Wait Quietly 4: From Unseen to Unprotected

I, Yevette, use god language to reflect on my lived experience as a child victim of sexual and domestic abuse who grew up in the church - unseen and unprotected by an omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent god. I deliberately use masculine pronouns, he/him, in my writings so that I can stay in the tension of interrogating this man-god.

Consider the fullness of your story; don’t minimize any moment, don’t shorten any timelines, or acquit anyone, not even god. Hold every brutal moment with an honest, unwavering glare, and then sing a song of worship, quote a psalm, or recite a prayer of god’s promises of presence and protection for the most vulnerable among us. How does it feel up against the reality of your trauma and god’s inability to deliver? Why were the three of us waiting quietly, in the dark?

As a child victim of sexual violence, domestic abuse, and religious indifference, I didn’t know how to look up and outside of myself with any sense of an enduring hope or an unhindered joy. Fairy tales and Sunday School lessons mocked my reality and rang hollow in my imagination, even as I rode with Cinderella to the ball, wishing some mice and birds would make me an unsoiled gown. Where does a child anchor their hope when the villain wins in real time? How does a child curate a healthy identity in a world in which they are unseen and unprotected?

I was told to worship this god and be grateful. To forget, forgive, and humbly eat his son’s broken body when he had never attended to my broken body. Even the sacrifice for my sins came after a female minor gave consent for god’s holy spirit to hover and impregnate her – nonconsensual surrender mined through the indoctrination of religion. 

I was a child toiling with the adult passions of men that I could not begin to comprehend, but my body was being forced to embody them. I didn’t know how to argue with this god, his sons, or his holy minions who had been ordained by their dicks, familial legacies, reckless theologies, and antiquated traditions. Men who were cloaked in white robes that absorbed the DNA of their secret perversions, while they used their sweaty palms to acquit the guilty and silence the innocent with divine authority. Before I could reason for myself, my tender body was bent, while others screamed at me about my need for this god and his need for my adoration and gratitude. In the middle of the night, while changing a soiled nightgown my mother had made just for me, I was trying to find ways to raise my tiny hands and confess MY sins to god.

As I aged and my childhood trauma manifested into adult problems, I was so lost and indoctrinated that I didn’t know how to question the meta-narrative about this god. How had I gone from child victim to unseen, unprotected, to indebted on some cosmic type-shit? Without any divine explanation or intervention, I was forced to worship a god who never fulfilled his promises. I was indicted. I was indebted. I accepted the blame. My heavenly father had accused me and left me liable – powerless against a text and the men who would define it. The abuse didn’t stop, and in time, my abusers left the courtroom, while my community picked up large stones to condemn me to death.

This god was complicit in my suffering, and as long as I breathe, he will forever be indicted. It has taken many years to cultivate this courage, but today I rage against this god. 

The deepening sense of my unworthiness settled into the marrow of my bones, into the sinews of my pre-pubescent heart. I despised the physicality of my being – why were they harming ME? What had I done for them to desire me, molest me, and then beat me? Believing that one is unworthy of love is the root of all victimization; it is the root of one’s vulnerability on a cosmic level. If I, at SIX, 6, six, believed I was unworthy of god’s love, my creator’s love, attention, and protection, what could I expect of others? There was no expectation. Abuse and violence were my expectations. How could I have had any healthy expectations of parental love, familial love, divine love? I had no reference for either. With no expectation of a healthy love, we create the perfect child victim who waits quietly to be delivered.

By the time I was an adolescent, I had wholeheartedly accepted the blame. At 10, my body blossoming prematurely, I had wept at many altars confessing to feelings and sins that were not mine to confess. I had stood before god in the flesh of Eve, foolishly taking the mythological legacy of her liabilities as my own, while Adam walked away - acquitted. Even though my body was being beaten and molested, I had somehow tucked away my own victimization. god had ordained things to be this way. In my body, spirit, and psyche, I switched places with my perpetrators; god and society had told me I was to blame when they knew the truth. This cosmic parental wound and the internalization of blame for my victimization would lead me to a life of addiction, crime, and sex work.

As a child, I felt sadness and shame before god as I held the hand of my perpetrator in the darkened corner of my bedroom. How crushing is that realization? I didn’t cry out because I didn’t believe god would hear me. How many child victims of sexual violence and domestic abuse remain silent for this reason? By the time I was an adult, I was full of nothing but self-hatred, addiction, and divine and communal shame, and so I kept worshipping an impotent god, trusting hateful, rigid, and righteous communities to love and restore me while I continued to hold the hands of violent men.

This all-powerful god, who parted seas and systematically murdered the enemies of his chosen sons and his chosen people, could not rescue or empower me, the most vulnerable being raped under his constant gaze. No, within my victimization, I was told to hold, as an honorable woman, the residual waves of sexual abuse that ricocheted within all my fuckin’ bodies: physical, emotional, psychological, spiritual. This is an impotent god in the sight and soul of the child victim of sexual and domestic abuse. Who do they tell? Who can a child trust when not even god has actively listened and responded?