Wait Quietly: A god Culture of Complicity and Communal Silence

*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 the 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 and those who created him to minimize me.

At Six. SIX. 6. I was disoriented in the physicality of my being, and everyone I knew was complicit in my suffering. If someone had asked me then, I would not have had the language to express the deep sense of betrayal my mind and body were being forced to hold. I was confused - not like, “What shirt should I wear to school tomorrow?" confused, but "Why the fuck do I exist?" confused. Why had I been summoned to this tacky dimension of shadows and suffering? Why had the matter of my flesh formed in my mother's womb to hold the weight of their sexual violence and god’s passivity?

MUTED on a molecular level.

Today I can speak, write, and express this pain and confusion without hurting. I have been diligent in developing language and some measure of freedom to address the diabolical narrative that colored and indicted god and left me alone in a world with no access to his promises. The mind of a child whose imagination is already intrinsically generative should never pivot on abuse or god’s indifference. The untethered, joyful curiosity that a child should have when looking into their own eyes should never reflect the violent glare of their perpetrator or the cast-down gaze of an impotent god. This root of cosmic neglect - existential, ontological - became the center of the victimization that allowed my abuse to ricochet quietly in my body, between their instructions, the darkness of my bedroom, and the soft light in the elder’s office. If god had sided with my abuser within the four walls of the church, then surely I was not loved.

On that random afternoon, with a wink, every fiber of my being had been reduced to nothingness before man and god. I had been abandoned to hold this, their violence, alone - to process it, alone. In the darkness of my bedroom, pillow in hand, I had cried bitter tears to god and pleaded with his blue-eyed son to deliver me as he had delivered others, but there would be no deliverance for me. How could the church elders ignore my mother’s testimony, her deflated posture, the bruises on her beautiful skin? I heard her soft tone, the accusations of infidelity, sexual and domestic violence. I was angry with her. Why wasn’t her tone equivalent to the violence we were enduring? I heard her quietly pleading, sobbing, and I watched her attempt to wipe those tears away with dignity as my stepfather walked into the office and she walked out – head bowed.

I distinctly remember how brief his time in the elder’s office was, and how confidently he had walked in and walked out. Untroubled. The dust on his boots – undisturbed.

My pillow, as present, pink, and precious as she was, had no answers. I remember weeping into her folds, asking this god why he did not, could not see me or protect me? Why did he leave me alone to wait quietly in the corners of darkened rooms, holding the clammy, soiled hand of my abuser? Why wasn’t he there in the dark as I waited quietly? Why was I born to be unseen, ugly, unprotected? I was taught that our groanings, our private lamentations, would pierce the heart of god and turn his heart towards the oppressed, but he never opened my bedroom door. I then assumed that the promises of god were in the hallway.

god left me alone with my stuffed animal and a pillow, and so had the church.

How was he, the predator, allowed to walk stridently into the church? To exude authority, not only over his victims, but the elders? My stepfather walked out, but my other perpetrator was sitting next to me. I felt sick and afraid. I did not want to go home. We weren’t just being sexually abused; this man would throw us across rooms and bust our flesh open with a two-inch cubed stick as my mother sat in the hallway with a first aid kit as her children wailed. He eventually broke that stick against my body when I was eight. EIGHT. 8.

There was a despair that settled into the sinews of my heart that day. Why did the promises of god not apply to me?

My mother, realizing what she had done, walked us out quietly to her green, wood-paneled station wagon and rolled down the windows. I was sweating, looking out the window with a sense of despair that a child should not know. We rode home in complete silence – each of us being forced to acknowledge that god saw what we were enduring and had surrendered his power to a violent pedophile and three white men sitting behind a table who told us to go home and just be better. I didn’t understand why the promises of god’s protection and provision did not belong to me. What had I done to god?