In Which Things Are Happening

Photo by Michael Geertsma.

When I was a little kid, I dreamed of sitting at a typewriter, banging out the Next Great American Novel. I wanted to be like that Robert Frost guy my mom admired so much – sure, he wasn’t a novelist, but I was six, so what did I know? I didn’t even know if I was a good writer, but what I did know was that I’d been reading since I could remember, and I wanted to move people in the same way the stories I was reading did.

When I was a sophomore in high school, my Advanced English teacher met with each of us students and talked with us about our writing. She didn’t have much to say in terms of what I needed to do to improve, she said, because I was already miles ahead of the rest of the class in terms of clarity, and precision and economy of words. This was the first time I can remember thinking “this writing thing could work.”

In graduate school, I needed an adviser for my thesis. I asked a professor with whom I’d had two classes – one formal and one independent study. He told me that he doesn’t usually direct Master’s students, but he’d make an exception for me because he enjoyed my writing so much. That’s a rare thing in academia apparently – to have writing that’s enjoyable.

And now, three and a half years after that conversation, I’ve discovered that other people like what I write. To the point that they want to pay me for it.

I have a book contract.

I am joining Matthew Paul Turner, Justin Lee, Jay Bakker, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Lillian Daniel, Brian McLaren, Philip Yancey and many other wonderful voices in publishing with Jericho Books, a religion imprint from Hachette. The book is scheduled for release in Spring 2015.

I am incredibly excited to start this next phase in my writing career. I may have even brandished the book contracts over my head while yelling “I’m going to be published!!!!!” at my cat. Because why not. Why. Not.

Thank you for all your support now and in the future. It means the world to me.

Guest Post: When God Is Man, But You Are a Woman

(My apologies for this post being a couple days late this week. There was a scheduling hiccup on my end. But this post is definitely worth the wait.)

Danielle L. Vermeer is a social impact consultant by day and blogger on the intersections of marriage, faith, and feminism by night. A Christian feminist and longtime advocate in the anti-trafficking sector, she is passionate about amplifying the voices of women and girls and sharing stories of hope and healing. She and her husband are on a journey of two becoming one and live in the Chicago suburbs with their adorable baby-dog. Connect with her at www.fromtwotoone.com or on Twitter at @fromtwotoone.

They told me that God must be a man because men are more powerful.

I was six-years-old in the middle of playing basketball in my driveway with my next door neighbors – two boys a year older than I – when they confidently asserted their theological conclusion. Frizzy-haired, lanky, and stubborn as an ox, I retorted that God isn’t a man because God isn’t a person. God is God. They scoffed at me for not knowing what I was talking about and then we proceeded to go on with our game.

They told me that God must be a man because Jesus came to Earth as a man.

Growing up in the Catholic Church, I was taught that only men could be pope and bishops and priests and deacons and even altar servers.* Contrary to the evangelical debates on women in church leadership, the Catholic Church basically taught us that since Jesus was a man, only men could represent Him on earth in the sacraments and other important functions of religious life.

They told me that God must be a man because God calls Himself Father and Jesus calls Himself Son.

In the Catholic Church, we made the sign of the cross in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in the name of the Mother, and the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit. In some evangelical churches I attended, contemplating the (traditionally/stereotypically) feminine characteristics of the Divine was akin to heresy. God was Father. Jesus was Son. Period. No questions asked. Since the parts of Scripture that characterized God and Jesus in more feminine terms were exceptions to the rule, the rule was upheld in a remarkably literal fashion.

They told me that God must be a man because as husband is to wife, Jesus is to His Bride the Church.

When I splintered off from the Catholic Church during my preteen and teen years, the evangelical churches and camps I attended stressed the complementary relationship between men and women. They derived much of their theology from Genesis in which God created mankind in His image, male and female He created them. And since the male was created first and the female sinned first, they contrived that the man was to be the leader and protector of the more easily-deceived woman.

***

From my girlhood to my womanhood, I got the impression from both the secular world and my church traditions that all people were created equal, but men were just a bit more equal. Because if men are associated with power, salvation (Jesus), authority (God), and leadership (Church), then where does that leave me as a woman?

When they said that God must be a man because men are more powerful, they were implying that women were less powerful and inherently more vulnerable. While female people around the world are more vulnerable to abuses of power precisely because they are female, this is not a system ordained by God. Patriarchy is the not the result of men being made in the image of God, but rather of men wanting to be gods in power and authority.

When they said that God must be a man because Jesus came in male form, they were implying that the female form was not worthy of the Incarnate God. They were, of course, forgetting that Jesus incubated and was birthed through the body of a female, that God’s choice of a young, unmarried woman to bring forth the Messiah was not only a slap in the face of patriarchal norms about women, but also completely defiant of human logic.

When they said that God must be a man because God calls Himself father and Jesus calls Himself Son, they are ignoring the intensely patriarchal context of the time in which protection and inheritance passed exclusively through men. But they also are downplaying how Jesus consistently subverted the prevailing norms of the day when relating to those considered less than – women, the disabled, foreigners, children – basically anyone who who do not fit into their narrow definition of person.

When they said that God must be a man because of those verses in Genesis and Ephesians, they are literalizing metaphors – communicating truth through symbolism – that ultimately are profound mysteries to us. Paul even says so explicitly after the analogy of husbands and wives being like Christ and the Church. And as for Genesis, the Hebrew word for “female” – in some cases meaning to be perforated, punctured, bored through, or screwed – is an anatomical description from a contextualized era in which women were not considered fully human, not an ontological truth about women’s role in all places and in all times to be (passive) receivers of “something bigger than ourselves.” Elevating literal interpretations of the intended figurative translation results in false theology that says women are held accountable for their submission to their husbands while men are held accountable for their submission to God.

That’s not who I know God to be.

God is not powerful or authoritative or protective or a leader because He is like a man. God is the Father who passes on inheritance of eternal life through the Son Jesus. God is also the Mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings.

God is all of these things and more because God is above and beyond and encompassing gender of all kinds.

Growing up, I essentially learned that if God is male, then the male is God. But as I’ve grown in wisdom and stature as a Christian and a feminist, I’ve come to rest on a profound truth: that I am made in the image of God both irrespective of and precisely because I am made female.

Why I Write About Rape Culture (And Believe It Exists)

Age 12. The waves were beating against my legs as they hung off the back of the inner tube. My arms hurt from gripping the handles as I bounced over the rough waters of the Mississippi. And my face hurt from smiling.

I wasn’t actually that happy, but I felt like I should probably look like I was having a good time – after all, this was summer, and I was out with my cousins in their boat on the Mississippi River. I figured I should be grateful. Somehow, I managed to keep a smile plastered on my face for a good 20 minutes, finally being pulled into the boat when the person driving got tired.

“Gee, Dianna, I thought you were out there for a long time, but you just kept smiling, so I figured everything was okay!”

Age 15. I’m sitting in the chair at the hairdresser’s, something my mom and I did as a mommy-daughter date every 6 weeks. My hair was short at that time, so it needed the upkeep. I didn’t know the hairdresser very well, and wasn’t particularly versed in the ways of hairdresser-client conversation. But, I felt I should be polite and nice, and that meant smiling from ear to ear the entire time as she cut my hair, right?

It was awkward and weird, but by this point, I’d been pretty well trained that a smile from a woman was disarming, was read as “polite” and that if I smiled to show that I was “enjoying” something, it didn’t matter what my actual feelings about the matter were.

Age 21. I’m in Oxford, England, and walking home by myself through city center at about 9:00 at night. I’ve just been out to an improv club for a fun night with my friend Scott, but unfortunately have to walk the 20 minutes back to my house by myself. As I’m walking through Cornmarket street, a homeless man yells something unintelligible at me.

“No, thank you!” I yell back and start walking hurriedly, wondering why I thanked the man for yelling at me.

Age 25. I’m home on Christmas break and having the worst day. My ex boyfriend is refusing to speak to me, I’m having severe anxiety issues, and I feel sick to my stomach most of the time. I realize that I’m supposed to stop at the local grocery store for something on my way home, and pull into the parking lot. As I’m marching inside, thinking about everything that’s going wrong in my life and all the stress that’s piling up to nearly unmanageable levels, the Salvation Army bell ringer – a man – notices my frown and yells, “Hey, smile, pretty lady.”

I have to resist flipping him off.

Women are conditioned, from birth, to be as unassuming and unresisting as possible, not to show displeasure and only to respond in the nicest of ways. In these tiny, subtle ways, our culture has invested itself in the public ownership of women’s bodies, to the point that they prioritize other people’s feelings over their own safety and their own perfectly valid reactions.

We all know how it looks. That female coworker who sends emails with emoticons to soften the blow: “I’m sorry but that report needs to be redone. :)” Women fret over how to let down nicely the boy who didn't bother to call for three hours even though you were dressed up nicely for your date. The simpering, groveling obeisance, the responses that put the feelings of the person hurting us over our own feeling of being hurt. The invalidation of our own pain out of some odd deference to that of everyone else.

Women are trained to act and see themselves as as receptacles for the feelings of others. Once you begin noticing it, you see everywhere. We wonder why women have trouble saying “no” directly when women who fiercely stand up to street harassers are met with yells of “bitch!” We wonder why women don’t take control of their own body when someone violates their boundaries after we’ve been instructing them their entire lives that their bodies are meant to be saved for their future husbands and that the men in their lives get say-so over what clothing women put on their body.

We condition and socialize and punish, and then claim that demure niceness and prioritizing sympathy for their abusers are central traits to what it means to be a woman. We lecture that “no means no,” and then we pick up toddlers who don’t want to be picked up and punish them for not giving their relatives a hug.

We spend our lives teaching women to take responsibility for every pain, hurt, and feeling they might cause others – an unhappy woman is cause for concern, just as an unabashedly and happily ambitious one is cause for ridicule.

And then we wonder at rape culture? We say that talking about the enforcement of boundary crossing, the policing of female behavior and clothing and connecting it to the ultimate crossing of boundaries is “sensational”? As though rape is some sort of revered thing that must only be discussed in hush tones behind closed doors?

We discount women’s words and women’s emotions in the smallest things, in the littlest interactions. When we tell women that they’re oversensitive, over-reacting, and, perhaps, sensationalizing their abuse for profit, we reinforce an attitude that pervades juries, judges, prosecutors, police forces. We reinforce attitudes that justify rape in the minds of the rapist, that result in victims living in hell.

I don’t write about rape culture because it’s sensational. I write about it because it is the stuff of my life, of the lives of people around me. I write about it because I think the way we talk about women’s bodies and the way we discuss our value matters in the larger scheme of violence against women.

How we talk about our culture matters. How we participate in relationships with the women around us matters. Because all lives matter. Rape isn't some sacred thing that we must only discuss "when appropriate" which is often code for never. Rape needs to be talked about, discussed, and seen for the horror it is. Talking about culture that condones and endorses rape, then, is the act of bringing light into darkness, of making it harder for evil to hide, of setting our foot down and saying "no, that's not okay because that is the mindset of the rapist."

It is not sensational. It is necessary.

Feminist Book Club: SPEAK Discussion

Hello all! Two weeks ago, I suggested that we read SPEAK by Laure Halse Anderson together, in light of the Steubenville trial. Today, I'm opening up the comment thread below to discuss the book, and I'll start with a few questions (taken shamelessly from the discussion guide at the back of my edition).

1. Is there a relationship between speaking and listening? Can one exist without the other?
2. Discuss the social hierarchy at Merryweather High. What role does the concept of identity play? Why is belonging to one of the clans so important to Heath and so unimportant to Melinda?
3. In Rachel and Melinda's written conversation in the library, why do you think Rachel doesn't believe Melinda?

Basically, how do you see rape culture playing out in Melinda's story?

Thanks for reading and participating!

Other People's Reasons and Our Narratives: On the Appropriation of Suicides

[trigger warning: suicidal ideation, description of suicide methods]

In October of 2010, I wanted to kill myself. I started plotting, on a daily basis, how it would happen. I’d stare up at the roof of my apartment building as I walked up the hill toward class, wondering who would spot my body first when I hanged myself using the loose wires up there. Or perhaps I would use one of those toxic bug bombs I still had on hand from when my apartment had become infested with roaches during the summer. I was living in Japan at the time and mercifully didn’t know enough Japanese to buy myself enough drugs to overdose.

2 months later, I quit my job, returned home, and began the slow road to recovery.

It was a dark, terrifying place to be. It’s not something I talk about easily or openly – few people, to this point, ever knew that this was the case and that this was the real reason I left. At the time, I said it was because I had a lack of Christian community around me, that I wasn’t getting the spiritual food I needed and it was leaving me hopeless. This was only a small part of the truth – the real problem was that I was deeply, deeply unhappy, and deeply, deeply broken. Even three years later, I can’t truly tell you what went wrong, other than a pervasive sense of being entirely unmoored from any reality I’d ever known.

I tell you this not to garner pity or to elicit sympathy for my case – I am recovered and I am in a much better place now. The fact that I can even talk openly about it is a sign of a good recovery.*

No, I tell you this because I was triggered – trigger is the only way I can describe it – by an offhand reference in a piece I read this morning, a sublimation of the story of a person who committed suicide into an anecdote about submission.

And I am furious.

Emily Wierenga wanted to talk about servanthood, submission and the feminist conflict. I understand where the piece was attempting to go. But the piece derailed for me when she chalked up her grandmother’s suicide to her grandmother’s inability to submit properly:

My dad was a pastor but when I was a little girl, the church was the only place he was a leader. At home, my mum made the rules. She told my dad when to punish us; my dad would always tell us to go to our mum when we asked for permission, and she ultimately made any decisions affecting the family.

And my dad let her. So I not only didn’t fully respect my dad growing up, because he didn’t stand up to my mum, but I didn’t really trust him to protect me. To come to my rescue if I needed him to. And when I first got married I treated my husband the same way; I bossed him around and got annoyed when he wouldn’t listen to me.

My mum’s mum was that way too. My Nanny and her husband divorced, because he couldn’t please her, and in the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.

“In the end, she committed suicide, because she wasn’t able to get her way and so I come from a long line of willful women.”

Perhaps I am too close. Perhaps the memories of lying in my bed at night imagining the different ways I could end my suffering are too stark in my mind. Perhaps those afternoons of pajama clad vegging on the sofa, being utterly and totally incapable of even getting dressed to walk to the grocery store are still too close in my memory. Perhaps I am biased. Surely, that is the pushback I will get here, for telling this part of my story – that I cannot see the forest for the trees, that I’m unable to separate one line from the thesis of the piece as a whole, that her grandma’s suicide isn’t the story she’s trying to tell.

Valid.

But consider this: whose story is it to tell when a person commits suicide? What right do we have to ascribe a meaning to their personal tragedy?

Surely, the appropriation of another person’s story – especially to support a point about selfish willfulness – has to be considered, has to be weighed, and has to be understood. Surely, this distilling of a person’s story – complex, multi-faceted, and ultimately tragic – into one line is a microcosm of everything wrong with how we tell, appropriate and understand each other as people, as complex human beings, as sisters in Christ. Surely, we need to discuss how we talk about and handle suicide and depression.

I cannot begin to imagine how Wierenga’s grandmother felt in her final days. I didn’t know her, and I don’t know her story. But as a person who has been in that dark place, and who managed to get out by the skin of her teeth, it horrifies me to think that someone would use my story to malign me, to paint me as someone who “couldn’t get my own way,” to pretend to understand all the reasons that go into such decisions and such thoughts – reasons I still don’t fully understand myself.

This one line matters because this woman’s story matters. We can talk about the abuse apologism (reflective of John Piper’s “enduring wife” ideas) and the idea of servanthood until we’re blue in the face, but if we’re not willing to honor another person’s story, if we’re not willing to give tragedy the weight that tragedy demands, if we are not willing to see others as human beings and their stories as valid stories that cannot be boiled down to one sentence, then we have failed – miserably – in our duty to be like Christ. When we appropriate another person’s tragedy to build our personal thesis and ascribe our reasons to their actions rather than listening to the stories themselves, we are doing a disservice to our church family.

I will not stand by and watch people who claim the name of Christ shame those who contemplated or committed suicide. I will not be silent in the face of those who would call suicidal people selfish. Because my story, this grandmother’s story, and the stories of countless other people, matter. They are complex, they are human, and they are not ours to play with.

_______________

*If you are experiencing suicidal thoughts and depression, please get help. Here’s a hotline or chat-line you can use.

Easter Monday: Open Thread

I’ve had a really busy weekend, and unfortunately had no time to get the post put together for this Monday – my apologies on that front! But, in the interest of not leaving you guys in the dust, I thought it worthwhile to do a temperature check of what people would like to see on the blog, especially since my snarky, sarcastic post from last week was one of the most popular I’ve had in awhile.

So, I’m opening up the comment thread below for suggestions, feedback, ideas, etc, about what you, dear readers, want to see more of in this blogging space. Since I like blogging to be a community, a place for interaction and growth and working out the messy issues of life, I’d like some feedback on what you guys want to see more of – more polemics about rape culture? More stuff on modesty culture? More take-downs of bad theology from pastors? More cat pictures?*

And if you don’t feel like talking about those things, tell me about your Easter, if you celebrated! If you didn’t, tell me about the latest cool thing that happened in your life.

Basically, open thread party!

*I always have more cat pictures.

Also: I have a FB page now! Where you can "like" me! Go, do it!

The Case For Getting Married Whenever You Damn Well Please

This piece of satire was inspired by yet another “The Case for Marrying Young” article, this time appearing in The Atlantic.

A compelling case can be made for the advantages, particularly for women, of marrying just after you graduated high school. As a lazy writer and radio producer*, I’m disinclined to wrestle with the statistics right now though I’m perfectly capable of doing the math, but I believe a good case can be made, alternatively, for marrying whenever you damn well please.

There are costs to marrying at a very young age, a tradition the institutional Church seems intent on recommending, with articles consistently bemoaning the increasing ages of first marriage and dissecting all the causes. New research declares that I no longer give a damn what “new research” has to say about my life as a single woman. While marrying your first serious romantic partner does have benefits like having someone else on hand to open that jar of spaghetti sauce, the news isn’t all good.

While men and women are waiting longer to marry, some people are having kids outside of wedlock. While I can’t for the life of me think of why “out of wedlock mothers” became synonymous with “single mothers” even though linguistics and statistics don’t bear that out, I suppose I could allow for some concern over that idea. Because apparently single parents can’t provide stable homes for people who might grow up to become, oh, I don’t know, The President.

Also, there’s something to be said about seeing surveys about “satisfaction” and selectively reporting them as referendums about single and married life in general. And that something is “nuh-uh no way these self-reported surveys often have known biases that skew the results toward marriage as a symbol of ‘adulthood.’”

Of course, marriage has changed considerably over the course of history. In Bible times, women were married off pretty much right after their first period and didn’t really have a choice in whom they married. This was probably even the case for Mary and Joseph, the folks who raised Jesus – I mean, the whole problem of that thing was that Mary was *gasp* an unwed mother! OH NOES.

...where was I?

Oh, yeah. We’ve agreed basically by consensus of our changing culture that maybe having people with uteruses (uteri?) start spitting out babies shortly after they’ve started their monthly bleeding cycles is a Bad Idea. So we can probably adjust our culture to the shifting ideas of what marriage and family look like now without rending our clothes and grieving in sackcloth over the demise of an idealized image of the American Family That Never Was.** And it doesn’t necessarily matter if/when a woman gets married because autonomy, y’know?

Of course, the idea of autonomy seems mightily offensive to some folk. But see, when they long for the good ol' days when women and men married at 20 and settled down, what they're actually saying is that they'd like to see marriage returned to the time when women were encouraged not to educate themselves but rather to depend solely upon a man. This frequently trapped young women in abusive or just plain unhappy marriages because women weren’t educationally or vocationally equipped to leave.*** But now apparently cishet women choosing career and financial stability before (not instead of, but before) a husband, asserting their autonomy and taking the right choice instead of the first choice is hedonism. Or something. That argument is really unclear, because you'd think hedonists wouldn't get married.

Let’s insert a completely unnecessary personal anecdote, because the plural of anecdote is TOTALLY data, right?

I’m twenty seven years old. I’m single. I have two higher education degrees that have enabled me to find a stable job to support myself and pay back my educational debt, and find a fulfilling life doing what I love. I have a cat, and yes, I drink about a bottle of wine every couple of weeks, because I enjoy having a glass of wine now and then and White Zinfandel tastes good.****

What’s more is that I am happy. I am satisfied with my life. I’ve had the opportunity to travel – I’ve lived in England and Japan and travel internationally on a yearly basis for my day job. I also have the freedom to take off for a weekend if I want and an open schedule that only I dictate. I am also responsible – I pay my bills on time – and I am successful – I have a steady job, a blog with good stats, and friends I dearly love and am incredibly grateful for. I have a number of people who are my chosen family who would go to bat for me in a heartbeat (and frequently do). I know people of all different walks of life and I love that being single in my 20s has afforded me the opportunity to know them. My life that would be entirely different had I married at 19. Not bad, just different.

And you know what? I know people who got married at 19 who are happy with that decision - fewer of them than these older Christians who keep urging us to marry young. And I think the high divorce rate that correlates (but is not necessarily caused by because, gee, social trends are complex!) with an earlier age of marriage is something to be concerned about - a trend that these people who urge for early marriage seem unconcerned about or intent at sweeping under the rug.

 What's important here though is this: my life decisions are not a referendum on anyone else’s and they are not an invitation for white American Christians to pearl clutch and whine about how “times have changed” and “demographics are different.”

My life is my life, married, singled, divorced, widowed, or otherwise affiliated. Marriage, if it happens, will be the icing on the cake of a life well lived and that does not make it any less valid or any less awesome OR any less of a cornerstone that will change and alter my life.

End of discussion.

_______________

*Note that this has nothing to do with the subject at hand. I just thought I’d brag about my TOTALLY AWESOME job.

**I mean, read The Feminine Mystique, people.

***Again, read the research, people.

****Shut up, Preston.

Guest Post: The Ever Changing Faces of God

Dani is an obsessive geek, skeptical feminist, graphic designer and struggling writer over at crooked neighbor, crooked heart.
___________________________________

Trigger warning: self harm, sexual assault

"I did it to myself. Mea culpa, mea culpa."

I would rock back and forth, muttering those words to myself, scratching my arms and legs until they almost bled, eyes squeezed shut to keep out the images I'd just emblazoned into my mind.

You're a girl, I scolded myself. Girls aren't supposed to want sex. You're nothing but a filthy whore. You're robbing your husband; you'll have nothing to give him. You're disgusting and vile and worthless. Only evil women have desires like this.

You see, believing that my highest calling was to be a wife and mother, it occurred to me that I was ill-prepared for the physical intimacy that marriage entails. Since I was told that frequent good sex was something I owed my husband, and since sex is generally a taboo subject in conservative Christianity, I did what I thought was the most reasonable thing for me to do. I decided to learn about sex from the privacy of the internet so I would be prepared when I got married.

What started as an educational exercise, however, turned into something I thought was a fight for my eternal soul.

I begged God to take away my desires. I begged, pleaded, screamed, wracked my body with temporary scars and shaking sobs. And yet they remained. I hated myself. I thought this must be my thorn in the flesh, and in some moments I even hated God for making me this way if there was no release.

And God was someone who would first make me a sexual being, then condemn me for it. He gave me desires and needs without the means to fulfill them or the decency to end my suffering.

_______________________________________

"Your...hair...smells...good," he breathed into my ear. I'd stopped struggling — he was surprisingly strong for someone wheelchair-bound. My breast throbbed with pain as his grip tightened, my back twisted oddly as I was being pulled halfway painfully into his lap. His guardian and our professor sat across the room, talking, oblivious.

It took a long time for them to notice. Even then, my teacher did nothing — my attacker’s guardian was my salvation. As he was being pried off of my body finger by finger, he stretched to kiss me. "I don't want this to be my first kiss!" my brain screamed as I tried to twist away. He managed to plant a kiss on my jaw anyway. It occurred to me that perhaps this was God's punishment for my sexual desire — that my sexual desire made me a sexual object to be consumed against my will.

The next class, my teacher caught up with me. "So, he has wandering hands, huh? He apparently has a way with the ladies."

I was horrified. Shaken. Enraged. Confused. Terrified.

He saw...and did nothing.

And I couldn’t shake the image of God as that teacher, watching silently from across the room, doing nothing.

_______________________________________

I had just begun dating my husband, and I was quickly becoming terrified at his level of commitment to me. I tried to push him away as hard as I possibly could with the only thing I knew would surely be repugnant enough to open his eyes. I launched attack after attack, explaining how unlovable I was, how dirty I was, how worthless I was.

He batted it all aside with kindness. He spoke life and truth into my wilderness of self-hatred. He didn't see me as a project. He didn't see me as a collection of moral failures. He didn't even see me as an object for his pleasure. He saw me as a person, full of inherent worth. He saw me. And he loved me.

It took a long time to accept his love. But when I did, all I could think was, "This...this must be what Jesus is like. This is what people mean when they talk about a God of love. I haven't seen it before. This is grace, this is peace, this is hope, this is love. I understand now."

He was the first person for whom love did not include shaming or controlling me.

And God started to become someone I could love, trust, and believe in.

_______________________________________

That is...until we had sex.

"Your relationship is ungodly," my friends told me. "If he was the one God wanted for you, he wouldn't have tempted you to sin like this. The fact that you gave in to it shows you're not ready for a relationship, let alone marriage."

And I was confused, so confused. Would God really want to take away the one person who most convinced me of His goodness, simply because we made love? People kept telling me how sex before marriage could never be about love — it could only be about sinful lust and defying the work and word of God. But my experience was completely the opposite. Having sex with him had been the most loving, healing thing I had experienced in my life. And yet it was evil?

And God was someone for whom good and evil could be arbitrarily defined, no matter the consequences to His followers.

_______________________________________

"You do have some polycystic ovaries."

My breath caught in my chest and I stared at her, not quite ready to understand what she was saying. "You mean...you mean I have PCOS?" I somehow managed to keep my voice steady.

She didn't quite meet my gaze. "Yes. We'll continue with your birth control, and when you're ready to talk about having kids, come in and we'll see if you can."

I felt dizzy. My mind flitted back to a sermon that a trusted mentor once gave about Hannah and Elkanah. He posited that Hannah should have been content with Elkanah's love and not continued to ask God for children. That when women were barren in the Bible, it was God that had closed their wombs and they should unquestioningly accept God's judgment in their lives.

And God’s judgment seemed clear. He was holding all of my sins against me, and I was found lacking.

_______________________________________

After years of squelching doubts and emotions and fears, I finally began talking.

I began to tentatively share my questions, my problems, my fears with a small but growing group of people. They told me about a God who really doesn't hold past sins over our heads to beat us with. They told me about a God who understands fear, anger, pain, and doesn't shame or punish for those feelings but instead listens, loves, cherishes, and comforts. They told me about a God who isn't abusive, who isn't capricious, who isn't cruel. I hardly dared to believe them.

But there it was, that seed of hope.

And God became someone I really felt I could wrestle with, because He might really want to engage my heart and mind, no matter what that meant. Even if it meant waiting until I was ready.

_______________________________________

"My friend called me, wanted me to come over to see him at his house. I hung up the phone, and walked to the front door, and stopped. God wouldn't let me leave."

My head was pounding with a migraine that made lights blindingly bright, sounds unbearably loud, and made my stomach lurch. The preacher’s voice droned on, each rise and fall of his tone piercing my head. I held onto my husband for dear life, my only physical stronghold in an environment that made me taste fear.

"The Holy Spirit finally released me, and I walked over to my friend’s house to find people sitting on the front porch, crying. He just shot himself." My stomach lurched again, and I felt my husband stiffen beside me. "He'd been sitting in his room by the window with his gun, waiting for me. God worked salvation in my life that day. If I'd arrived any earlier, he could have shot me."

By the time the closing prayer had been uttered, I was being steered to our car — I was shaking uncontrollably from pain and rage, afraid I would be sick or pass out.

But as we drove away from the church building, my head eased, then stopped hurting altogether. My stomach calmed. Lights became normal, sounds became bearable.

And it hit me like a ton of bricks, how emotionally and physically toxic that environment was.

I looked at my husband and said, "I think this is our last Sunday."

His jaw was set grimly. "I wholeheartedly agree."

And for one day, I was convinced that God was not the monster that this man was preaching. I didn't know what He was exactly, but I knew more than I knew anything that He was not someone who would sacrifice life like that.

_______________________________________

Now? I struggle daily with my view of God. I suppose it's only natural, considering the many faces He has had in my life. I'm still sorting through them all. Some days, I don't even think He has a face. Some days, I don't think He exists — or exists in a form that isn't pure evil. 

But the struggling is worth it. Because it's finally allowed. I've seen goodness and kindness in people that makes God seem so near. I've seen interpretations of Scripture that seem like they can override the way I was taught to read and understand the Bible. I catch glimpses of a God who isn't a narcissistic sociopathic monster, and those glimpses are enough to keep me searching.

And so now, God is a mystery. But I am resting in that mystery, in the in-between of the faith of my childhood and the faith of my adulthood, waiting.

And I think He's okay with that.

Worth Reading This Week

Hello hello! What with the Steubenville verdict coming down on Sunday, it's been a fascinating week for reading about rape culture and how we can move forward. In that vein, I have two of my favorites from this week.

First is a piece from the CS Monitor about how to raise children to respect others' bodies and their consent:

All this is helpful in the present. I’m glad my preschooler has a basic, age-appropriate understanding of respect and consent, even if he doesn’t know those words yet. Everything we do now paves the way for future conversations, and I know that as he approaches adolescence, it will be easier for us to discuss consent and respect with him.

And second, there's this piece on questions to ask rape apologists (warning: some ableist language):

4. At what point does a woman's outfit cross the line from "modest" to "asking for it"? Should we take rulers to parties to measure skirt length? Is one inch above the knee the equivalent of consent? Two inches? Three, four, five, six? What about necklines? How much cleavage is consent? Then there's the thorny issue of slutty, slutty shorts. Does wearing hot pants mean consent but not sensible, knee-length hiking shorts? How about a test of tightness for tops? Should promising young footballers consider a woman in a spandex top as consenting but not a woman in baggy T-shirt? What if she is wearing a baggy T-shirt with a short skirt? Honestly, this is a minefield...

Last, not to be entirely self-promotional, but this is my space, in case you missed it, I wrote a primer on Rape Culture and Victim Blaming for Rachel Held Evans this week.

Announcing the Faith and Feminism Book Club: SPEAK

[trigger warning: rape]

"I have never heard a more eloquent silence."

Melinda can't talk about what happened at the party. All she cares about now is getting through the ninth grade. Outcast, cut off from her friends, having trouble making new ones, Melinda lives day to day, barely able to open her mouth, barely able to even say to herself what happened.

This is the story of author Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK, an award-winning Young Adult novel. It is one of my favorite books, and in light of the Steubenville verdict this past Sunday, the parallels between the two cases are undeniable. So I've decided to re-read it. And I would like you to join me. This is a simple, low-key, online only book club, a chance for us to dive in to the same feminist literature, discuss the story and the ideas and the shortcomings and work out what these things mean for us.

And just so it's clear, this book has triggers for rape, eating disorders, verbal abuse, and emotional abuse. Don't try to go beyond limits if this book would be hard for you; self-care is important.

If you want to participate, I'll give you two weeks to find and read the book (this one moves quickly), and on Wednesday, April 3rd, we'll come back together for an open thread of discussion and thoughts and sharing.

If this first one is successful, we can start doing them once a month, eh? It would certainly help me be accountable with the reading I've been neglecting. Leave your suggestions for future books in the comments and click "like" on the suggestions you support so I can get an idea of which ones are popular.

The book is available at every major book store/online retailer, though I'd heartily suggest supporting your local, independently owned bookshops if you have them. Now let's get reading!