That command pops up — out of the blue, it seems — in Exodus chapter 22, part of a list of _thou-shalt-nots_ that most people mostly ignore most of the time.
I say "out of the blue" because it seems like a non sequitur in a list that ranges from theivery to liability for property damages to bestiality to labor practices to, well, witches. You can read it for yourself.
I say "most people mostly ignore the Exodus 22 list most of the time" simply because now and again, people self-identifying as Bible-believing, have taken to heart individual items on the list.
Some folks, in obedience to #21, which forbids mistreating or oppressing foreigners, have sought to make that the law of the land — which you'll recall the U.S. has done on and off for 250 years.
And, here and there, when folks have taken it upon themselves to obey #18: — "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" — they've accused, charged, tried, and convicted women and girls of being witches; and not suffered them to live. Sometimes, we know, folks jumped straight from the accusation to the execution ... so... murder. They have the element of speed in common with race lynchings.
I *think* executing people for witchcraft is uncommon these days. But I'm not sure. I mean, historically, we only know the instances when such executions were reported; not any that weren't reported. And I need not mention (but will) that an ungodly number of women and girls have just *disappeared* over the centuries, including this century, so ... we don't know, do we....
Something we *do* know is that shunning still happens everywhere, all the time, and while shunning isn't murder — judicial or otherwise — it's certainly not benign.
Truth be told, I think shunning is witch-trial-adjacent. (We'll start with girls, and then the women they become.)
What girls are sometimes shunned for is other people's conviction that they somehow bewitched good men into abusing them — against those men's will, it should be said — and then they *told* about it as if was the men's fault! The nerve some children have of going through puberty ... they should be ashamed.
A good shunning will drive a lot of girls from the religious community they once thought of as theirs. But, sometimes, a thorough and convincing rebuke, with a side of isolation, can be enough to leave a girl scared silent — which, in some ways, is just as good.
Later, if for some reason they still go to church, a lot of those girls become women who understand they are expected to keep it to themselves — to keep quiet about the lived experience in which, when they were legal children, an adult male who had some kind of authority over them, or duty of care for them, turned their body into a crime scene, doing unspeakable things to them.
Women who fail to live down to the expectation of silence — clearly are not team players — and can expect to be benched. The ones who refuse to play ball can expect to be ignored, dismissed, ridiculed, and maybe accused (maybe re-accused) of having bewitched those men into acts that must have been conjured by the girls they were. Because why else would grownass men do something they would never in a million years even think, let alone plan, pursue, repeat, deny, and finally shift blame? Not immaturity, or arrested development! Not lust! Not power! The child made me do it! What could it be but witchery!
Last month, Joy McCullough published her 16th book — an early-life memoir titled Suffer a Witch.
She's said it seemed weird to her, writing a memoir in her 40s; but she's been exploring the core of this work for decades in books and plays — most famously, her 2018 novel Blood Water Paint.
In September, 2018 (remember what was going on then?), my first recommendation of Blood Water Paint read : "This extraordinary novel is … right now … everything we are talking about … or everything we should be talking about."
A few months later, I wrote: "I love this book and recommend it without reservation — especially if you're a youth worker, or a parent, or a grandparent, or a teacher, or the spouse, partner, or friend of any woman, ever."
And in 2020: "
"Blood Water Paint is an important, artful contribution to our conversations about gender equity, sexual violence, and justice. This book is richly textured and composed like nothing I've read before or since. If you care about women and girls, take this as my unqualified recommendation to read, consider, share, and discuss Blood Water Paint in your sphere of influence."
And again in 2024:
"Six years later, [this is still] a very important book for anyone who believes women and girls matter in this society and in the world. I’ll be surprised if you’re not surprised by Blood Water Paint."
Of course, I wasn't saying anything the book reviewers weren't saying
Natasha Tripathi, writing in The New Yorker wrote:
"McCullough began working on the novel long before #MeToo, but the parallels are hard to ignore. The book does not read like historical fiction. It teems with raw emotion, and McCullough deftly captures the experience of learning to behave in a male- driven society and then breaking outside of it."
Parade Magazine included Blood Water Paint among the 101 best young adult books of all time.
So, yes: Joy McCullough was ready to memorialize the ways and means by which she survived years of sexual abuse by the new youth pastor in the church where she grew up — right under the noses of the adults who should have, could have, would have stopped it if they'd paid the right kind of attention to the right things at the right times.
Now: This is where I acknowledge that I'm in the book. I was the first adult Joy told about the sexual crimes against her. Don't look for my name. She chose to refer to everyone in the book by pseudonyms, beginning the abuser.
I think that's fair play. Why should she have to type the abuser's name every day for years in the writing of this book ... and why should she permanently surrender an otherwise perfectly good name, a name used by trusted friends, just because it also refers to someone who is, for life, the person who groomed, seduced, abused, gaslighted, and attempted to possess her ... and, it seems, is getting away with it....
Early in 1998, Joy traveled from her college town to visit my spouse and me; to talk about what she went through in high school.I won't try to relate the story she told us because Suffer a Witch is that story, artfully told so much better than I could tell it ... and because Joy McCullough is the central character and narrator of her story — as she absolutely should be.
Suffer a Witch is a twisty, emotionally wrenching story of abuse by a man entrusted with her care. It's a story neglect too, I think, by the community of adults who coulda / woulda / shoulda done a better job of adulting at a number of points along the way.
Which is to say: I'm persuaded there are lessons to be learned by anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
That's not the same as justice, which has yet to trickle, let alone roll down like a mighty river. But it's not nothing, because churches and other trust-based institutions can do something about due diligence in finding out whether or not trust is warranted and — if someone slips through the cracks anyway, they can do something about cooperating with law enforcement and making it harder for predators to slink out of town and get positions of trust in other communities.
People who knew Carlisle Marney saw that he was flipping the script when he said "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you flinch before it sets you free."
Churches (in the company of schools, theaters, summer camps, kids sports, and food and hospitality employers ... so, most of us, to be fair) are still in the flinching phase.
At church, the Preacher Boys podcast and Roys Report keep reminding us, Joy McCullough is not the only one, and not the most recent one. She's certainly among the most eloquent ones ... and maybe among the most courageously hopeful because she is willing to use her richly deserved platform as a playwright and novelist to tell the unflinching truth as a memoirist — for the common good ... healing, responsibility, for justice.
She should be rewarded for that with a boundless multitude of readers who take her story where telling it can still do the most good.
Sources
1 Exodus 22:18, The King James Version of the Bible . https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2022&version=KJV
Other sources
No comments:
Post a Comment