Later from the way “good people did nothing,” or worse still, did things to let us know they wanted to silence our story.
Jesus said, tell the little children they will always be safe with me.
Yet in order to protect their legal asses big, well-known communities and institutions all over this country are serving up biased, unsubstantiated defamation of childhood rape victims and their families in place of solid, simple procedures to ensure that children are safe in church and that the law is followed.
It should never be “protect my ministry,” over protect the children.
Matthew 18
What if we are parables, Darling?
The Angry Biddy
She flaps her (flightless) wings and flutters about
Because surely birds can’t cry and this world is full of sorrow
She is almost human, fully sentient with the wary eyes of someone who knows what it is to not have opposable thumbs
So I tell her, do your graceless angry dance and I will translate for you
About how eternal we are in this brutal place
Where the stars tell us things in the darkness
About hope
Dammed hope
Which will one day soon
Break free
What is a good friend?
Yep, I know-who?
Bear with me.
Ten years ago we discovered that our adopted son had molested some of his siblings and their friends.
I went to my friend and asked him what I should do and he said,
The truth will set you free.
So I told people the truth
Church
Work
Neighbor
Community
Family
Truth
And most people stopped being our friends.
So not who, what
A good friend never leaves, never forsakes, never hides your sin, but doesn’t abandon.
Jesus is a good friend.
What is Love
What is justice
There were times we all faced this extreme solitude of the truth. People who had been out friends could not risk the chance that we were contagious.
But Jesus was always there, the sojourning older son, back from afar, standing on the other side of the street, in sight of the house, I-am-here-darling present with us
never alone because
What a friend we have in Jesus
The Good Friend
Recently I have started “meditating” on the good friend. I put meditation in quotes because it can seem monastic and old fashioned, could just say thinking about.
But I say meditation because the particular focus for me is the life-long friendship God calls us to pursue.
God calls us to pursue.
What is a good friend?
Who qualifies as a good friend?
How does one be a good friend?
What do good friends do together?
How much time does good friendship require?
Is there a schlepping requirement?
All these things are on the big stone table of this miraculous friendship God has called me to through the doorway of Jesus.
Very Christiany, I know.
But then I also know I could not draw close to the Holy Divine if I did not have
A friend like Jesus.
Half-eaten Plum
I have tried to write us into the third person for this Passover mitzvah
He for you, she for me
“Do you take this man? Do you take this woman?”
Some iteration of a
long-ago covenant made and broken in a garden
Careful to avoid her gaze as you give her sour fruit
Mixed with all the other intentional elements of our redemption
I once knew a man
I once knew a man who was a dogged optimist, or so it seemed at the time. Sure, he spoke of darkness, but he spread a sunny optimism in every conversation he had.
Which meant that when the shadow of the Cross loomed large over us all
He had no answer
Isaiah 58
Dear Friend,
Within a month of each other, several things happened–
- A beloved family member who, like you, does not believe in God, said that if I believe in Hell, I should be trying to convince you of its reality and horror all the time.
- Several states, most notably Georgia, passed pro-child legislation restricting abortion and received fury for it from people who regard abortion as categorical maternal right.
- I read about a doctor who received NIH funds to carefully, (without anesthesia because it would adulterate their tissue “donations”) extract babies in their second and third trimester whole in order to use their prenatal livers to revive adult livers.
- And a single wasp stung me above the left eye.
I know how much you believe in abortion. I know how little you believe in God, yet I believe that the first abortion happened when a literal and real woman (like you and me) murdered all of us with a powerful and deadly choice in a garden we call Eden.
She made a choice, we make choices
As women, as mothers, as friends
To intervene for either life or death.
I believe in a literal hell, literal hells, already clearly delineated in our history of meat shields in steppe conquests, gladiatorial death matches, the ridiculous and deadly crusades, the Inquisition, bubonic plague, and in our case the body of every one of those meticulously harvested prenatal humans, old enough to live outside their mother’s wombs long enough for the doctor to use their pieces and ignore the sum of those parts.
Because livers are so necessary to scrub the toxins in the blood…even the flooding, momentarily excruciating wasp toxin.
You will think it strange that I thought of you and others who do not believe in Hell when I reeled into the pain of that single sting. I thought about how terrible it would be not to believe in the soaring truth of 1 Corinthians–“Oh, death, where is thy sting?”
No accident I write this to you on Father’s Day. When I lost my father it was so devastating–how could death have lost its sting if that single death hurt so much?
You know what I believe–I will see my father again one day, because Jesus took the real sting.
Catastrophically painful, eternal, and all of our faults. Sometimes no bigger than a wasp’s sting in the dark, or smaller than each prenatal human’s carefully extracted extinction.
But there in the Cross–
Our hell, our iterations of hell
Whether we believe in them or not.
Dear, you will and always and eternally be, dear, very dear to me.
So much so that I would risk your real and legitimate anger if it might spare you the measure of that incomprehensible Corinthian sting.
Carrying Light 