High in the mountains of Montana, I played as a small child and searched through weeds and bushes to find bits of beauty and wonder to amuse myself with. My mother would frequently send me with dad whenever he went to work cutting timber there. The rise and fall of growling chainsaws became as familiar to me as a lullaby, and the smell of freshly cut wood became as cozy as an overstuffed chair might be for someone else. I quickly learned to stay away from the campfires where the men gathered to drink coffee and complain. They were as rough and hard as the falling trees.

On bad days, the boss sent dad back home because “This ain’t no place for kids!” But mama continued to send me with him for years.

Dad disliked me, and the fact that he lost the work that normally provided beer money for him lowered his opinion of me even more dramatically.  I, too often, robbed him of those evenings he earnestly looked forward to of sitting in a knotty pine barroom with cigarette smoke and clanking glasses and those rough hard men that he worked with.

Mama continued to send me with him because she regarded me as a sinister little intruder that could rudely pry open secrets. She would sometimes glance at me and turn pale and mutter, “Linda has eyes that see souls!”

And so I collected purple clovers and wild strawberries and sticks to the background music of chainsaws. There were also wonderful moments when a miracle would appear in the form of a brilliant blue butterfly. They were glorious, magical creatures of supernal beauty! It was a truly awesome day when I could follow one through wildflowers and patches of mud to stay close before it flitted completely away. Unfortunately, my love came to an end the moment I came upon a pile of dung and found it covered with my blue butterflies.

I felt deceived. Cheated. I never again looked at one of those butterflies with anything other than feelings of betrayal. How could I have ever thought they were so beautiful?

Finding God in abuse is difficult because the pain and horror and walls of disbelief are so overwhelming that there is no logical place for God. But sometimes if we reflect back, we can find him there in the darkest of places and circumstances. If God was there, why did he not step in and stop the abuse? By letting go of what we think God should have done…if he loved us, we can mentally sort through evidence that he really was there weeping with us and for us. We can often uncover overwhelming evidence of love and careful tending that we overlooked because we were so focused on the ugliness.

Once I was playing beneath a barstool near my father when I was around four years old. Although I was aware that my father was talking to someone, I didn’t pay any attention until there was a dead silence and an ominous feeling in the air.  “You can do whatever you want to with ‘er! I don’t give a damn!”

I glanced up first at my father who was laughing darkly and then at a semi-circle of men who were looking down at me. I didn’t know why they wanted to hurt me, I only knew they were going to hurt me because I was a girl. Fear pulled me into a numb confusion, and then a loud thought came to me. “Find the man with the soft eyes.”

I obediently searched each face until I found him. He had kind blue eyes and blond hair.

“Go take his hand.”

Fear had turned me into jelly, but I wobbled over to him and grabbed one of his hands with both of mine until he firmly pulled one of my hands into his. I didn’t know what he was going to do with me, and the not knowing left me with tears rolling down my face.

“Leave her alone. I mean it! You guys leave her alone!” His body trembled, and his voice shook. He had his head down staring at the floor in front of us in the silence. Music wasn’t even playing. I could feel that the hand holding mine was clammy and cold, but there was an unwavering fierceness in his voice as he repeated, “Leave her alone!”

Because the memory was bitter, I did not appreciate this angel that God placed in my life until I was well into my adult years. Then the memory came to me one day and opened up a sweeter understanding. I remembered how thin he was. How much smaller he was than the others. How scared he was. How young he was…and he still chose to be an angel.

Like the beautiful butterflies on the manure, I had blocked him out because of the terrible association with my father’s betrayal of me. When we ask the right questions, the answers can often be amazing.

My father was a photographer. That was his job in WWII as he was shuttled back and forth to Europe in a ridiculously small submarine. In his later years, he would sob like a little boy while he tried to explain his terror through a cascade of tears. “They sent me out again last night…dirty bast***s! Ya never know! Ya never know where you’re gonna go an’ when you’ll be comin’ back!”

Dementia from alcohol abuse had swallowed his mind, and so he relived the highlights of his past over and over again. He described foxholes in Holland and the farmland of Germany and how terrified he was on the streets one time when Hitler came past him in a parade. I listened and grieved for him and remembered the times I had watched him crush a beer can in one hand and mutter, “They say the Army’ll make men outta boys, but instead they made boys outta men!” And he would cry. He freely cried and felt sad, and we felt sad and scared to see our father cry.

My own tears and the tears of my siblings were lost in the storms of blame and savage fury of those who were meant to protect and love us but destroyed us instead. At some point, I refused to allow anyone to see me cry again and became rigid and withdrawn.

My brother Bill and I are standing outside of our house in Gallatin Gateway, Montana in the above photo in 1965. It is one of the hundreds of photos my father took of us as he unwittingly recorded our journey through unspeakable things.

Bill has secrets in this picture that he has guarded for years. Ugly secrets that have him hiding his head under an old army blanket and sucking his thumb when he thinks no one can see until his teeth began to twist outwards. Secrets that torment and embed his dreams with horror. Secrets that leave him heavy with remorse and guilt. Secrets that he can never get away from. And I had my secrets. Secrets that constantly slithered through the darkness whispering, “Don’t tell!”

We pulled our secrets up close to our chins like oily, filthy blankets that we grew accustomed to and slept a sleep that had no hope of dawn.

A year and a half later we were living in California with welfare benefits including medical care. Bill walked the long miles all hunched over with pain to a doctor in Monterey who had no idea what the disease was that had been eating through his organs. He came home one afternoon with his eyes all rimmed in pink and ran to his bedroom for privacy. Everyone was gone except for us. He soon came back with his face working like he was just going to break out bawling, and with emotion torturing his voice, he unburdened himself.

In a child’s voice, my twenty-year-old brother confessed the things he had watched dad do. With a child’s understanding, he cried about the women screaming and trying to get away. With a child’s broken heart, he told me that dad always said they were prostitutes. Our secrets collided and spun out of control leaving me numb for days. I knew those women were not prostitutes. Dad viewed all women and girls as prostitutes. Bill had also witnessed dad attacking me through the bedroom window because I was considered to be one, but Bill couldn’t completely let go of the need to believe his father.

Obviously, our father had brutally assaulted countless women. Since dad was incapable of feeling shame or remorse, Bill by default awkwardly attempted to carry that burden for him. We were firmly frozen in the confusion of our childhood traumas, and we couldn’t recover from any of it because recovering required a higher level of perception.  Maturing emotionally was impossible without enough freedom to grow, and so we remained children. In his childlike perspective on who was to blame, my beautiful brother falsely believed that God was punishing him with a fatal illness for not saving dad’s victims even though he was not older than twelve at the time.

And so now, on cozy summer evenings, we often chat back and forth through the veil. “I’m so glad your teeth are nice and straight again, Bill. You are just amazingly good looking! I never noticed that before when we were kids. You filled out, too. We were both so skinny back then! I’ll be forever grateful that you came to our family. That was a real act of courage you know! You were always so giving and patient with us. We didn’t get a lot of that from anyone else. But you know what? You ALWAYS chose love. The greatest thing is that in spite of all your suffering, you still chose to love. That’s what really makes the difference, isn’t it? Some people get hurt and they spend the rest of their lives hurting others. Then there are people like you. You still chose love, Bill. In spite of all of that. You’re my hero, and how I love you.”

If I find the courage, I might sort through some old photos after a great conversation, but often the photos are far too heavy with grief. “Remember how tenderly you took care of me in the hospital, Linda? Linda, you are so tender. Thank you….thank you…”

And I think about those who urge punishment and pain for all the terrible people and their terrible deeds, and I know it doesn’t work. It never works. All of the possible pain that could ever be inflicted would not give us back one second of our lives nor dry one tear. There has to be a calm in the middle of the storm that can quietly bear testimony with enough power to change the course of human ignorance and indifference. This is the time for a change of heart and mind that carries the potential to reach every corner of society and change the world from the inside out through compassionate wisdom and unyielding determination.

I was always looking for someone to love me enough to fix the hole in my soul that perpetually blocked happiness and success. Instead of love, I attracted what I was familiar with and ended up marrying men like my father.  I became even more damaged and lonely. The hurts that I carried came from others so it was only natural to believe that the solutions could only come from someone taught to heal such wounds. I was in a therapist’s office staring at a poster of a whale’s tail arching upwards from an ocean splattered with the colors of a setting sun.

“How did you live through all of that?…I mean where did you find the strength to continue with so much horror around you?…Why didn’t you just give up?” She was studying my face with academic curiosity and puzzlement.”

My mind was instantly flooded with memories of the countless nights where I knew that I could not live one more moment with my pain. Pain that came from feeling so worthless and repulsive that I sometimes had to will myself to breathe. Pain that came from the agony of looking into the faces of so many people and not finding a single shred of humanity looking back at me. My body simply wanted to die all on its own in order to erase the unbearable images of those faces. But I always waited. I waited for that first light of day to leave me exhausted enough to sleep.

“I did try to kill myself a couple o’ times.” I felt my mouth twist into a smile about an experience never shared before. “I ate a bottle of aspirin once and washed it down with a bottle of white wine. Vomited blood all night…didn’t die.”

She continued to study my face as if I had given an incorrect answer. So I relented and told her the silly secret to my endurance.

“I guess what really saved me was this funny belief that if I died…then the very next day would have been the best ever…and I would miss it.”

She still didn’t seem to approve of my answer even though she went on to a different topic. That’s because she didn’t know my longing for one perfect, happy fairytale day! I had always felt that that day was slightly beyond one more sleepless troubled night. A miracle would be waiting! I just had to hold on one more night.

I had lots of those nights and only promises of that day. But I still held on.

I was in another office years ago with a wonderful local church leader. I shared my tears over the troubled past that I was fighting hard to be free from, and he listened just as he had before. He noted my discouragement and tenderly made promises just as he had before. He tried to lift me up by telling me lovely things just as he had before. Then he suddenly became a lost, lonely little boy, confused and sad and introspective. “I had something like that happen to me too…not as bad, but it was every night. I cried from the pain, but he wouldn’t stop.” He was obviously accustomed to his own buried secret hurts. As he gazed listlessly at the wall,  there was a tired, worn-out acceptance flooding the air that said it was just the way things were and nothing could ever be changed. He played listlessly with a pen and then the fabric on the sleeve of his suit jacket. “It was my father too. I guess that’s what makes it so hard to deal with.”

There was silence while I tried to digest the reality of what he had shared. I, who had suffered so much sexual abuse, had no idea how to comfort him. And so we sat in that silence. Two broken children quietly sitting in the ashes of our childhood. I went on to dream of my perfect fairytale day, and he committed suicide.

It’s hard to describe the dimensions of a wound that society has historically refused to acknowledge. In the past, sexual abuse was mostly grist for jokes and sordid stories. We were told to “Just get it behind you, and move on with your life!” But there was no life. Only a large gaping wound where a life should have been. With time, I have tried to define that wound. It is as if there is an inner cathedral in each one of us. A sacred, golden cathedral of light. It’s so sacred that it holds secrets to all that is divine within us. It has an alter that declares our divine, eternal worth. There are candles carefully placed around paintings and mirrors and gorgeous hand carved woodwork. It’s warm with peace and safety, and time is pulled out on a ribbon of forever with a knowing placed there with angel kisses and God’s own loving hand. And then, it’s all gone. Left in chaotic rubble. The golden beauty of it has been slashed and torn and burned. It’s no longer sacred, and it no longer has any safety or peace.

Healing begins with accepting the loss of the innocent child we once were. That child is gone and so is the adult we would have been. We might always be homesick for what was and could have been, but we still courageously walk into the rubble in spite of the pain to pick up a painting…and a candlestick, and a broken piece of a mirror. Those who vandalized will not be back to pick up a single nail. It’s up to us to make it beautiful again. The love that spontaneously rested there before can only be called back after we have taken one of those broken mirror pieces and gazed into it long enough to feel God’s love reflected back. That love is what is needed to make it sacred once more.

I heard one man grumble about the girls he had raped. “They just want to play the victim!”

We are not being “poor sports.” We are not “playing the victim.” We are not lying. We are not “looking for attention.” We are trying to describe an indescribable injury that has permanently altered us and destroyed the quality of our lives. We want to make sense out of the senseless. And we want to find that perfect, happy fairytale day.

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You always feel as if you stand alone in memories that have no top and no bottom in an endless landscape of shame and guilt and pain. There is nowhere to run and no place to hide, because your tormentor lives somewhere in your head behind billowing, scary curtains of denial and confusion. I have been to a lot of therapists over the years. Some actually hurt me. Some helped me a little just by listening, and some helped me a lot to overcome soul-wrenching suffering. But regardless of any disappointments, I always kept going back in hopes of finding my way out of a long, dark, bitter night that went on for decades. One of the most helpful tools that I was ever given, is to find pictures of myself close to the time of the traumas and examine them to see how well they match up with the stories that are told.

The above photo is me at nine years old in front of my uncle’s car and our neighbor’s house. My father said I seduced him at this age. The half-brother who raped me said, “She ain’t never been nothin’ but a liar!” Various and assorted others would have similar stories about me.

I don’t look like a seductive, evil Jezebel who has demoralized boys and men from birth. I just look like a lonely, damaged child. Like most survivors of abuse, I was slow in learning to defend my dignity and truth. Sexual abuse is a form of death, and I spent far too many years of my life living as if my body resided somewhere else. I couldn’t look at myself fully in a mirror for decades. If I was putting on lipstick, I saw only my lips. Mascara was the same. I refused ownership of my body because it no longer belonged to me.  Once the ownership of our body is stripped away, recovering that power can be seemingly impossible. And that loss of my body was, of course, my fault. It was always my fault. I had fully accepted responsibility for my own abuse and there was always someone eager to keep me in my place if I should ever try to stray.

Mama sent me over to find my father at a construction site once when I was eighteen years old. I didn’t like being there because it was empty except for a small trailer at the side of it. Scared, but even more scared of disappointing mama, I knocked on the door. An older, lanky man opened it and stared down at me. “Is my dad here? His name is Lyman Hopkins.”

He said nothing for the longest time. He just stared with a twisted expression of pure disgust and hate.  “I know what you did,” he muttered. “You’re the one that ruined your daddy’s life! He done told me all about it.”

He continued staring coldly without offering information on dad’s whereabouts, apparently wanting to allow time for his rage at the seduction of my father and ruining his life in the process to sink in. I obviously didn’t merit a response. He slammed the door in my face before I stumbled away unable to think or feel.

Logic didn’t factor in. What mattered then, and now, are the deep underlying beliefs in our sub-conscious minds. Beliefs that we absorbed from others. Beliefs that were handed down from one generation to another. Beliefs that have been around for so long that it would be irreligious to doubt them. I can remember my mother plopping me down next to the neighbor’s boys while they were digging up pastel-colored grass roots with tablespoons. “Get ‘er out o’ here! We don’t want to play with her! She’s just a girl.”

Everyone could chuckle at that one and reflect on the silliness of a preschooler’s philosophy on life, but the following are quotes and reflections from some world and early church leaders who have shaped our present social structure with the same silliness. Most people don’t understand that Eve eating the forbidden fruit continues to wreak havoc today. Being kicked out of Paradise has never really been forgiven by an angry few. A German proverb says, “Adam must have his Eva so that he may blame her for what he himself has done.”

“Women”, wrote Tertullian, ” The curse God pronounced on your sex still weighs on the world. You are the Devil’s doorway. You have led astray one whom the Devil would not attack directly. You are the first that deserted the divine laws. All too easily, you destroyed the image of God, Adam. Because you deserved death, it was the Son of God who had to die. You shall always go in mourning and rags.”

It’s noteworthy that early Church Fathers did not view a woman as being in the image of God as Adam was. She was more of an inferior sub-species with a weak, pathetic ill-suited body. Tertullian further insulted the daughters of Eve, “Woman is a temple built over a sewer.”

Where did they get such rage and contempt for women? They did not take their cue from Christ because New Testament sources do not contain a single negative statement about women from him. It appears to have arisen out of a need to attribute blame for a large number of mistresses and sexual conquests that had soiled their collective histories.

Fast forward to our not-so-distant past. Assessing sexual abuse yet rests on the research of men like Freud who listened to ‘hysterical’ females claim that their fathers had sexually abused them as children. He uncovered abuse and then covered it back up. He stated that the accusations were sexual fantasies. This preserved a nice surface of Victorian respectability for the men.

“To remove the responsibility from the father, Freud found it necessary to undermine the perceptions of his female patients. Therefore, since any attempt on the part of the child or for her family to expose the violator exposes her own innate sexual motives and shamed her more than the offender, concealment is her only recourse.” The Freudian Coverup

Freud drew the blueprint for sex offenders to this day. The victim will often be humiliated, ridiculed, shamed, and called a liar. Survivors have scuttled like rats for centuries keeping their secrets in dark places and hiding from the light. I was in such pain for years after being raped at nine years old that I couldn’t sleep. My father had been aware of the pain and told my mother that I had seduced him. I cried at her bedside hoping to go to a doctor but she would always say, “Hush up now, and go back to bed”. By minimizing the experience and my pain, she made me worthless. The shame I felt over the years of abuse and subsequent feelings of unworthiness eventually swallowed away any dreams or hope or feelings of lovability.  I grew accustomed to the pain and numb to the possibility of happiness.

There should be no more shame or secrecy in being a survivor of sexual abuse than there is in being the survivor of a car accident. By denying me the right and the freedom to openly express my experiences, I was also denied the right to fully live. I couldn’t show up for life without those experiences and society has refused to let me, and so many others, in with them. The real shame here is that tens of thousands of us are still waiting to live.

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