Tag / Abuse

by Michael

Relationship Abuse & Faith pt 2

Religion does great good and great harm and the deciding factor between the two options is often tied to how a person interprets that religion’s sacred text.  That is true for my faith and probably every other faith.  How I interpret and interact with the Christian scriptures will influence and shape what I do with those interpretations.  Another way of saying that is that theology effects ethics.  How I live is influenced by what I read.  And so on.

When it comes to intimate abuse or domestic violence or abuse in relationships, this has great weight.  For people of faith, relationships are often viewed and embraced through the lens of faith.  When religion or faith works (i.e., when faith is working on you), everything changes because of that religion or faith.  Everything excludes nothing.  How you engage in and develop relationships will be adjusted or approached through the experience and understanding of your faith.  I think this relates to relationship abuse and interpreting our texts in the following ways.

  1. Staying close to our sacred readings helps us define abuse.  When our readings build on a foundation of love or justice or hope, it is easy to locate abuse or violence when it happens.  In my faith tradition, love is seen in the personal life and ministry of Jesus.  Jesus, in love, lived and died by love, because of love, and in order to extend perfect love.  There’s no way I can express faith in Jesus and not follow that example in my marriage.  That means I’m looking out for my wife’s growth and peace and nurture, not her harm.  Debbie Jansen, in the article I linked in yesterday’s post, says, “If a dysfunctional definition of faith allows one partner to destroy the talents and abilities of their spouse, it can only be labeled as abuse.”
  2. Relationships are places of redemption.  Jesus is not the only exemplar in my tradition.  There are others in our scriptures and there are others in our corporate faith tradition called life.  In other words, another source of how we think and talk about God is people (and the relationships we’re in).  We get to look at the lives of others and witness how God has used those good people to be redemptive in relationships.  So we look for women who use their identities as women to be redemptive, pulling the men around them to be something better, something different, something closer to the Divine.  Or we watch and learn from the men who hold their relationships with increasing gentleness because they have been redeemed or blessed or loved by God.
  3. The reality of abuse changes how we talk about God.  How we speak of God and God’s relationship to creation has always been important.  Always.  And the real and harsh truths associated with violence makes God-talk that much more significant.  For instance, growing up in a Baptist church, we learned to speak of God as a Father to the fatherless and a Mother to the motherless.  But those same Baptist communicators would shudder if I said to them that they were doing the same thing that my seminary profs taught me to do in acknowledging that God can be talked about in both masculine and feminine terms.  The presence of brokenness in the form of relationship violence makes those connections more important, particularly since everybody can’t always relate to the over-used and often destructive masculine images of God.  Those biblical images have to be paired with others that are fresh or new and still biblical.
by Michael

Relationship Abuse & Faith

I was engaged during the last part of my first and all of my second year of graduate school.  Dawn was finishing the last month or so in Urbana-Champaign with my engagement ring on her finger. 

We were engaged for a year, Easter to Good Friday.  When we started our premarital counseling, we saw Rev. Harvey Carey, my wife’s pastor growing up at Salem, and one of the psychologists at the Wheaton College Counseling Center.  I was studying there, and Dawn would come out for the appointment and, afterwards, I would either return to Chicago with her or go to my next class.

During one of the sessions with the clinician at the Counseling Center, we started talking about my personality.  I can’t remember what he asked.  It was a general enough question.  And when Dawn answered, I got the distinct impression that she was describing a person I didn’t know, a person who was cruel, and, worse, a person who was mean.  The counselor looked over at me and said something like, “Michael, what are you thinking?” Or maybe it was, “Michael, how are you feeling as you hear Dawn?”  Whatever it was, I told him and them that Dawn’s description made me sound like I was abusive. 

The counselor said something like Dawn wasn’t saying that and he said that I was a good guy.  I thought he pushed the moment too quickly.  He was right that Dawn wasn’t saying what I heard, but I also felt like he moved that conversation along a tad too fast.

I remember that meeting, that session, at different points in my life.  I remember when my tone gets a little too preacherly, or loud, at home.  I mean too loud for the small space between me and the wife.  I have a voice.  It’s always been a useful instrument, and I tell people that the instruments and tools God gives us are usually the instruments that bring us harm when we’re not attentive.  So I think about that meeting when my voice rises.

The session came to mind when I saw something in my inbox from Christianity Today.  The subject line asked, “Does Faith Hide Marital Abuse?”  I knew the answer was yes without reading it.  I knew that the proper place for faith was, indeed, inside a relationship.  I knew before reading the article that faith–rather than being something to cover or hide abuse–should be the catalyst that sparks change and the vulnerability which precedes it, be it slow conversion or rapid transformation, in a relationship. 

Faith is belief in the unseen but well known.  It is the trust that something is present–something like health and wholeness–because of God’s generosity.  Faith should make abuse impossible.  It should make husbands, boyfriends, and significant others acknowledge our needs for grace.  It should give us permission to admit and accept hard words, particularly when what our partners say about us is true.  Faith should provoke us to be strong and weak or strong enough to admit weakness.  And faith should make us better.

October is the nationally recognized month where people all over pause and say something about violence between intimate partners, also known as domestic violence.  I’m writing at least another post about this but what do you have to say?