De(con)struction

Have you ever wondered what happens behind the walls of a sanctuary once the church service ends? The pastor shakes the last congregants’ hands and turns back to the little hexagonal room that holds all the holy garments. The room behind the pulpit full wine and bread. Altar candles. The Ten Commandments hung on the wall. The stench of things that have been taken from children always lingering.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t feel guilty about myself. I can’t remember a time I didn’t know in my bones that God knew what a disgusting creature I was and that he hated me for it. How much saving I needed. How all my Original Sin covered me and dripped down my face and clothes like black swamp mud full of decay. They started us early; four times a week behind stained glass since I was too young to read or write. By the time we came into our own, we were so well groomed we were nothing of ourselves.

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Once, in the children's room during service, I looked in the mirror over the counter as I reached for Cheerios in the upper cabinets. I wondered out loud, why, if we aren’t of the body, do we look in the mirror so often. The wife of an elder was in the room. She set the baby she was holding down and walked over to me, using one hand on each of my shoulders to reposition me to face the mirror. And she said,

So you never forget that He is always watching.

I didn’t find out for another decade that she wasn’t just talking about God; she was talking about men. I was seven years old.

---------------------------------------------------------Once, as I read through 1 John, crying over my punishment for questioning why women aren't elders - an essay on the virtue of blind obedience - an elder came in, sat down beside me, and called me by a familiar name. He was the only adult who had ever shown me kindness. My parents already knew I had unnatural feelings. Thoughts were crimes all their own, let alone my incessant questions. The teachers, the elders, Pastor - I wasn’t scorned, but I was treated as a scourge.

The elder put his arm around my shoulder, told me to stop writing, and used his other hand to cup my cheek and pull my face up to meet his eyes. And he said,

You’re not lost for hope; God loves you, and he wants me to show you that.

I didn’t understand what it meant when he pulled me into his lap and breathed in the smell of my hair, or when he kissed me on my neck in the dark of the room off the side of the overflow. I was eight years old. And it wasn’t just once.

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Once, as I was scrubbing the linoleum tile floor of the gathering room as penance for another slight, one of the elder’s wives came storming in. Alarmed, I stood up, but in a moment I was back on the ground, backhanded so hard I tasted blood before I had a chance to take a breath. I didn’t ask a question or even look up, but just put a hand to my face and apologized profusely for whatever it was. The fact that I didn’t know made her even angrier, and she said -

Not only are you a disruption and an aberration, you are a whore. You will never reach salvation.

I didn’t realize at the time that her son had asked her about sex, and when she asked him how he had learned about such dangerous things, he pointed the finger at me. Everyone knew I was an easy scapegoat; marked. I was nine years old.

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Once, as I studied my confirmation workbook, preparing for the service that would seal me to this old stone building and its old stone god forever, a boy from the youth group walked in. He looked at me and said nothing, but sat down across the wooden folding table from me and stared at me intently, as if willing me to look up. When I did, he smiled and said,

I heard my father tell Pastor that you need the Holy Spirit. Pastor helped me once before; I’ll help you now.

And he showed me the type of kindness that the elder had began to show me two years before.

I didn’t know for many years after that he really was trying to help me - that I was not the only soul the men of the church were stealing pieces from. I was ten years old.

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Once, a new family came into our church. They had a son who would soon graduate and go on Mission. He asked me why I seemed so quiet and sad. I told him I wasn’t here to perform for anyone but the Lord, and that He only cherished women who knew how to quietly serve Men of God. I expressed my desire to be an example of purity and devotion; poisonous, soapy words that were shoved into my mouth every day since I could remember. And he said,

I wish for you such devotion and a joyful heart that rests in the shadow of the Lord.

I didn’t see this coming. And I felt like a fraud but I also felt the hope of connection. I was eleven years old.

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He treated me the way someone would treat a small, injured bird. The way a cat gently plays with a mouse to make the game last as long as possible. The things he said to me didn’t have different meanings from the others, but they sounded different. Gentle. Luring. So when he slid his hand up my skirt and then down through the elastic waist of my stockings, it didn’t have different meaning from the others, but it felt like it did.

His hands, his mouth, and the way he looked at me - in my short life no one had ever expressed just... wanting me. When he told me not to tell anyone about us, I obeyed. When he led me into the coat closet on the balcony level and told me to undress amongst the must of forgotten garments, I obeyed. When he forced himself into my mouth until I threw up, he told me I was a good girl. And I thanked him. No one had ever said that to me before.

When he left for Mission a few months later, I felt like a hole had been ripped in my heart. And I felt more unsafe than I ever had before. I was twelve.

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A season had passed when Pastor called me to his office. He told me the women had alerted him my attitude had been poor with no signs of improving. This, despite all my time in church, all my time communing with God. He looked down at me the way everyone did, but a little more fatherly, as if I were a disappointment he had affection for. And he said,

We need to do serious work. God’s work. I want you to come to my office each Tuesday and Thursday after the homily. We have to start right away if we want to save your soul.

I looked down, wishing I could sink into myself and away from this place. Still, even as I heard him begin to remove his belt, I thanked him for taking interest in my salvation. Even as he turned me around and pressed my face into his mahogany desk, I wondered if this might really be the answer to how troubled I was. And as he used me, still with his hand pressing the side of my face into the cold wood, he said, panting rhythmically -

Can you feel the Holy Spirit moving through you?

I didn’t quite understand what he meant, but I was beginning to. I hadn't yet turned thirteen.

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Over time, our meetings changed, deepened. He became less kind and more domineering. He put me on my knees and made me beg for his salvation. He stuffed his mantle in my mouth until my eyes bulged out of my head as I violently choked. He used me in a new way I hadn’t been before, and it hurt so much more than I knew something like that could. Sometimes there was blood; sometimes I would cry. But I always thanked him. He was the only one trying to help me. And then one day he said,

I don’t know that you can be helped. I’ve worked very hard - taken so much of my time from deserving congregants who need counsel - to cleanse your dirty soul. You consistently choose not to satisfy what the Lord asks of you, even when a holy man relays the message.

I begged him not to give up on me as I tried to wipe his cloudy slime out of my hair. I told him I would be better; I would be stronger, stop crying, be more grateful. It seemed to amuse him, which I hoped meant he would reconsider. He did. And he said,

My son is in seminary to carry on our family's good works and expand our flock. I’ll talk to him for you. But you must promise you will be a better servant to him than you have been to me, and I will talk to God for you as well.

I fell to my knees and kissed his shiny black shoes, thanking him profusely. I saw my distorted reflection and I did not recognize her. I was thirteen then. I was thirteen when my parents sent me to an apartment to study 1 Corinthians alone with a grown man. A Man of God. I was thirteen when he, too, started to give me the Holy Spirit, commanding me to confess to him all my sins while he defaced my insides and called me a whore.

And I was still thirteen when one night I felt my stomache splitting in two, blood pouring out of me. I sat in the bathtub, hemorrhaging, as I quietly realized what was happening. Once it was over, I cleaned up the scraps of small life and all the blood I’d lost, and I never told anyone what happened, because it was all my fault.

So by the time Pastor's son finished seminary and the other man returned from Mission, I was uncollected, in so many pieces that there was nothing I wouldn’t say or do for someone to just look at me as something more than bones covered black swamp mud full of decay.

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When he returned, he was different. He stood taller, spoke more strongly, held me tighter, and grabbed me more harshly when he felt I hadn’t satisfactorily obeyed one of his commands. And he never stopped reminding me of how dirty I was, and how righteous he was for taking me under his umbrella. My mother stopped beating me. My father stopped telling me I was ruined and undesirable.

For them, he was the solution to their problems as much as I believed he was the solution to mine. A grown man would take their fourteen year old off their hands and into his household; they could rest assured she would be taken care of by a man who was holy. A man who had influence. A man who would shelter her and make her upright; the answer to their prayers.

For a while, he was patient with me as I learned the way he liked his household run and the way he liked me in bed at night. In the morning. The afternoon. Not speaking unless spoken to. Never refusing. Always obeying. Hiding the pain and the bloodstains and never wincing when he re-entered too soon. Staying on the ground after he beat me. Quietly crying in the shower after a punishment. Covering up the bruises around my eyes and neck with concealer. Not limping after he pushed me down the stairs. And never, ever telling anyone anything not wonderful about him or my life as his loyal servant. I was grateful. I was non-existent.

I was naive to think things would ever change for the better. As I grew up, I settled into the violence and the emptiness. Because it was predictable and it was quiet.

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Once, with his permission, I was allowed to leave the house on my own, as a reward for my meekness, in his words. As I walked around the block, realizing I’d not been more than 100 feet from church or home for an untold number of years, I stopped and looked up at the sky. Cloudy, just a vague concentration of light where the sun should have been. Fitting. And when I looked back down at the earth, there was a man smiling at me from two houses down the way. He was sat on his porch, a can of beer in his hand. He held it up and said,

Want to join?

It wasn’t an option. All I wanted was a connection to the outside, but the outside people were malicious and the outside men wanted to ruin me. They were not righteous; they would not lead me towards salvation but away from it. So in my meekness, I looked down and shook my head, mumbling an apology. Just then, the face of a girl my age popped out from behind him, her long blonde hair somewhere between curly and wavy, her eyes the color of clear water, her voice the sound of freedom. She was beautiful. In an instant, I knew that I was every much as bit of a degenerate as everyone had always told me. I was lost in the haze of an indoctrinated version of self-realization when she shouted,

Why don’t you come out from under that umbrella for a minute? The porch is covered, too.

It wasn’t raining. Something compelled me to go to her; she knew the language of where I came from - maybe she would know something about me, too. I smiled and nodded, stepping up into a little oasis of string lights, the feeling of warmth, and a girl I didn’t know shoving a hard seltzer into my hand. I told her I wasn’t allowed. She said,

I bet you’re not allowed to do a lot of things, huh?

And she grabbed my free hand in hers and squeezed for a moment. I was so broken, so gone, so isolated, so frail. So done. And so I opened the can and took my first sip of alcohol. I thought about what it would be like to kiss someone just because I wanted to and not because they were in charge of me or trying to "repair" me. I cared less than I should have about what God would think, but in my heart I knew if my husband caught me there it would be the last time I’d be allowed outside. It would likely be the last time someone would see me alive.

For awhile, the three of us sat on the porch getting to know each other, though it was more them asking rapid fire questions at the reclusive girl covered wrists to ankles as if from a past period, unable to cite any experiences that didn’t involve church or religion. But they never said an unkind thing, and I found that strange, because all the people who loved me the most always said very unkind things to me. In His name. For my sake. But these two godless fools welcomed me into their space. Was it a trap? Or was it an escape?

I didn’t have time to figure it out before I saw my husband’s car pulling around the corner two blocks back. He'd be looking for me. I immediately sprang up, thanked them, and left. Once on the sidewalk, I resumed my stroll, hoping to convince him that I'd simply lost track of time. But when he angrily shouted at me from the car, the girl on the porch ran out and said to me, loud enough for him to hear,

Is everything okay? Do you need help?

I gritted my teeth and tried to subtly nod no. But she wouldn’t stop. And I saw him realize that there was a man on the porch, too, and that neither were perfect strangers to me. When that thought fully percolated, his eyes set back and became dark, and I knew this would be worse than the times before. I silently got into the car. The moment I shut the door, he backhanded me. My face hit the window. I saw both of them outside the car, shocked, panicked. As we sped away, my husband said nothing. He said nothing when we got home, through dinner, or the rest of the night.

Later, I laid down on the floor at the foot of his bed, as I did every night after he was done with me. I wondered to myself if anything was worth it - in or out of the church - with or without him - what was the point? I was wrong and crooked and ill-adapted and evil. Shameful. Always had been. And in the dark and the silence, from the bed, his voice -

Come here.

It wasn’t angry; it was too calm, and that was scarier. So when he told me to get on my knees and beg for his forgiveness, I did. When he told me to lie down on the bed and beg to receive his anger and his mercy, I did. When he got on top of me and put his hand around my neck, I didn’t stop him. And when he squeezed, putting the full weight of his body behind it, I wondered how peaceful it might be if one of these times he just committed to it and finally let me rest.

He did. I was seventeen.