(This article is reprinted with permission from Canticle Magazine, the Voice of Today's Catholic Woman.)
“It will lead me to you, grandmother, I know!”
“Yes. But remember, it may seem to you a very roundabout way, and you must not doubt the thread. Of one thing you may be sure, that while you hold it, I hold it too.”
When I began my journey of confronting and healing from childhood sexual abuse, I followed the thread of Christ's presence in my life. It led me not away from the pain and terror, as I had hoped, but deeper and deeper into the dark night of betrayal and fear. During this journey, there were certain songs, poems, and stories that sustained me. One was George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin. This fantasy tells the story of Irene, a girl who travels through the goblin pits to her grandmother, always holding onto the thread.
Feeling with her right hand, she found her grandmother's thread. To her surprise, and somewhat to her dismay, she found that instead of leading her towards the stair it turned in quite the opposite direction…. The thread led her straight into a hole in the mountainside. Before she had gone far she was in total darkness.
When Irene runs from the goblins that have invaded her nursery, the safe place of her childhood, she expects that the thread will lead her to her grandmother. Instead, it leads her to the mountain and down into the goblin mine. The terror that I experienced, the memories of the abuse and betrayal, followed me to class. They hovered, breathing over my shoulders when I read, and woke me up with nightmares in the middle of the night.
My spiritual director began meeting with me two and three times a week. The more I prayed about it, the worse it seemed to get, as the memories became fully revealed.
In the story, Irene came to a huge heap of stones, piled in a slope against the wall of the cavern. She climbed up, only to find that the thread vanished through the heap of stones, and left her standing on it, with her face to the solid rock. For one terrible moment she felt as if her grandmother had forsaken her. The thread had gone where she could no longer follow it, had brought her down into the goblin mines, and had left her there. She threw herself down and began to cry. Then the thought struck her that she could at least follow the thread back, and get out of the mountain, and home. But the instant she tried to feel backwards, the thread vanished.
What Irene discovers is she can't turn back — the thread won't lead her back to that old place that was once safe and isn't anymore. This was what I discovered in my own journey. I could have chosen many times to give up and turn away from where Christ was leading me. This could have taken many forms: giving in to despair, retreating into fundamentalism, denying what had happened. But any of these choices would have led me away from God. With the guidance of my spiritual director, of George MacDonald, J.R.R. Tolkien and other storytellers, the love of my community, and the light of Christ within me, I went forward.
When Irene reaches the wall of stones, she sits down and cries, convinced that her grandmother had forsaken her. This is something I can certainly relate to. My deepest fear throughout my recovery was that God would abandon me, as I felt I had been abandoned as a child. I was sure that without Christ, I would not survive. And at the same time I lived with this question: If God loved me, then why had God let me be raped?
I spent a lot of time praying after I first began to deal with my memories. I spent a long time just trying to see Christ in the room with me as I was abused, to know that I had not been abandoned during that time. After a while, I was finally able to see Christ in the room with me, the child being abused. And I expected that now that I could see Christ and know that He was with me, that He would pick me up and protect me or make the abuser go away. But what happened wasn't what I expected. What I saw was that Jesus' spirit moved within me, so that He was being abused with me. What happened to me happened to Him.
In the Gospel of Matthew, we are told that one of the names of Jesus is “Emmanuel, which means, God with us.” God was with me in a very different way than I had expected. Christ's presence was not one of power over me, but one of sharing in my suffering. This vision gave me hope. In experiencing Christ's presence with me in my suffering, I came to know that God had never abandoned me.
Christ's presence with me also gave meaning to my suffering. Not because God wanted to teach me something through my suffering, but because it helped me to understand the way God works in the world, and helped me to see how I might be part of making the love of God manifest. When Jesus encounters the blind man in John 9, His disciples ask “Who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” They want to know who to blame. This is a typical response that we have to suffering, and in particular to rape and abuse survivors: our question is “what was she doing wrong that got her raped?”
Jesus answers: “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents, but that the works of God might be made manifest through him.” Through his response, Jesus turns his disciples to a new question. Instead of focusing on who is to blame, Jesus invites them to see the love of God through His act of healing the blind man.
Jesus also calls them to be a part of this work: “We must work the works of the One who sent me.” Through my own experience of Christ's presence in my experience of abuse, I have been led to work with abused children, to try and be a part of God's healing in their lives. After hearing the stories of abused children all day, I would be tempted to despair if it were not for my faith in God's love and leading in our lives. God does not prevent suffering, but God is with us, and with God, beyond the darkness of the goblin mines, there is resurrection.
All at once Irene realized that she could remove some of the stones and see where the thread went next. She set to work, and soon, with an aching back and bleeding fingers and hands, she reached the other side.
At the very beginning of The Princess and the Goblin Irene gets lost and cries. After wandering, she finds her grandmother at the top of a hidden flight of stairs. Her grandmother is spinning the thread Irene will follow.
“Why didn't you come to me so that I could wipe your tears?” the grandmother asks. Irene answers: “I didn't know you were here. I will from now on.”
I believe that God is waiting to wipe our tears for us, and cries with us. But God is spinning threads of light for us to follow, before we know to ask.
