When Theology Intensifies Trauma

“IT HAPPENED ON a Sunday night, even though I’d been a good girl and gone to church that morning.” From that opening, Ruth Everhart’s Ruined begs the question: If the sovereign lord of the universe wills you to suffer unspeakable pain, what choice do you have?

Find your voice, and find a better God.

Ruined is a powerful memoir of suffering, survival, and theological imagination. In the age of Donald Trump, it is also subtle yet keen political critique. With unflinching and deeply personal honesty, Everhart takes the reader through the valley of deepest shadows with eyes wide open to the horror of a home invasion and sexual assault she and four Calvin College senior housemates survived in November 1978. The assault ruined more than the author’s sense of what it meant to be a “good girl”; it also ruined her image of God.

Her strict Calvinist upbringing in the Christian Reformed Church taught that nothing happens outside of the sovereign will of God. Yet the assurances of the catechism came up short in the face of the horror and violence Everhart and her friends experienced.

In the aftermath, as days stretched to months, she was left struggling to understand how her rape could be part of God’s will or if it was the punishment God brought upon her for the sin of being a fallen woman. When, against the odds, the rapists were eventually sentenced to lengthy prison terms, she was left wondering: If God was responsible for that “justice,” did that also mean that God was responsible for the crime in the first place?

Shaped in church and school by an ethic of sexual purity that measured a girl’s worth according to her virginity, it’s not difficult to understand how Everhart felt that God must be punishing her for a casual sexual encounter the summer before the break-in. One might expect that conclusion to spark a breakup with God altogether. Instead, Everhart took the GRE and dreamed of applying to seminary, even though the Christian Reformed Church refused to ordain women.

One might also expect such trauma to result in challenging relationships, and it did. Everhart puts it like this: “And after that I felt rotten about myself, and I had an affair with a married man. He was older, a seminarian, and I fell in love with him. I shouldn’t have done it, but I did.”

While the affair may not have been wise, its brief path and ultimate ending helped liberate Everhart from the theology of her childhood.

Theological liberation is not the same as theological reconstruction, and as a young woman starting over in her adopted hometown of Minneapolis, Everhart began the long search for a God worthy of her struggle and suffering. She found the map for that journey only a few steps removed from her Reformed Church heritage in a Presbyterian congregation in St. Paul. She knew she had come home when, on the first Sunday that she and her fiancé visited, the congregation was casting a vote to hire a woman as interim pastor.

From that community, Everhart ultimately lived into the calling she had first discerned as a young woman, and through its nurture, eventual seminary studies, and the unfolding journey of marriage and motherhood, Everhart came to understand the deep connection between love and suffering in the Incarnation.

Ruined , ultimately, expresses the deep wisdom of a survivor. From wisdom grows compelling conviction, which Everhart articulates in a coda addressed to her young adult daughters:

“Daughters, don’t believe the lies! You are more than your virginity. You are more than your sexual history. You are more than what happens to you. You are immensely valuable. No wound can ever make you less than whole. Wounds become scars, and scars make a person beautiful. In fact, nothing is more washable than human skin. It is the most washable substance on earth. Thank God.”