Bridging The Distance

I must begin with a confession—one that perhaps many of us could make. We want so much for the world—and ourselves—to be different, that we try to arrive at change without walking the path of solidarity and suffering that it takes to get there. We are sometimes able to break through and touch the pain of others, but that touch seems easier if their pain does not relate to our own—if we can keep our distance.

Middle-class white women face the temptation to see the economic and educational advantages into which we have been born as tools for success in a male-defined world. We are uncomfortable with the weakness and marginality that mark the history of women as well as the lives of many of the women we have known. We can become determined to distance ourselves from their powerlessness, to cultivate gifts for success, to prove ourselves different.

Such was part of my journey. I had developed sympathy—but not empathy—for the victims of an oppression that is both very subtle and often cruelly blatant.

Putting together this issue on violence against women has been personally healing for me and all of us at Sojourners. It began for me many months ago at 11 o'clock on a Saturday evening when I picked up a book titled I Never Told Anyone. The book is a collection of writings by women survivors of child sexual abuse.

The book offers page after page of recounting and reflection on the vulnerability of young girls and the violence that is forced on them—from infants to teenagers, from uncomfortable touches to acts of brutal sexual torture.

I could not stop reading until I finished it. And then I could not sleep. I needed to take time to feel the pain and anger, to grieve and pray and weep.

I began to experience waves of pain that matched the descriptions I have heard from mothers of the early stages of giving birth. In the few hours that were left of the night, I drifted in and out of sleep, experiencing an intensity in the pain. Through the night I felt at times utterly alone, abandoned to the pain and confusion about what was happening to me. At other times I felt the presence of death in the room.

But toward morning I felt a profound sense of the presence of Christ—Christ beside me and within me. I was awakened at 8 a.m. by a phone call from a close friend and member of our community with the news that she had suffered a miscarriage through the night.

It is not easy to write about the profound nature of the bonds that can grow between us through Christ. It is harder still to write of those rare and extraordinary moments when the divine intrudes into the mundane realm of our lives; those moments when a touch of God is so profound that we begin to glimpse the possibilities, to see ourselves healed and whole. Such moments change the way we look at ourselves, at others, at the world, and even at God. We know ourselves loved and held by a God who is both far-off mystery and intimate companion.

It is difficult to write of such things because we are not often comfortable with what we might call mystical experience. But we must begin to get comfortable with one another and our experiences of God, to discover the truth that lies in such experiences.

This touch of God unlocked something in me and began a process of healing. Something died in me that night: my alienation from other women, my pride, the distance and barriers I have built to insulate me from their suffering. And from the death are emerging new possibilities, new hope: new life.

Jesus was present in the dying that night. It was the Christ in me that took on the pain of another, and the Christ in all of us that invites us into the suffering of one another, to commune there together and share our dying and our hope. That night I was invited to share in the suffering of women. And in the suffering is redemption—new life growing out of death.

Jesus was present in the grief of a mother over the loss of a baby not yet known. And Jesus is present in the suffering of all women—the fearful, the unsure, and the exploited; the raped and the battered. These sufferings and humiliations were carried to the cross and borne in the shame of Calvary by a bruised and battered Christ. And they have been redeemed by his love. Until we all know that in our souls, women will remain on the margins of society and the church.

Our intention with this issue of Sojourners has been not simply to recount the statistics of violence against women—as alarming as they are—but also to share the stories, the personal anguish. The issue presents the roots and realities of sexual violence, but also the healing and hope that women victims are discovering.

Too often women have been told to bear their bruises alone. This issue of Sojourners is an invitation for us as individuals and communities of faith to understand the pain of the victims, to be places of support and hope for women. It is an invitation for men to hear the cries and learn, and for women to embrace freely all of womanhood—both the vulnerability and the strength.

It is most of all an invitation to build bonds out of our woundedness. With our own bruised hands, we can anoint the wounds and scars of others with the ointment of healing. We can begin to see that all suffering is of one piece, that the sin of sexual violence is a sin that we have too easily accepted; that the suffering of the victims is our suffering. Then we can begin to realize that violence against women is a reality from which we cannot afford to keep our distance.

Joyce Hollyday was an associate editor of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.