How Survivors of Abuse Relate to God

The Authentic Spirituality of the Annihilated Soul

Susan Shooter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409441267
• eBook ISBN: 9781317120759
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Grappling with theological issues raised by abuse, this book argues that the Church should be challenged, and ministered to, by survivors. Paying careful attention to her interviews with Christian women survivors, Shooter finds that through painful experiences of transformation they have surprisingly become potential agents of transformation for others. Shooter brings the survivors' narratives into dialogue with the story of Job and with medieval mystic Marguerite Porete's spirituality of 'annihilation'. Culminating in an engagement with contemporary feminist theology concerning power and powerlessness, there emerges a set of principles for authentic community spirituality which crosses boundaries with God, supports appropriate human boundaries and, crucially, listens attentively. Appealing to Church leaders, students, practitioners and practical theologians, this book offers a creative and ethical theological enquiry as well as some spiritual anchor points for survivors.

Chapter 1
Introduction: What Lies Beneath

By the age of 18 around 25 per cent of girls and 10 per cent of boys have been victims of sexual abuse, so most available statistics tell us.¹ Some authors suggest even higher percentages² and it is clear that in the first decades of the twenty-first century we have been gripped by panic about such abuse, not to mention the furore about the sexualization of children in our culture. The alarming statistics and the daily dose of abuse stories in the media highlight the silence which shrouded this issue before the 1970s, when Child Sexual Abuse was considered extremely rare, a mere footnote in textbooks on child psychology.³ It was the women’s movement, or ‘second-wave feminism’, that provided the political context which was so crucial in exposing the extent of the sexual and other wide-ranging abuses suffered in secret and in silence by women and children, particularly in the private and personal ‘sanctuary’ of the home.⁴ Helena Kennedy QC reminds us in this respect that not until 1991 was it deemed possible for a man to rape his wife, and consequently such abuse made illegal.⁵

In the sanctuary of the church silence has been even more obdurate,⁶ where ecclesiastical authorities have been slow to defend the abused, particularly when perpetrators are clergy.⁷ Abusing priests have often been sided with in order to avert scandal, or more recently disassociated from the institution of the Church in an attempt to avoid punitive financial damages. For instance, in the case brought by ‘JGE’, who was sexually abused as a six-year-old resident of a children’s home, the Catholic Church claimed that the culpable priest should not be considered legally as an employee, and therefore the Church was not ‘vicariously liable’ for the priest’s actions, thus shirking any responsibility.⁸ Even churches with robust child protection policies can still mishandle clergy exploitation of adults who, seeking spiritual support during a life crisis which often can be precipitated by experiences of abuses in childhood, are drawn instead by predatory clergy into an unwanted and damaging sexual relationship. Subsequently these victims are forced to keep silent to protect ministers’ reputations and the sensibilities of their congregations, and if the abuse should be reported, it is regularly referred to by the authorities as an ‘affair’. Researchers into such exploitative relationships insist this is a complete misnomer and that these liaisons should always be more appropriately labelled an abuse of professional ethics.⁹

The title of this chapter makes reference to a film¹⁰ in which an apparently respectable research scientist has killed the student with whom he had an adulterous, and unethical, sexual relationship. Having dumped her corpse in the lake, his amnesiac wife becomes his next quarry after she recovers her memory and uncovers his deadly secret. With supernatural help from the murdered girl, we learn that behind the face of the outwardly loving husband there is violence and lust; in the murky waters of the past there is a body to be discovered. This book, with the help of those who have been victims of abuse and ‘soul murder’,¹¹ seeks to answer the question, what does lie rotting beneath the surface of the Christian Church and its theology that must be dragged into the open? For if we are to find some way of swimming through the mire of damaged and damaging relationships, of opening wounds to the air for healing, then those who have had their voices drowned out are the people we need urgently to listen to, and more importantly, hear clearly. The driving force behind the doctoral thesis on which this book is based began as a hunch and grew into the full conviction, that those who have held the secret of their victimization might understand most about the corrosive subtlety of abusive power relations. We need to know what is at the heart of the abused and their continuing relationship with the God, whom as Christians we declare is Love. A slither of hope is proffered by this study, but it is discovered in the deepest oceans of despair and damage through which we must wade. For hope cannot be conjured up by the will; we must not ‘rush to resurrection’¹² without first facing the reality of destruction, for some never do find their way to Easter morning.

Having met with many vulnerable and abused people on my own journey, and reflecting on these encounters during the course of this study, I have come to realize that, not only have I experienced specific assaults on my own person of which I was aware, I have also been part of a web of distorted and distorting relationships in systems that are themselves warped; of this I was not so aware. Therefore what now follows in this introduction will first place the dynamics of power abuse within the context of patriarchal values, looking beneath the ‘secular’ context and suggesting that these values have been supported by distorted Christian theology at its bedrock. Subsequently an outline of each chapter will set out the parameters of the book and the empirical research at its core, which pays close attention to the spiritual experience and faith of nine Christian survivors of abuse. This work shares an underlying hermeneutical principle with that of James Poling, who writes that ‘those with the least power can reveal the most about the nature of the good and unmask the abuse of power’.¹³ My assertion is that those who have made the arduous journey to recovery from abuse have along the way acquired an authentic spirituality. This spirituality turns out to be theologically challenging, deconstructs traditional doctrines and practices, and insists on the intimate and empowering presence of God.

Abuse, Patriarchal Values and Theology

Witnessing a SlutWalk might on the surface give the onlooker the impression that liberated female self-expression has finally, in 2012, been realized. On the contrary, SlutWalk ¹⁴ is a new global demonstration of female solidarity that aims to expose age-old rape myths, particularly the myth that rapists can be excused their violent behaviour because of what women wear. Such movements show that despite twentieth-century legislation addressing equality for women, patriarchal values appear intransigent. Power inequalities are seen obviously in pay and promotion differentials,¹⁵ and Poling’s argument still holds true that the family is idealized in our culture as the basic social unit. This ‘ideal’ is, according to him, a location where children are not listened to, especially if they come from a ‘good family’; moreover, females are socialized into accommodating behaviours while males are socialized into a sense of entitlement to control the family and to be served.¹⁶ According to him this combination of attitudes results in ‘sanctioned forms of social control of women and other marginal groups’ expressed explicitly through sexual violence and in socially sanctioned protection for men in their abusive conduct.¹⁷ That Western society is an unsafe place for women and children is supported by Judith Herman’s analysis of her clinical experience with victims of rape and battery, whose symptoms of post-traumatic stress were indistinguishable from those suffered by soldiers exposed to extreme combat. She concludes that the trauma of the public warzone for men is comparable to the private social environment to which women and children are exposed in the home as a rule.¹⁸

Nearly 20 years on, Angela McRobbie, in a resounding echo of Poling, writes about ‘resurgent patriarchies and gender retrenchment’ played out particularly on girls’ and women’s bodies, not only in a ‘post-feminist masquerade’ of endless beautifying regimes aimed at pleasing the onlooker,¹⁹ but also in pornographic violence.²⁰ Furthermore, while there has been no let-up in the incidence of sexual and domestic violence, young women without any history of specific abuses are now arriving traumatized in Susie Orbach’s consulting room, suffering from a bodily anxiety, terror even, which she believes is transmitted ‘transgenerationally’ and dictated by global consumerism.²¹ The added complication of the present situation, which all these feminist writers identify, is that women and girls are supposedly making an empowered ‘choice’ to go under the knife, starve their bodies and become sexual objects. Abuse, then, has a wide and complex definition, although the survivors I interviewed in this study reported specific traumatic events and relationships rather than any perceived social malaise.

Reluctance in our culture to relinquish stereotyped gender roles and traditional family relationships is reflected in the Church’s corresponding reluctance to relinquish dominant masculine imagery in liturgy, in academic theology, and in ecclesiological representation. For instance, Jim Cotter points out that the Anglican Common Worship Baptism service which was introduced in 2000, includes the promise required of candidates that they ‘submit to Christ as Lord’, despite the extremely negative effect this would have on those who have been forced to submit to abuse. The response of a member of the Liturgical Commission to Cotter’s critique was that ‘the connection simply had not been made’.²² Regarding academic theology, in response to the feminist challenge to the all-male Trinity, still worshipped as Father, Son and Holy Spirit who is ‘Lord of life’, Colin Gunton argues that the only self-relatedness of God to us is as Father of Jesus and therefore God is necessarily patriarchal and should remain so.²³ Furthermore, the theological arguments for excluding women from positions of authority, namely that they cannot represent the paternal Father or be an icon of the masculine Son, are set out clearly in the report Women Bishops in the Church of England? ²⁴ Such convictions are still held by many Christians. These examples may seem less damaging, even benign manifestations of die-hard or, if McRobbie is to be believed, retrenching social values. But when it is observed that in Australia in the Diocese of Sydney the subordination of women to men is still taught under the guise of ‘complementarity’, and the single biggest cause of death in New South Wales for women under the age of 45 is domestic violence,²⁵ questions must be asked. Poling has argued that the most intransigent sex offenders (sexual abusers of children and clergy sexual abusers of parishioners who fail to recognize their culpability even when confronted) give extreme expression to the patriarchal theologies of domination that lie at the base of our Western culture.²⁶ With its intrinsic code of adult male entitlement to th...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction: What Lies Beneath
• 2 Knocking at the Door: Presenting Issues
• 3 Finding the Right Key: A Grounded Qualitative Design
• 4 Opening Up: How Survivors of Abuse Relate (to) God
• 5 Crossing the Threshold: Job the Survivor?
• 6 At Home with God: Marguerite Porete’s Mirror
• 7 The Authentic Spirituality of the Annihilated Soul
• 8 What Lies Ahead: Conclusions and Implications
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Scripture Index
• Subject Index