A Womanist Pastoral Theology Against Intimate and Cultural Violence

Stephanie M. Crumpton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137378132
• eBook ISBN: 9781137370907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book is about Black women's search for relationships and encounters that support healing from intimate and cultural violence. Narratives provide an ethnographic snapshot of this violence, while raising concerns over whether or not existing paradigms for pastoral care and counseling are congruent with how many Black women approach healing.

1

I Can Speak (the Unspeakable) for Myself

The stories shared in this chapter are taken directly from transcripts of group and one-on-one interviews with six women, the chapter also includes excerpts from written narratives they provided. All but one of the women were children under eleven years old the first time they experienced intimate violence, and the person who abused them was a member of their immediate or extended family. These women reflect diversity in age, education, employment, and sexual orientation. They are married, single, partnered, mothers, daughters, friends, and sisters who shared deeply with me about their inner lives and the encounters and relationships that helped and/or hindered them.

The chapter presents the words that women I am calling Rori, Eliza, Camille, Tamara, Cirene, and Octavia¹ used to talk about what they experienced, how they felt, who mattered, and how they “made it through.” Collectively, their words provide points of departure for those who do pastoral care and counseling to learn how many Black women grapple with violence and understand themselves in the world.

Rori

“It’s All Coming . . . But It Got to Pass”

With her broad smile and curious eyes, the group came to expect Rori to be the one who would bring a sense of humor to the conversation. She told us that laughter was one of the ways she deals with what happened to her. Humor helped her speak the truth about being sexually abused by a church elder who was also a member of her extended family. He abused her and her sisters for about three years until an aunt caught wind of it and intervened:

Okay. Where do I begin? I’m a sister of three other sisters. But, it was like three of us was three stair-steps. And being raised in the church all my life, a lot of people laugh at me because I always compare everything to sex. But, that’s all I’ve ever known. As a little girl, I remember being molested by a man we call, on the outside, Uncle [name omitted], but at church, “Elder [last name omitted],” who is a minister (his wife was like our godmother).

What they would do . . . (I still to this day don’t understand how my mother who sees all [did] not see that this man was molesting her three daughters).

I remember as a little girl he would dress us all up as little baby dolls. And it wasn’t him [sic]. His wife would be at some white lady’s house doing house work. And he would have us in his car. And I remember I would be the one that he would sit on the roof of the car. Both sisters would be on the front seat with the door open, legs open, panties down. And the sister that’s under me would be in the backseat, panties down. And I can remember (every time I see Vaseline now, I get these flashbacks). I can remember him with a baby nipple on his finger. And he would dip it into the Vaseline. And he would just do whatever. I remember him taking his penis out sometime. If he put me in the backseat with the door open and had one of the others someplace else . . . I remember him rubbing his penis up against my vagina. I remember all of that.

And then when we finally told our mother that Uncle [name omitted] was playing with my “tookie”(because at that time she told us it was a “tookie”). [She said] “No. Don’t be lying on Uncle [name omitted]. Don’t lie on him.” And for the longest, that happened, like for three years. Because I remember from three to five. And then finally my auntie heard about it. She said, “He did what?” So then she went and confronted my mother. She said as a child she was molested by her brothers. So, she knows . . . “Those children just didn’t make that up.” And, [she said] you need to get them away from him.

So, by that time my father got wind of it. And this guy would just show up. He would try to wrestle with my mother to try to get his rocks off some kind of way. And I remember my father going between . . . He had chased him out of our apartment. And he was stretched across from this apartment building to the other apartment building trying to get to this man. Because he had come out of our bathroom window and was stretched across to somebody else’s apartment trying to get them to let him in so he could get away.

Rori’s experience was horrific, and the situation was made even more difficult by the fact that the church, a significant part of her family’s identity and spirituality, was also the place where she regularly encountered her abuser. Looking back, she concluded that she and her sisters weren’t alone. She believed that there were more girls, other than just her sisters, on whom this same man had also preyed:

Everything else that happened in my life happened with the confusion of the sex and spirituality. I mean, the sex and church. Church and sex. It took me a long time to, and I still work on that, to separate the two. Because that’s just there. It’s just thrown in your face and you see the damage that was done. All these young ladies were there at this church. All of them got these same confused thoughts.

Rori’s confusion about sex and spirituality began in childhood, but the effects of the violence she experienced showed up later in her adult relationships. She recalled,

I had tickets to a Peabo Bryson concert. I was so happy. I sang “Feel the Fire” with Peabo Bryson. I sang the female parts in all of his songs. After the show, my girlfriend dropped me off at the apartment that Mr. Wonderful and I shared. I took the elevator up to the fourth floor, walked to the apartment door, put my key [in] the lock and said, “Honey, I’m home.” To my surprise, Mr. Hyde appeared from behind the door and said, “Where you been Bitch?” I had never heard him speak to me that way before. As I looked up at him through drunken eyes I never saw it coming. He hit me upside my head with his opened hand. I felt like I had been hit with the door. The room was dark but I actually saw stars. I screamed as he began to hit me and punch me like I was a punching bag. I balled myself up in a knot and attempted to protect what parts of me that had not been punched. I got myself together enough to get my keys to my car and run out of the apartment.

The violence caught her off guard and it made a lasting impression on her emotionally, psychologically, and even spiritually. During the initial group interview, I asked each woman if they could identify a specific moment when they realized they were “going to make it,” through the pain they had experienced. For Rori, it wasn’t about avoiding pain. It was about knowing that although pain had come, it had only come to pass—God wouldn’t let it stay and hold her captive.

I think for me the best way I can say it is the way it came to me was when I was . . . You know when you’re reading a fairy-tale and it says “that it came to pass.” I caught on to that. And then when things start happening I would just say, ‘and this too shall pass.’ It came to pass. And once I accept that, it’s like I can release it and move on. But as long as I’m trying [to] hold on to something, whether it’s a memory, whether it’s a feeling, whatever it is; it just came to pass. It’s not here to stay forever. And when you realize that, you can let it go and look for the next “came to pass.” Because it’s all coming. But it got to pass. It can’t stay here. Nothing remains the same.

Rori developed this notion of trouble that “came to pass” out of her own experience, but she recognized that her story was common. Part of her recovery from the intimate violence involved breaking the silence, and telling other girls and women how to avoid it and recover from it. While her pain in abusive relationships was very real, she worked with and through the pain and determined that she had made it through because of God.

Two particular experiences in college helped her make this determination. The first involved an encounter in church. She tried to get high before church service and had planned to hook up for sex with a man she knew after service was over. She tried to get high because she felt anxious, “like something’s coming.” The drugs and alcohol didn’t work, but she still went to church. The message she heard changed her.

So, I go in there, and he’s preaching, and the sermon is, “Do you want to leave here the same way you came here?” He got my attention. So, that was a different Sunday for me, because I had planned to go home with this guy after the service. He was supposed to meet up, have dinner, and go have sex. It blew all that away, okay.

My thing, my walk with God had been one that when I finally realized at this point right here that God was talking to me? And I had been listening but not listening. You know how you hear, but you don’t listen? Okay.

From that point on, I started listening, because the next day I had . . .

You know [how] you call yourself a little ho’. You . . . you got an appointment, and you set up for your “clients.” Well, my client was coming at Monday, so I got (pause) . . . and, I totally forgot about it. I mean, that’s stuff that I just didn’t do. He came by, and I said, oh, I’m so sorry, and I began to tell him what I experienced with the Lord.

He left money there, and he said . . . I said, “What you doing that for?” He said, “Because if you ever backslide, I want you to call me.” But it was like . . . He said, “Your conversation now is so different,” that he knew that I was serious. I wasn’t trying to run no scam. He said, “You’re serious about this.” I said, “Yeah. Man, it’s nothing like it. It was the best thing that ever happened to me.” So, now it’s like I still believe.

Up until that transformative moment during college, Rori hadn’t taken seriously church or other spiritual phenomena she had experienced. That moment during the sermon prompted her to believe it really was safe to believe. Her sense that “God was talking to me” opened her to experience a sacred acceptance, and that in turn encouraged her to take seriously other spiritual encounters she’d been having. For years, Rori had experienced visitations from dying family members who would appear and talk to her during semi-dream states of sleep just as they were completing their transition. She had disregarded them as mere dreams without much meaning or value, that is, until the experience in church called her to consider that the dreams were a gift from God.

Her maternal grandmother had come to visit her like this a few years before she actually transitioned. During the vision she asked Rori to “take care of her baby” because she wouldn’t be there much longer to do it for herself. Rori remembered the vision some time later when she got a call to come back home and take care of her critically ill mother. She left college (and the drug and alcohol abuse) behind and returned home. Rori understood the encounter in church during college and the multiple visits from transitioning family members to mean that God was interested and involved in her life. She finally felt affirmed. These two critical experiences in her spiritual journey made God real for her.

For Rori, these affirming events began an important process of building a relationship with God. With time, she gained the self-confidence to question what she had been taught in church. This questioning shed light on the hypocrisy she experienced in being raped by a church leader and simultaneously being raised to be a religious, socially conservative, Christian woman. She began re-evaluating the religious and social messages she had received about what it meant to be Black and female. In church she got the impression that women were considered weak, and she distinctly remembered how conversations about girls and women were often punctuated with the injunction that “thou shalt not.” In her Church of God in Christ tradition, female bodies were something to be covered up, and sex wasn’t addressed unless it was discussed within the context of marriage or in terms of how it was wrong. The onus for male sexuality was placed on the female’s sexual restraint, which was interpreted as evidence of her genuine connection with the Holy Spirit. In return for upholding these sexual ideals, the message was that God would protect them and others would hold them in high spiritual regard. Conversely, girls and women who did not comply with these sexual codes were deemed lacking and unfulfilled by the Holy Spirit.

It was a turning point for Rori when she realized that obeying the sexual codes governing her sense of holiness had no real spiritual influence over her connection with God, or whether or not a man would abuse her, as she had been taught. Her healing awareness of the connection between childhood molestation, the impact of religious teachings on her identity as a woman, and the relationship choices she made were accompanied by awareness that all of this occurred within the wider context of her family’s struggle to recover from multigenerational instances of abuse. Rori and her sisters were sexually assaulted, and Rori’s aunt (the one whose intervention led to the end of the abuse) had also been raped by someone within the family. The struggle continued into a third generation with Rori’s two sons, who were abused by their fathers. The abuse was primarily physical, but one of her sons was also incestuously molested by his birth father. During the interviews, Rori shared and reflected on her process of becoming clear about the connection between the abuse she experienced and the violence her two sons suffered:

As an adult you think that you’re past all of that. But, after I moved down here this man [Rori’s childhood abuser] showed up at my door. I came down here in [date omitted]. I had already had both of my sons. As a matter of fact, I had come down here because I found out that my husband had molested my baby. I just beat my oldest son into submission, I guess. And when I found out I was like, we got to go. We can’t stay here. Because if we stay here . . . There was so many things going on. And as a teacher I noticed it when other children were being molested. But I hadn’t noticed my own. And that bothered me. Because you know, you get so caught up in your work. And I was like, work is not that important.

When Rori found out that her son was being molested, she pieced together a network of professional women and family members who helped her get herself and her sons away to a safe place. Rori shared with me that her two grandchildren, had also been abused—physically and possibly sexually—by other family members. She was proactive in doing her part to disrupt the patterns by taking a visible and vigilant role in her grandchildren’s lives. As a family they have struggled with the impact of necessary legal interventions on behalf of the grandchildren on the one hand and the desire to keep the family together on the other.

The force of Rori’s commitment to disrupting the patterns of abuse rivaled the force of her own trauma as it re-emerged in the form of flashbacks, anxiety, and ongoing struggles with intimate connections. She developed several strategies to help her cope. Whether healthy (like singing, sewing, and breaking the silence about rape) or not (like drug and alcohol abuse), all of these strategies were directed at managing the trauma she experienced. She grounded her healing and self-recovery in the strength she gained from her faith, relationships with other women, truth-telling about sexual violence in her family and the community, and active involvement in her church’s music ministry.

Eliza

“Oh, Yeah, I’m Still Here in God’s Grace . . . God’s Grace”

When Eliza came to the table, she sat down like a woman who had looked back over her life and was now retelling it from a vantage point that spoke to the meaning she had made of her pain. When we talked one-on-one, as well as when she spoke during the group sessions, she shared how difficult some parts of this process were for her. Part of the difficulty was simply an aspect of talking about pain. Another part was that these conversations were a first for her. Up until the interviews, she had shared publicly bits and pieces of what had happened to her. But, this was the first time she had ever pulled the violent incidents in her life together to speak about them in a cohesive narrative. When it was her turn to share with the group, she waited until she had everyone’s attention at the table, and began to read the manuscript she brought with her.

How have I dealt with my hurts and my anger and my losses and my pain? I write about it, about them. Some of them I dissolve in the memory bank of my hurts. Some of them I forget for a long time in order not to allow them to continue to hurt me. My firs...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   I Can Speak (the Unspeakable) for Myself
• 2   Navigating the Hostile Terrain of Intimate and Cultural Violence
• 3   A God I Recognize
• 4   WomanistCare: Reshaping Images and Paradigms for Care
• 5   Womanist Pastoral Counseling: Clinical Considerations
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index
• Subject Index