Prison Fellowship: Transforming Our Rape-Oriented Culture

I recently received this update from Prison Fellowship. Prison Fellowship is a Christian ministry leading prisoners to Christ and discipling them in God’s love. The effect of this ministry is simple. When prisoners leave prison, they are much less likely to live the criminal life they led before if they have had a life-changing encounter with Christ through Prison Fellowship.

Unbeknownst to many people, including victims of prisoners, prisoners themselves — both men and women — are often brutally sexually assaulted in prison. In 2003, the Congress of the United States began to take legislative steps toward ending rape in U.S. prisons nationwide. Now more is actually being done to put the legislation into effect.

Here is the most recent news from Prison Fellowship:

Dear Friends,

For untold thousands of American prisoners, the threat and horror of rape is an every-day reality. But thanks in large part to the hard work of Prison Fellowship and other organizations, there is a ray of hope.

Yesterday, the Federal Prison Rape Elimination Commission released a groundbreaking report with recommendations on how the states and federal government can put an end to this scourge on our nation’s honor.

Please watch a special video by Chuck Colson that he recorded for Prison Fellowship and BreakPoint supporters. Chuck explains how critical the commission’s findings are, and how Prison Fellowship—and you, through your support—played such a key role.

Thank you!

The Staff of Prison Fellowship and BreakPoint

April/May 2009 Update

April was National Poetry Month. To celebrate, I wrote a poem a day, and I shared my poems in an online community of poets gathered at Robert Lee Brewer’s blog, “Poetic Asides.” I wrote three or four poems on the theme of God’s redemption and how it can work in the lives of those who are recovering from sexual abuse and assault. One of these poems, “Psalm,” received positive feedback from other poets. (I have since posted the poem here on the JSASSN website.) By reading and responding to poems by other survivors, I was able to make personal connections that brought encouragement to those writing about their experiences of abuse. I felt particular solidarity with a Jewish psychologist from Florida who survived sexual abuse, still believes in God, and works to help young people overcome similar, horrific past experiences.

As the school year wrapped up at Wheaton College, I met numerous times with survivors and members of their families. I feel that God has been drawing my attention to the needs of the children of survivors of sexual abuse and assault, survivors who have not been able to receive complete healing from their past. Many times, for example, the hypervigilance and fears of mothers who were abused have a negative impact on the identity formation of their daughters, particularly their attitudes towards human sexuality.

On a personal note, I learned that Johnny Dale Damron first pled guilty to the charges brought against him by the state of Ohio when he was extradited from West Virginia. However, on the date of his sentencing, he changed his plea to not guilty. He will remain in jail until his case is revisited in the courts in August.

In May, I watched the movie, “The Kite Runner.” This is a film about the rape of a young boy and of his country, Afghanistan, among other things. It is an extremely intense story that draws attention to the needs of orphans in Afghanistan, Afghanistan itself, and the larger problem of evil men who do violence to children. I think if survivors watch this movie, it will trigger certain memories and emotions, but in my case, it also reminded me to continue to pray for the end of sexual abuse, assault, and trafficking worldwide.

Later on in the month of May, I spent some time in Spain, primarily to take a spiritual retreat with the Lord in Avila and to make a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. During the trip, I met a member of the Guarda Civil (Civil Guard), and I had a number of meaningful conversations with him about the history of Spain. We talked, among other things, about the dictatorship of Franco and of Pinochet (who ruled in Chilé), and the forms of torture that those men used against the people they persecuted. I was reminded of how evil war and violence really are. Like poverty, war and oppressive governmental regimes create opportunities for sexual assault. Therefore I pray not only for the end of poverty but the end of war.

Dr. Jane Beal
JSASSN International

Being the Beloved

BEING THE BELOVED

In the Song of Solomon, we read:

“Catch for us the little foxes,
the little foxes that spoil the vineyards,
for our vineyards are in bloom.

My Beloved is mine, and I am His.”

Now, years ago, I remember pouring out my angsty, troubled, teenage soul to a wise, elderly, black woman who attended our church in Santa Rosa, California. Her name was Esther, and she was either widowed or divorced, and had, in consequence, raised her children with only God the Father as her co-parent. On this day, I was enumerating all my problems to her, and she said something to the effect of “you know, Jane, those problems are little foxes.” She went on to quote the whole verse from the Song of Solomon and to talk about how the enemy of our souls seeks to harass and damage the beautiful vineyards of our lives with the little foxes of difficulty and strife. This is one of the first times I remember hearing the Song of Solomon interpreted allegorically, and Esther’s interpretation has stayed with me a long time.

Yesterday, the verse came to me again as I was meditating on identity. It struck me that the bride from the Song of Solomon does not see her identity primarily in terms of her education or her vocation, but in terms of her relationship to the one she loves who loves her in return: “My Beloved is mine, and I am His.” She has a strong sense of mutual belonging, and from within the safety of a sacred love, she lives and moves and has her being. She loves and is beloved.

Then I began to think about how differently identity formation works for so many of us in this life.

SIN

Most of us have experienced the effects of sin on our souls. One of the most devastating effects is on our identity, on our understanding of our selves. Sin is so powerful that sometimes it begins to define who we are. Sometimes it is specifically the sin of others that damages us.

Just this past weekend, I met with a woman who was devastated by sexual abuse and incest when she was very young. She drove all the way from Michigan to Illinois to meet with me, having learned about my JSASSN ministry from her daughter and the JSASSN website. We talked for a couple of hours, and one of the things she said was that this terrible experience of abuse has prevented her all her life from feeling like she was good, from feeling like she could have real intimacy with God, and from feeling like she is loved. As a pastor’s wife on the verge of turning fifty, she believes intellectually that she is loved by God, but she’s been praying that God would move that knowledge down from her mind and into the depths of her heart so that it might suffuse her whole being.

I know that the sin of others can damage our identity as the Beloved. As Esther said to me years ago, the sins of others can be like little foxes. Those sins can steal our joy and make us believe lies about who we really are. So can our own sins.

When other people sin against us, when they hurt and damage our souls, whether purposefully accidentally, we are become vulnerable: able to be wounded. So often, I find, the places in our lives where we have been hurt are closely related to the sins that we commit. Our own sins further ground us in a shame-based identity that we hate. Sometimes sin is so powerful in our lives and in our world that the mere temptation to sin begins to define us.

Recently, one of my dear students at the small, private, Christian liberal arts college where I teach wrote an essay about being gay on our campus. He is a thoughtful young man, intelligent and gifted, sensitive and moral. His essay revealed how he sees his identity. Because he experiences attraction to other men, even though he does not act on his attraction, he believes that he is gay. When I read what he wrote, I thought: the temptation to sin should not define our identity. If I derived my sense of identity from my temptations, how devastated I would be! No, it is not being tempted or even acting on temptations that makes us who we are. While no Christian can deny that we have a sin nature and that we are, in fact, sinners, sin does not define us. Life is not about being sinners. It is about being the Beloved.

In his first letter to the church at Corinth, Paul makes a long list of sins that members of the church previously engaged in, including sexual immorality, idolatry, adultery, homosexuality, thievery, greed, and drunkenness, among others things. Then he says: “And that is what some of you were.” Were! He uses the past tense of the verb to emphasize that the sin and the shame-based identity are in the past. Paul goes on to say, “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God” (1 Cor. 6:11).

SOCIETY

It is not just sin that attempts to get such a strong hold on us that it defines who we are. The society we live in does the same. The people we are around name us in various ways, sometimes in ways that make us feel bad, but often times in ways that make us feel quite good.

For example, I teach at a college where people often ask each other, when they first meet, the following two questions: “What is your major?” and “What do you want to do with that when you graduate?” These questions are an entryway into getting to know the other person. There is nothing wrong with these questions in themselves. Certainly I’ve asked these questions any times because I am a teacher, and I want to foster my students’ current education and future dreams.

But because these questions are asked repeatedly, sometimes students start to get that feeling that who they are is based on what they study, their accomplishments in their field, and the grandiose nature of their future plans for great jobs, effective ministries, and, as the cliché goes, a white picket fence with a happy spouse, 2.5 children, and loyal dog. Faculty are at least ten times worse than the students because they have been members of academic society for a longer period of time. The questions they ask and answer are even more heavily inflected with expectation of success and judgment of failure.

The result for students and teachers is often a profound sense of inadequacy. Worse yet, people moving in the academic realm begin to base their sense of identity and sense of self-worth on transitory kudos. They begin to believe that they must work to be praised and that somehow that praise will make them good and may even result in their being loved. The whole dynamic is extremely unhealthy. But it is very common.

I think people develop a strong yearning to get rid of the shame-based identity that sin has imposed on them in favor of a success-based identity that academic society can give. But this is just replacing one merciless taskmaster with another. The soul, whether under the weight of shame or the weight of success, is still withering because the soul still desires to be the Beloved.

When identity is success-based, when that success is a desperate attempt to compensate for sins that have damaged the soul, people begin to hide as many of the unattractive parts of themselves as possible. We don’t want other people to know about our brokenness, our weakness, our shame. We fear rejection. The thought of rejection is terrifying, especially since our soul is still longing to be the Beloved. Even when people try to love us, when we have attempted to substitute a success-based identity for a shame-based one, we cannot receive the love that is offered. We can’t receive it because we believe that our true selves are not what is being loved, only the façade we have presented to the world. No one truly knows us. We believe if they did, no one would truly love us.

The silent and unseen devastation of success-based identity cannot be overstated. In truth, it absolutely damages the soul and leaves people feeling isolated and unloved. It was never what God intended for us. It is not our destiny in eternity. Both now and in times to come, God wants us to know that we are the Beloved.

SELF

The war between shame-based identity and success-based identity is constantly being mediated by the self. The self becomes the ambassador between the two opposing camps. The self tries to choose how to define itself, but the self is very weak.

How can we ourselves choose our identities rightly when it is our selves, our very souls, that have been attacked by both of the armies we are trying to force to agree to a peace treaty? It is impossible. After the first Persian Gulf War in the 1990s, no one expected Kuwait to be the primary mediator in the negotiations between Iraq and the United States. Why would we expect our souls to be able to negotiate the boundaries, the expectations, between shame and success?

There is only one person who can effectively define us: the Spirit of the Living God.

SPIRIT

In the Gospels, we read that when Jesus was about to be baptized, heaven opened up and the Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove. The voice of God the Father then proclaimed from above, “This is my Son, whom I love; in him, I am well pleased.” As Henry Nouwen has pointed out, Jesus had not yet done anything on earth to earn the approval of the Father. He had not yet fed the 5000. He has not yet raised Lazarus or Talitha from the dead. He had not yet gone to the Cross to suffer and die and redeem all of humanity from the power of sin. Yet God loved him, and He was pleased with him.

Jesus was the Beloved.

I believe that when God looks at us, He sees us, and He knows us, but our identity in his eyes is not primarily about our sin and shame or our success and social standing. He loves us because He made us, and we are his. If only we could realize, in the deep heart’s core, that He is ours, our identity would be transformed.

Then we could live all our lives knowing that we are the Beloved at all times.

Jane Beal