Fierce Joy
When evil is removed, love must heal. That is its power.
This week of Epstein news makes reaching for joy feel wrong. Joy feels dismissive. Joy seems tone deaf. Joy in this moment appears to disregard a deep evil that our society has yet to reckon with.
As a person who calls herself a Christian, I get so viscerally angry when the evangelical world makes excuses for sexual predators, looking for any way to justify what happened or to water down the harm by offering excuses. I ache for the pain inflicted on women, I cry for the life change the children and teens have forced upon them—especially when their adult coping mechanism becomes defending predators, so their childhood pain is absolved. Then cycle is condoned again.
Growing up in the church my sexual purity was paramount. My clothing was monitored, my words guarded. I was vigilant to make sure that my being never tempted a man, because it was my duty as a sister in Christ to make sure men didn’t stumble sexually due to me. I was told men and women couldn’t be friends because it led to sex. This demeaned both me and the men in my world.
These past 10 years of Trump I’ve had to deconstruct what I’ve been taught about sex to match what has been unmasked in the embrace of Trump’s blatant sexual crimes, and the church’s unwavering support of the man as “divinely appointed.” Epstein is a whole other layer of disgust.
Yesterday I read a quote from Sheila Wray Gregriore, who writes extensively about how the church has missed God’s heart for a healthy sexual life. Her quote broke open the deep hurt by so many women. And, while she wasn’t connecting it to Epstein and Trump, it pointed to the hypocrisy and an egregious wound that needs deep tending, and not just in the church, but for women across the world. Writing about women raised in the church she says:
“She has spent her whole life in this culture being objectified and having sexual violence as a constant background noise. Sex has been primarily about her husband and not about her. And then she is told that God wants her to let her husband use her, so that her husband won’t sin. Now it feels as if God is objectifying her, too. It feels as if God is coercing her into sex—almost as if God is her pimp. If feels as if no one actually cares that this is her body, in fact, she’s told again and again that her body belongs to her husband.”
“God is her pimp.” That phrase stopped me in my tracks and blew open, again, the evil in allowing billionaire pedophiles to be held unaccountable. It screamed at the evil of sacrificing our girls and our women on the alter of politics. The evil that the world has always turned a blind eye to and is, once again, glossed over by many in the church. I am devastated at the disregard for women. I won’t ever let the church talk to me about a woman’s role again. They have forfeited that right and get to shut the fuck up and listen for the next millennium.
I had to find some way to hold these feelings and keep functioning as a person in society. I tried this week’s lectionary and found that it held opposing scriptures. On the one hand Jesus was talking about wars and rumors of wars, saying, “You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends.” His words have proved true over and over again throughout history. On the other hand, there is the promise from Isaiah where people are allowed to live in the house they have built, they are able eat the crops they have planted, because there is justice, these things aren’t being stolen from them any longer. Isaiah could just have easily said, “Woman will be regarded as human beings and men will no longer take what is not freely offered.”
Malachi is tucked in the middle between those passages and he reads, “See, the day is coming, burning like an oven, when all the arrogant and all evildoers will be stubble; the day that comes shall burn them up, says the LORD of hosts, so that it will leave them neither root nor branch. But for you who revere my name the sun of righteousness shall rise, with healing in its wings.”
I needed to see that evildoers have neither root nor branch. I needed to feel the promise of “righteousness shall rise with healing in its wings,” because when evil is removed, love must heal. That is its power.
We aren’t powerless against the powerful. Each of us who feels ripped open by the betrayal of those we love can still be an embassy of righteousness in this broken world. We can say, “Not on my watch.” We can say, “You are believed here.” We can say, “Domination is not an attribute of love.”
That is fierce joy. That is righteousness bringing healing in the burning field of stubble, saying this is not all there is. That is making real the promise that “they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.” Joy isn’t blind. It is an advocate for justice. It is the promise of what we are making, fuel to stand and say, “Here there is life.”
#joyasresistance