To Burn or Not to Burn: That is the Question

I'm in the anger stage now

[Egbert van der Poel (1621-64), Nocturnal Village Fire Scene; painting and photograph in public domain]

Note: We are taking a snow day and canceling “class” this week. You have a chance to catch up on the reading, if you wish, or just take a break with me as I share some of my recent personal ruminations. Next week, we will start on Shakespeare’s sonnets: 18, 55, 73, 116, 130, and 138.

"Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” – Simone Weil¹

I am trying to let go.

I’m not quite there yet.

I have a friend—not a close one, an acquaintance, really. He’s a fellow writer whose work I admire—a writer whose work many people admire, in fact. I don’t remember how it started, but he and I have had some dialogue over the past year or two about our faith backgrounds and our church experience in the present. The long and short of it for him is that while he was once quite churchy and devout, he is now only devout and has left organized religion entirely. To be clear: he has not left his Christian faith. To the contrary, that faith drips from every word he writes. But he doesn’t think about church. He doesn’t think about the things institutional Christianity thinks about, fights about, pontificates about, and polarizes about. He has checked out of it all.

When he first shared these things with me, I couldn’t imagine what that would be like. The checking out, I mean.

I can imagine it now.

But I’m not there yet. And I don’t want to be. I just can’t check out yet.

Over the past couple of weeks on social media, I’ve been on a tear.² Report after report has come out, evidence upon evidence, of what my denomination, what pastors, and what churches knew, how much and how long, and what was covered up, hidden, delayed, about various cases of child sexual abuse. Child rape. And this is only the most recent turn of events in years of revelations about abuse, cover-up of abuse, and abuse of power.³

I can’t let it go.

This is the denomination that made it clear in various ways that I was not wanted as long as I spoke up in certain ways, ways that upset the status quo and messed with the old networks and traditions.⁴ Others, too, were subjected to similar treatment (and for far longer and more devastatingly than I).

But the man who allegedly raped little boys (and settled out of court with several of his victims)? He was lionized, credited with saving the denomination itself, designated as a hero in the myth the denomination tells about itself.

Yeah. I definitely need to let that place go.

And I will.  As my husband keeps reminding me, “Shake the dust off your feet.” (He follows Jesus, that man does.)

But letting go is a process. And some processes can’t be hurried along.

In her 1969 book, On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the theory of her now-famous five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Of course, Kübler-Ross was studying literal death within her field of psychiatry.

But there are other kinds of deaths, too: metaphorical ones.

Losing faith—faith in people, institutions, and ways of life—is a kind of death, too, one that must be grieved. Many people lose faith itself, too, of course. By the grace of God, that is not my story. But I, like so many others, have been facing loss that is like a death.

I find myself going through all of these stages in facing my metaphorical death.

For me (and, I think, for many others) denial consisted of denying hard truths, of not seeing what I didn’t want to see. We all do this, don’t we? It’s human, for one thing, but as someone in this little community of ours at The Priory observed to me recently, some of us take so long to see because we are resisting the easy temptation to operate in cynicism. The line between naïveté and cynicism is awfully fine—and we will all find ourselves erring on one side or the other from time to time. I’m trying hard not to overcorrect my former naïveté by swinging over the bridge to the other side and onto the banks of cynicism.

Getting out of where I was entailed a lot of bargaining—with others and myself. Trusting neither, I sought direction and even intervention from the Lord and I truly believe he showed me the way. I’m so thankful.

I don’t believe I’ve ever experienced clinical depression. But the last year brought me the closest to it that I’ve ever come. There were many hard, dark days that I don’t care to revisit now. I graduated from therapy recently. I don’t so much feel like a different person now as much as I feel like I got myself back.⁵

I’m in the anger stage now.

I’m angry that church leaders hid allegations of child sexual abuse that were so substantiated by so many witnesses that millions of dollars and many years were spent reaching a settlement.⁶ I’m angry at the near silence from current leaders in positions of great power and authority on this grievous bargain with evil that brought them the things they thought were more important. I’m angry that they make stained glass windows out of these perpetrators and their friends and tell themselves that they might have done some bad things, but they did some good, too, so it’s sort of okay.

I was in the Vines Center at Liberty University when Jerry Falwell, Jr., brought to the stage a stained glass window of Jerry Vines,⁷ who by then had been publicly exposed⁸ for covering up the serial child sexual abuse by a pastor whom Vines promoted and protected until that pastor was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned for sex crimes against minor children.⁹ I felt sick to my stomach looking at that graven image that day. Now dozens of women have come forward to say they were victims of this pastor’s sexually inappropriate behavior.¹⁰

Someday I will fully accept that this is who they are and who they have been. And I will release it all and move on.

I don’t know when that day will come.

For now, here is a poem that helps me and haunts me:

Voting as Fire Extinguisher by Kyle Tran Myhre

When the haunted house catches fire:
a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones,
and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels
that overwhelming dread, the evil
that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:
there are children inside.

There are fires to extinguish, my friends. There are people burning. Let us not turn away.

But perhaps we can take turns fighting, hold one another up, rest when we must—and be sure our own oxygen masks are on before we assist others.

Break, blow, burn—yes.¹¹

But also, breathe.

1. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, trans. By Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London: Routledge, 2002), 117.

2. Twitter, mostly. Twitter is the medium for such things.

3. I understand that people don’t always know with certainty what might be rumored or suspected. I know myself how easy it is to interpret something in the best light and only later when more truth comes out to see more clearly what was so hard to see before. The biggest issue isn’t what we do before we know—it’s how we respond when we do. With that said, there is a lot of willfull—culpable—ignorance at play, too.

4. Not univocally or unanimously, of course. I have many, many friends and supporters within the denomination. But it only takes a few to poison the well entirely.

5. My therapist told me that there would be setbacks and to expect them. She was right. The nightmares and sense of heaviness are back. But I know why. And that helps.

6. News stories for those interested in the details:

https://religionnews.com/2024/01/22/a-southern-baptist-leader-used-religion-and-piety-to-mask-decades-of-abuse-will-his-fall-doom-sbc-abuse-reforms/

https://baptistnews.com/article/sbc-attorney-calls-pressler-a-monster-a-predator-and-of-the-devil/

https://baptistnews.com/article/settlement-reportedly-reached-in-sexual-assault-case-against-paul-pressler/

https://baptistnews.com/article/law-firm-representing-rollins-against-pressler-comments-on-the-abuse-case/

7. https://www.liberty.edu/news/2019/05/10/jerry-falwell-displays-stained-glass-windows-recently-removed-from-southwestern-seminary/

8. https://baptistnews.com/article/publisher-to-correct-errors-in-vines-autobiography/

9. https://baptistnews.com/article/sex-offender-pastor-can-minister-to-children/

10. https://www.actionnewsjax.com/news/local/duval-county/pastor-accused-sexually-inappropriate-conduct-by-44-women-southern-baptist-convention/EXIIUFG3RBEYRE6477FF6U4CYU/

11. We will get to John Donne eventually: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44106/holy-sonnets-batter-my-heart-three-persond-god