Thanksgiving

Southern Baptist ministers and leaders instilled in me a hateful lesson. The core teaching of their lesson was this: “You are a creature void of any value -- you don’t matter.”

In both my childhood and adulthood, Baptist leaders made that dehumanizing lesson absolutely clear. They whipped it into me.

It was a lesson first taught by Tommy Gilmore, the minister who molested and raped me as a kid.

It was a lesson reinforced by the keep-it-quiet music minister, Jim Moore, and by other leaders in my childhood church, who knew and stayed silent.

In recent years, the lesson was retaught by the current ministers and deacons at First Baptist Church of Farmers Branch, including the same keep-it-quiet music minister Jim Moore, who is still there. These were men who chose to threaten recourse against ME rather than doing anything about their own former minister who molested me when I was a kid.

Then, as though Baptists were afraid I hadn’t adequately learned my lesson, it was retaught yet again by the men of the Baptist General Convention of Texas who, with double-faced dissembling, strung me along, did nothing to help me, and instead helped the church that was seeking to silence me.

The lesson was repeatedly retaught again and again by men of the Southern Baptist Convention who misled me to think my perpetrator wasn’t in ministry, who wouldn’t even shake my hand, who did nothing to help me, and who said remarkably harsh and hurtful things.

In truth, if I were to recount all the misery of what I’ve encountered in Baptist-land, there would be no end to it. And how I wish my story were a rarity. But it’s not.

I’ve seen the effect of Baptist leaders’ “you don’t matter” message on many other clergy abuse survivors. It’s such a terribly hateful lesson for religious leaders to teach.

It’s a lesson that I consider myself lucky to have survived.

That’s why I’m always a bit bewildered when Baptist leaders lash out that I’m motivated by vengeance. What really motivates me is something more akin to gratitude. I KNOW how lucky I am.

After all, I survived my twenties only because I was too inept to kill myself off. I can’t help but think that even God might find some humor in the incongruity of it. I’m a “do-the-job-right” sort of perfectionist, and yet I’m also a person whose heart is filled with unending gratitude for my own imperfect failure.

In more recent years, when Baptists’ “you don’t matter” message reared its ugly head again, I was graced to have other people in my life -- people who worked hard to counter that hateful Baptist teaching and to remind me that my life did indeed matter. If not for them, I almost certainly would have lost my grasp. Thank God for non-Baptists and non-believers.

I am a survivor. And I am grateful.

It’s not something I take for granted because I know there are many who do not survive the savage wound that is inflicted by the sexual abuse of a trusted religious leader. It is a wound that literally kills people. And if the wound itself doesn’t kill, then the infection that follows from the faith community’s hateful collusion will sometimes finish off the job.

Every clergy abuse story is a tragic one, but the stories of those who successfully commit suicide are among the most heart-wrenching of all.

Many more clergy abuse victims survive in body, but are lost down a myriad of dark chasms. Lost to alcohol. Lost to drug addiction. Lost to rage. Lost to self-mutilating behaviors. Lost to isolation. Lost to chronic depression. Lost to mental illness.

My heart is filled with gratitude. I came out on the other side of that dreadful darkness, still alive and sane. Whatever pain I may have, I am grateful for the capacity to feel that pain and for the ability to speak of it. I pray that my voice may help others and may work for good.

I give thanks for the life I still live and for the goodness of the people who surround me. And I give thanks for all of you.

May your hearts be full. Shine on, Survivors!