"Complicit in Abuse"
Katie Sherrod
The thing that has helped me most in understanding what is happening in the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion is writing about domestic violence as a reporter since the early 1970s.
In those days, police referred to its victims as “battered women.” Most district attorneys’ offices would prosecute the batterer only if the wife agreed to divorce him.
That is, if the police even bothered to arrest him. Usually one officer would walk the man around the block to “cool him off” while the other office stayed with the woman to find out what she did “to set him off” and to urge her not to do that again.
After all, if she’d just “act right,” everything would be OK.
Any of this sound familiar?
Read it all at WILDERNESS GARDEN
If that link isn't 'hot' try: http://wildernessgarden.blogspot.com/
(Which, IMHO, is even more brilliant than her brilliant essay on the summary of events in the Episcopal Church and Anglican Communion: "ALL WILL BE WELL" - which immediately follows "Complicit in Abuse" on this same Blog.)
As you may know, October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month. I am continually stunned by the paucity of information many of us in Christian community - a shocking number of whom are clergy - have about the issue of Domestic Violence.
Indeed, many clergy are unable to "make the translation" much less the connection, as Katie Sherrod does here, between what happens in "the privacy of one's home" and the institutional church. Thus, they inadvertently perpetuate the domestic violence which happens on a institutional level in the "Household of God."
This is a great time to read PROVERBS OF ASHES: VIOLENCE, REDEMPTIVE SUFFERING, AND THE SEARCH FOR WHAT SAVES US.
Authors Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Ann Parker take on the Atonement in provocative mix of passion, intelligence and memoir/story-telling which is the signature of feminist liberation and process theology.
By the way, when you visit the website for the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence
click on the image you see above - the beautiful angel hidden in the butterfly wings, and help support the NCADV. Thanks.
Thank you for this post. I am three weeks into my DV event and am struggling between my Christian sisters' advice to reconcile and help him through the work, or cutting my losses whle I can and perhaps having a greater chance of staying alive and happy. I know it's early, and I believe in prayer as well as my sage friends who have left and lived. Just wanting to say thanks for this blog and your work.
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