Rehteah Parsons and Rape Culture

I’ve been reading about Rehteah Parsons the last couple of days.  I saw a quote somewhere that called it “Halifax’s own Steubenville.”  And I just have to wonder . . . how many times is this going to happen?  How many times before we stop talking about it and do something?

When did rape become funny?  When did forcing someone who can’t or won’t consent to have sex become a prank?  When did it become acceptable to spread pictures of it around?  This isn’t saran-wrapping someone’s car or filling it with foam peanuts.  This is someone’s life.

The script in the media after the Steubenville trial read, “She may have suffered for one night, but this will end these boys’ entire lives.”  Rape is not something that lasts one night or a couple of days while you heal up or even a few weeks.  Rape affects its survivors for the rest of their lives.  On top of the initial, physical trauma, rape survivors suffer emotional trauma that leads to PTSD, sleep disturbances, and relationship problems for years.  Rape survivors often have huge medical bills to pay from ER visits, follow-ups, and ongoing testing to make sure that they didn’t catch anything from the rapist.  HIV testing continues for a year after a potential exposure, so the survivor is subjected to the emotionally draining process of getting tested multiple times over the course of a year, each time dreading and worrying about the results.  Young rape survivors may have to drop out of school because of the complications they experience after being raped.

We have to change our understanding of what rape is.  Rape is a serious crime that has long-lasting physical, emotional and financial effects on its survivors.  Rape is generally not perpetrated by strangers or by poor men of color.  Rape is not perpetrated by the monster in the closet or by Hannibal Lector.  Rape is most often perpetrated by someone the victim knows.  Rape is not something that anyone asks for.  There is no continuum of “legitimacy” for rape.

We know these things.  But the media still portrays rape as a crime committed by strangers, usually poor men of color.  We still talk about women who are “asking for it” by being out late, dressing a certain way, or drinking too much.  We still tell our daughters to be careful about a million tiny things.  We still slut-shame and laugh at jokes that demean or dehumanize.  We still refuse to talk to our kids about sex in meaningful, healthy ways.  We still talk about women as if they are property, often public property.  We still insist that a woman’s rightful place is under a man.  (And yes, I meant that in all of its potentially disturbing double-entendre.)  We still refuse to think about the culture that our words and actions create, a culture in which rape is apparently the equivalent of an April Fool’s joke.

We can do better than this.  We have to do better than this.

One Step Forward . . .

I’ve put this off as long as humanly possible, and it’s still really scary to think about, but . . .

I think it’s time to go back to therapy.

I don’t want to.  It feels like defeat.  I want to be in a place where I can handle things on my own.  But I have to admit to myself that the tell-tale signs are there, and I need some help dealing with some of the questions I’m asking myself right now.

I’m not sleeping well.  I’ve been getting about five hours a night, but last night I had one of those restless, insomniac nights reminiscent of the period right before everything went to hell in a hand basket in college.  I eventually got up, read some fluff fiction and had a glass of wine to help me relax, but that’s not exactly a reasonable long term strategy.  I’m in graduate school.  I’m busy, and my schedule is only going to get stretched thinner as the semester winds down.  I need to be able to sleep!

Additionally, I’m getting that itchy, strained feeling that I associate with the impulse to self-injure.  I struggled with self-injury off and on throughout college, but I’ve been completely free of both the habit and the impulse for almost two years.  The last couple of weeks, however, I find myself wishing that I hadn’t thrown away that box of razor blades when I moved.  This tells me that something is wrong.

I know what the issues I need to work out are.  I know why they are problematic, and I know that I’m probably not going to be able to work them out gracefully on my own.  I know where the counseling center on campus is and how to go about procuring an appointment.

I just have to pick up the phone.

Asking for help is hard.  I’m not good at it.  Asking for help requires vulnerability, and I tend to envision myself as a strong, self-sufficient woman.  I don’t need a man . . . nor anybody else.  I can do this on my own, thank you very much.

But lately, I’ve been increasingly aware of how important community is.  I want to be in relationship with others.  I want to have friendships and mentorships and people I can trust and rely on.  I want to be part of a church family that knows me and loves me, warts and all, and will support me and help me and challenge me and cheer me on.  I want to be able to give back to that community in some way, to be a valued and valuable member.

I’ve been in a lot of bad relationships, both inside and outside the church, and I know that going back to therapy is part of fixing that.  I need to learn to be comfortable with myself, to relate to myself well, in order to really be comfortable in relationship with others.

So this week, I’m making the call.

God Who is Unexpected

It’s a week after Easter, and I haven’t posted since before Palm Sunday.

Mea culpa.

I chose not to give anything up for Lent this year, but focused instead on adding things to my life.  I started attending church (somewhat) regularly again.  I tried to be more faithful about prayer.  Somewhere along the line, I developed a weekly habit of sitting on my tiny balcony with a cup of tea or a glass of wine, a lit candle, and a journal, just to see if God has anything to share.

I’m finding that God is not what I expect.

I grew up in church.  I should know how this goes by now.  God is a well-educated white man with a temper, right?  Except that every time I go sit on my balcony, I realize something else that doesn’t quite fit.  One week, I wrote a journal entry about what it would be like to see God as Mother and wept the whole way through.  Another week, I pondered the beatitudes and wondered what it meant that all of these blessings were for those who had lost or were lacking.  The God I’ve always looked for is not the one I’m finding, and it’s strangely comforting.

This pattern is pretty obvious in the Bible.  We expect God to want a fancy house.  He prefers to live in a tent.  We expect God to appear in wind and earthquake and fire.  He shows up as a still, small voice.  We expect God to be born as a king.  He comes as the bastard son of a carpenter.  We expect to find God hanging out with the “holy” people of the day.  He parties with corrupt businessmen and hookers.  We expect that God loves the rich best because he has blessed them the most.  Instead, we find that it is almost impossible for a rich man to enter God’s kingdom.

In some ways, this is not the God I want to know.  I want God to be something that I can understand.  I want to be able to quantify what he expects of me, to make a list of rules I must follow and codes to which I must adhere.  Instead, I find a God who is smudged and fuzzy, who is so massive that he stretches away from one thing only to come back and encompass it.

As a high school senior, I took calculus.  I remember drawing a graph, its first and second derivatives, and its integral on top of each other and trying to see all of the relationships at once.  It was this big, complicated idea that I could understand in pieces but that I wanted to understand as a whole.  It felt like too much to wrap my head around sometimes, but in the moments when I could, it was absolutely gorgeous.

God is like that.  I can’t actually understand God.  I can only pick apart the facets and hold them up against each other and wonder what it all looks like together.  But in the moments when I glimpse something larger, it’s absolutely gorgeous.

God Who is Still

These days, I am learning to live with I-don’t-know.

I don’t know where I am going to work this summer.  I don’t know who is going to chair my thesis committee.  I don’t know what I want to do after graduation, much less where I will be in five years.

I don’t know if I will ever get married.  I don’t know if I will have children.  I don’t know if I will live in this city or this region or this country long-term.

I don’t know who I am as a Christian.  I don’t know if I am “progressive.”  I don’t know if I can continue to pretend to be “conservative.”  I don’t know if I am a Methodist or a Pentecostal or a Doubting Thomas.

I don’t know what I think about abortion or war or guns.  I don’t know how to talk to my old friends about sexual identity in the context of faith, and I don’t know how to talk to my new friends about my honest doubts about same-sex relationships in the context of scripture.

I don’t know if I will ever be able to tell my mother any of this.

My life feels so chaotic most days.  I stumble through a never-ending whirl of classes and meetings and phone calls and projects and jobs, and I never quite feel like I catch my breath or find my balance.  I’m not sure if the grace of God is keeping it all from crashing down around my ears or if the chaos has simply become a self-sustaining system.

Sometimes, all of these doubts and worries and obligations get so loud inside my head that I can barely think.  The words on the pages in front of me blur together, and all I can think about is how much there is to do and how little time there is in which to do it.  I can’t think, but I can’t do anything but think.  It’s paralyzing.

In these moments when my world threatens to crush me, when chaos threatens to consume me, I find an anchor in the ancient words of long beloved prayers.  Today, it was Saint Francis of Assisi’s prayer for peace, which begins the midday prayers in Common Prayer:

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.  

Something about the ritual of this kind of prayer is incredibly soothing to me.  It is steady and stable in a world that threatens to overturn.  It settles me.  It orients me to a fixed point.  It reminds me that there is something larger than me, something that touches every nook and cranny of the universe, something that I can weave my life into and hold fast to when everything else is chaos and disorder.

Growing up in the Pentecostal tradition, God was noisy.  God was weeping and wailing and shouting and groaning and jumping and dancing and screaming and yelling and clapping.  God was busy.  He was healing and preaching and prophesying and working and serving and teaching and doing.  God was not particularly still.  He was not silent.

I am learning to find the God of ancient cathedrals, the God who is deep like tree roots and mountains.  I am learning to find the God who is quiet and still and solid.

When I was a little girl, there was a tree at the edge of the playground where I went to school.  It was ancient and massive to my child’s eyes, and I played beneath it every day, its gnarled, exposed roots forming the outline of imaginary houses or secret tunnels or ancient kingdoms.  It was home base in every game of tag and the safe place where I waited for my father to pick me up.  When he was so late that I feared he had forgotten me forever, I would imagine climbing into the tree and sleeping there, how safe and hidden I would be in its branches.  That tree was my protector, provider, and friend.

Lately, I am learning to love God as I loved that tree.  I am learning to appreciate the constant divine presence in my life.  I am learning to understand that it will always be there, solid and reassuring, no matter how fast or far I think I have run.  I am learning to trust God to provide for me, to keep me safe, to give me room to dream.  I am learning to love a God who is strong and quiet and allows me to be who I am.

Come to the Table

I visited a new church on Sunday.  It was different.  I found it through the blog of a lesbian Christian who attends there with her partner and their children.  The service was liturgical without being high church.  The atmosphere was warm, with lots of talk about belonging and welcome and openness.  The pastor is a woman.

Completely by accident and despite being twenty minutes late, I ended up sitting two seats away from the blogger who helped me find the church.  I had intended to introduce myself, but found that I had seriously underestimated the stalkerishness of the scenario.  In fact, I ended up not introducing myself to anyone because I communion completely overwhelmed me.

I have never received the elements from two women before.  In my entire 13 years of taking communion, there has always been at least one man involved.  Usually, that man was the one in charge, and the woman was assisting him in some way.

I have never taken communion in a church that affirms homosexuality.

I have never taken communion in such an ethnically diverse group.

I have never taken communion in a church so theologically different from the one in which I grew up.

Halfway up the aisle, I can hear my father thundering on about profaning the elements, and I am suddenly terrified that this is some kind of step away.  Away from the safety of confidence, however ill-founded.  Away from the certainty of sameness.  Away from the kind of grace and love I have always known.

I cannot imagine what my face must have looked like as I held out my hands to receive the bread.  The pastor looked concerned.

I don’t actually remember walking back up the aisle.

I sat down, still chewing my juice-soaked bread, and I realized that this might be the first time in my life I’ve really taken communion.

The table we celebrate is not about exclusivity.  It is not about inviting those we who make us most comfortable or about eating with those who agree with us.  The table we celebrate is for sinners, redeemed and still working out their salvation.  It is for the lost and the broken and the forgotten.  It is for black and white and ever color in between.  It is for men and women and those who don’t quite fit within that binary.  It is for homosexuals and heterosexuals and bisexuals and asexuals and those who don’t quite know what they want.  The table is for everyone.  The grace and love and belonging are for everyone.  No one is excluded.  No one is turned away.

The realization that these people might accept me, in all of my damaged, skeptical, messiness, was overwhelming.  I wept.  The sweet woman next to me slipped out into the foyer and brought back some tissue.  She hugged me after the benediction and said, “You got real with that.”

This is what church is supposed to be.  It’s supposed to be safe.  It’s supposed to be real.

Empower Women in Africa

I had my first period when I was eleven years old.  I was at school.  The secretary allowed me to call my mother, who came and picked me up, took me home to change clothes, and took me back to school.  Since that day, I have occasionally missed class because I wasn’t feeling well during my period, but by and large, I am able get up and do what has to be done, regardless of the time of month.

This is not the case in much of the world.

In low-resource countries, onset of menstruation is associated with a number of negative outcomes for girls.  They are often unable to attend school during their periods, so drop-out rates for adolescent girls are significantly higher than for adolescent boys.  This, in turn, affects their ability to earn income and contribute to the community in the long term.  Even if they do continue to attend, they are often distracted and unable to focus, leading them to perform more poorly than their male counterparts.  Additionally, these girls are at increased risk for reproductive tract infections.

There are two reasons for these negative outcomes.  First, in many countries, menstruation carries a high level of stigma.  Women are considered unclean, contaminating, and dangerous during their periods.  Traditionally, women in many of these societies were isolated during menstruation.  While that practice is changing, the attitudes behind it are slower to die off, leaving women feeling uncertain and insecure about inhabiting public spaces during their periods.  Additionally, because there is so much stigma and shame about this topic, girls often do not have correct information about what is happening to their bodies, leading to fear and confusion.  Second, girls in low-resource settings are often unable to afford disposable pads or other sanitary means of dealing with their periods.  This leads to a number of improvised methods (scraps of cloth, mud, tree bark, toilet paper) that many not be sanitary enough to avoid infection and may not be effective enough to prevent embarrassing stains.

There are a number of incredible groups working to change this in sustainable ways.  One group that I have been privileged to work with as a student is Empower Women in Africa.  EWA works to works to provide educational and economic opportunities to women in Namibia by providing reusable cloth pads to school-aged girls and by helping local women start businesses to produce these pads for their communities.

In honor of International Women’s Day (which was March 8, so I’m a little late), I would like to invite my readers to partner with me in supporting this incredible organization.  There are three ways you can contribute to EWA.  1)  You can make a monetary donation.  2)  You can host a pad-sewing party.  3)  You can give them a signal-boost by telling your friends and family about this issue or posting about their website on social media sites.

Thanks to those of you who are reading!  If you’d like more information about this issue and the ways it is being addressed, click on the links below:

Empower Women in Africa

Days for Girls

Afripads

Menstrual Hygiene:  A Neglected Condition for the Achievement of Several Millennium Development Goals

Practicing the Sacred

Growing up in an Evangelical, Pentecostal tradition, I was fairly focused on what people believed about God.  How they lived their lives was important, of course, but someone who did good things wasn’t necessarily a good Christian, and even a Christian who did good things but didn’t believe everything he or she was supposed to was suspect.  After all, belief is what saves us, right?  “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” (Acts 16:31)

As I’ve gotten older, orthodoxy, or correctness of belief, has become less important to me.  I still believe that there are some sacred, inviolable truths, but they are fewer than they once were.  Additionally, I’m increasingly willing to accept that it’s possible to believe something that I don’t, or not believe something that I do (even if that something is really important to one or both of us), and still have a legitimate Christian experience.

The idea of “orthopraxy” (correctness of action, often standing in opposition to orthodoxy as centrally important) was first introduced to me in my Intro to Hinduism class in college.  As I have discussed previously, these classes were extremely challenging to my understanding of what it means to be a person of faith, who God is, and how humans interact with and make sense of the divine.  While the Hinduism class was important to me in a number of ways, one of these was that it got me interested in Christian liturgy.

That’s right.  Studying Hinduism got me interested in Christian liturgy.

I grew up in a tradition without a liturgy.  In fact, I grew up in a tradition where it liturgy was associated with spiritual dryness or death.  But Hindu religious expression seemed to have room for both the ecstatic experiences of Pentecostalism and the highly structured beauty of liturgical traditions.  There was room for intensity and emotional buy-in and spontaneity, but also for tradition and ritual and candles and bells and ancient prayers.  The practice of puja (daily devotions, includes things like prayer, candle-lighting, bell-ringing, sacrificial offerings of spices or milk, and incense burning) seemed sacred in a way that sitting down with my Bible and journal never did.

It was after that course that I bought a copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer and began reading the evening prayers each day.  I’ve since branched out into other forms of this practice, and I recently started attending a very traditional Methodist church.  Embracing liturgy has helped me understand my faith in a completely different light.

Connecting with a liturgical tradition has helped me learn that sometimes “walking by faith” means going through the motions.  Sometimes, it means honoring God in ways that aren’t comfortable.  It means offering a sacrifice of obedience, of daily ritual, even on days when there’s no spark.  It’s a kind of faith grounded in something other than emotional experience and rooted in millennia of brothers and sisters speaking the same words and doing the same actions, day in and day out.