american thinker

by M. Walter

    When my brother died, my first reaction was: “What are we going to do with his clothes?”  I was twelve, sitting with my mother on the velvet loveseat in the room you enter only when company comes.

    She’d sat me down when I woke up that morning to tell me my nineteen-year-old brother had died overnight from the injuries he’d suffered in a one-car crash the week before. “God took Nathaniel,”* she said.

    What I felt overwhelmingly upon hearing the news was...relief. I was glad he was dead. I couldn’t tell my mother or father that. I couldn’t tell anyone that. But I was hugely relieved. Why  Because my brother had been sexually abusing me for years.

    I have vivid memories of being dragged up the stairs — him pulling me by my arms as my heels hit each stair — to his room on the Saturday nights my parents would insist he babysit for me when they went out with friends. I’ve blocked a good deal of it out, but I have flashes of memory, and they are horrible, that’s all I’ll say here because for the purposes of this piece, that’s enough.

    His death, indeed his life, severely impacted my relationship with God, and what happened to me on my way to healing has permanently ruined my relationship with the Catholic Church.

In my twelve-year-old mind, you had to love God, or why bother trying so hard to be good  And how could I love a God who had brought this much pain to my family

    This logical prison was no doubt due to my (high-functioning) autism, which, as you likely know, comes with rigid thinking. (It’s hard for us to break out of logic prisons. Or at least what seems logical to us.) And God had hurt my parents, whom I loved.

    Later, having developed some of the self-esteem that comes with maturity along with its accompanying self-awareness, I concluded that I couldn’t love a God who would let me be so hurt the way my brother had hurt me for so many years. Further, I couldn’t love a God who would leave a young girl feeling so guilty for feeling so relieved that her tormentor was dead. The whole thing was one big jumble of love and guilt and shame. So much shame.

    I’ve turned sixty recently, and my parents are now dead. You’d think, by now, I might have found my way back to God, and I have, mostly, just not to any church. I have a deep, almost visceral belief in a grand design, in a single, omnipotent force for good, father-like, which birthed the universe and all its inhabitants. It’s all just too perfect.

    The way this all knits together is just too wondrous; there’s so much beauty, so much good in the world that I find it inconceivable that there wasn’t a divine architect.

    But the Catholic Church  Especially now, given what we now know about widespread priest abuse ** How could I possibly return  It’s … illogical to me.

    But that’s just one Church. A church, any church, is a man-made construct. This has left me adrift. I recoil at the “my way or the highway” blackmail of “the only way to Heaven is through Jesus.” I don’t like the extortionist nature of that, and it keeps me out of a lot of churches. Because what about the Hindus  The Buddhists  I just can’t believe that great swaths of humanity will be denied the Glory of Eternal Life because their path to God, to our Supreme Being, wasn’t this or that particular man-made “brand.” And you’ll never convince me that churches aren’t exactly that: brands.

    And if they’re all just that, then you’ll never convince me to fear for my eternal soul just because some man says so. You can see the box, the logic prison I’m in, at least the way my mind works, the way I’ve constructed this.

    But I envy those with faith and a spiritual home to express it. If you have it, if you have a church, I envy you. I’ve been wandering in the spiritual wilderness since I was twelve, and I’d love to come “home.” I just keep hitting brick walls with “woke” or the “my way or the highway” extortion I mentioned, or some other man-made embellishment to this or that faith community that is noxious or frivolous to me.

    And while I will read the comments this piece will surely bring in, and appreciate the invitations to this church or that, please know that my trust tank is pretty low on these matters. I just wanted all of you, with an active faith and spiritual home, to know that I envy you. That not all who wander, are, as they say, lost, at least completely. Maybe they’re just like me; a believer without a brand. And maybe that’s my destiny. And if it is, I pray I’ll meet my Maker with a full and grateful heart and get to be happy in His Presence one day. Right now  It’s for others, it seems.

__________________

    *Nathaniel was not his real name.

    **Re: the priest abuse scandal: I was a minor victim. My mother had recommended I go see the family priest, who had been to our home many times for Sunday dinners, to help me with the “trouble” I was having grieving my brother (in my mother’s estimation). So I went.

    I had actually thought I might share with him what my late brother did to me. But the first time I was there, he hugged me so incredibly hard I couldn’t escape when I pulled back. This happened just a couple more times before I concluded it wasn’t just an accident, and it was becoming scary.

    Gotta love the irony, right  I think I might finally confide in a priest about abuse, and he himself is abusive. His face ended up on the cover of my local paper as one of the priests who was caught up in the scandal, due to his far more serious interactions with others, not me.

    As a final note: I have never told anyone about what happened with the priest until...just now. Just as I have never told anyone outside my husband and children what my brother did to me until...just now. It was time. Past time. And I couldn’t think of a better group of people to share with than the thoughtful readers of American Thinker.

    God bless you all.