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The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse
The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse
The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse
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The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse

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The Narrow Way is an honest account of a life, fully lived, under Gods all-seeing eye. Although a memoir, it is not a conventional one. No reader will like everything in this book, but every reader struggling with some aspect of lifesexual abuse, marriage, militarism, prison, the loneliness of the American experience, the failure of democratic institutions, the quest for self-knowledge, the search for Godcan find something interesting and useful in it. Opening with an examination of the long-term damage done to sexually abused children, Part One covers the problems of marriage, the significance of dreams, art, and literature, an insight into suffering, an approach to understanding Scripture, and the social impact Jesus had on His society via teachings that we are still refusing to take seriously. In Part Two, the author gives an overview of the impact of the so-called Enlightenment, a period that promised a better human type living in an improved world, but that brought the human family instead to non-stop, high-tech war-making, rampant resource consumption, and an on-coming social, environmental, and economic catastropheprecisely because Christians, seduced by the products of the machine, have steadily diluted their commitment to Christ, who showed us the narrow way that leads to life. The Narrow Waythe result of fifty years of hard study of the intellectual and social trends of the past 250 yearsis a challenging book. Starting where theologian Reinhold Niebuhr left off, it critiques the so-called American way of life and calls for change.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherWestBow Press
Release dateJun 13, 2013
ISBN9781449795481
The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse
Author

Vivienne E. Perkins Ph.D.

As a teacher, artist, antinuclear activist, Ruskin specialist, expert on the Enlightenment, and author of The Narrow Way: A True Story of Surviving Sexual Abuse, Vivienne E. Perkins, PhD, found a new life in old age when a twenty-seven-year-old man asked her to become his adopted mom. Considering this a God-given task, Dr. Perkins adopted Daniel and, at his request, wrote Letters to My Son to teach him the doctrines of traditional Christianity as transmitted to us from the early church to Karl Barth.

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    The Narrow Way - Vivienne E. Perkins Ph.D.

    Copyright © 2013 Vivienne E. Perkins, PhD.

    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

    WestBow Press books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

    WestBow Press

    A Division of Thomas Nelson

    1663 Liberty Drive

    Bloomington, IN 47403

    www.westbowpress.com

    1-(866) 928-1240

    Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

    ISBN: 978-1-4497-9549-8 (sc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4497-9550-4 (hc)

    ISBN: 978-1-4497-9548-1 (e)

    Library of Congress Control Number: 2013909004

    WestBow Press rev. date: 5/29/2013

    CONTENTS

    Foreword

    Preface

    Acknowledgments

    Introduction

    BOOK ONE

    MY LIFE

    Chapter One How I Got Into This Mess In The First Place

    Chapter Two My Record As A Mother

    Chapter Three Creating The Self

    Chapter Four Dreams

    Chapter Five A House Is Not A Home Unless You Build It

    Chapter Six Marriage Wars

    Chapter Seven Perkins’ Laws

    Chapter Eight Art For Art’s Sake? I Don’t Think So.

    Chapter Nine Activist Years

    Chapter Ten Isn’t There Something Wrong Here?

    Chapter Eleven On Being Old In America

    Chapter Twelve Lazarus Revisited

    BOOK TWO

    REFLECTIONS

    Chapter Thirteen Consequences Of Child Sexual Abuse

    Chapter Fourteen The Narrow Way

    Chapter Fifteen The Question Of Suffering

    Chapter Sixteen Understanding Scripture: A Personal View

    Chapter Seventeen Jesus As Social Rebel

    Chapter Eighteen The Way We Live Now

    Chapter Nineteen Coda: Descartes Was Wrong

    Epilogue: To My Fellow Christians

    Afterword

    Glossary Of Terms Used In Text

    Bibliography

    About The Author

    THE NARROW WAY

    Enter ye in at the strait gate…because strait is the gate and narrow is the way that leadeth unto life and few there be that find it. (Matthew VII:13-14) KJV

    Also by Vivienne E. Perkins, Ph.D.

    A Kind of Happiness: Ruskin and the Passion for Order

    University of Colorado, 1978

    This book is dedicated to all sexual abuse survivors. It is my deepest hope that reading it will help each of you, in some way, to achieve a better understanding of your trauma, to forgive yourself for a situation you had no way to prevent, and to forgive, by God’s grace, the perpetrator, not so much because he deserves it, but because achieving forgiveness will assist you to heal your wound.

    It is also dedicated to Lillian, who encouraged me to write it all down.

    "For we know that all things work together for good to them that

    love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

    Romans 8:28 KJV

    (When I left home at 13, my grandmother, Rose Vivian Benson sent me this text. I always clung to it)

    FOREWORD

    A nyone who is struggling to make sense of the pain in his or her life needs to read what Vivienne Perkins has written in The Narrow Way. In The Narrow Way, Vivienne shows us how her brutal and nearly loveless childhood affected nearly every aspect of her adult life. Vivienne tells, with unflinching clarity, a story of how she and her brothers were subjected to daily torments: sometimes in the form of sexual abuse, sometimes through harsh verbal and physical punishments, sometimes simply through lack of food and care. Vivienne makes clear the connections between her abuse as a child to her many troubles later in life: three failed marriages, her own excruciating inadequacies as a parent, and her lifelong struggle with anger and depression.

    Although Vivienne’s difficulties are what will make many readers able to relate to her story, it is how she managed to rise above such broken beginnings that makes her story truly remarkable. For all of Vivienne’s troubles, one would have expected her story to end with incarceration, homelessness, addiction, or suicide. That she never succumbed to any of these, Vivienne would say, was due to the grace of God. Instead, she managed a successful career as a teacher, earned her Ph.D. as a Ruskin scholar, created a second career as a professional artist, and even built a successful fourth marriage that, to date, has spanned over three decades. The Narrow Way may start out as a story of desperation, but it quickly becomes a story of overcoming adversity and achieving lifelong growth via teaching high school and college students, via working as a social activist, artist, and teacher in jails and prisons.

    While any story of true growth is inherently inspiring, the uniqueness of Vivienne’s story lies in how she was able to grow, given the desperate circumstances of her early life. As her tools, Vivienne used things that are available to, but overlooked or not valued, by many of us: the beauty of nature, the wisdom of great literature, the inspiration of fine art and music, and the transformative ideas found in the Gospels.

    To feed her lifelong growth, Vivienne combined these tools with the courage to reflect on her life honestly, the skill of two dedicated therapists, the love of a kind and patient husband, and an abundance of God’s grace. However, being the natural-born teacher that she is, Vivienne understands the critical role that a good teacher plays in education as well as in personal growth. Therefore, in The Narrow Way, Vivienne teaches by example and gives very personal accounts of the lessons that fostered her own growth. Many of these accounts were painful to resurrect and required Vivienne to let go of the false pride which we all cling to, knowingly or not. Her truthfulness and courage give the reader glimpses of how his or her own truthfulness and courage might open up the channels that allow for growth and transformation.

    Today, Vivienne is a fiery, silver-haired woman of almost 80, with a steady gaze and a love of deep conversations with friends and strangers alike. In many ways The Narrow Way feels like another one of her deep conversations. It is filled with personal stories written together with many of the conclusions she has drawn after so many years of unbroken growth. It was written with faith that whoever might benefit from it, will find it and read it. It is up to God whether that will be one person or hundreds: one of Vivienne’s beloved inmates whom she taught in prison or in the county jail; one of her former high school or college students; a member of her extended family; a fellow survivor of child sexual abuse; or just someone trying to make sense of it all. May The Narrow Way enrich your life as the many, long conversations I have had with Vivienne over the years have enriched my life.

    Lillian Gonzalez

    Denver, Colorado

    December, 2012

    PREFACE

    Existence will remain meaningless for you if you yourself do not penetrate into it with active love and if you do not, in this way, discover its meaning for yourself.

    MARTIN BUBER

    U ntil the second half of my life, books by sexual abuse survivors simply were not written. Marilyn van Derbur Atler, like me an abuse survivor, wrote the first one I personally saw. Her book covered her father’s repeated violations of her as she was growing up and the subsequent long-lasting trauma his sexual abuse caused in her life and in that of her elder sister. Writing her book was a very brave thing to do. Her father, a well-known Denver businessman, and her mother, presented a perfect family picture to the world, a picture which was eradicated forever by Marilyn’s report. Plus, her younger sisters did not support her revealing these family secrets to the world.

    Although I have never met Marilyn, her courage released me from the conviction I had carried with me for so many years that my own sexual abuse was a taboo subject that I could never mention. To some degree, her book also released me from the terrible shame I had always felt about my own abuse and the traumatic events it unleashed in my own life. She made clear the unending chain of pain and self-destructive behaviors that abused girls (and boys) experience. I believe it is only when Americans come to understand the very long-standing, serious consequences affecting every part of a child’s subsequent development (including her brain structure) that our entire society will begin to seriously address the overriding necessity of preventing such abuse. It is crucially important to realize that, like Marilyn, most children know and trust their abuser, who is far too often a member of the child’s own family. That fact alone sets the stage for an insuperable inner conflict in the child.

    When I reported my father’s sexual abuse, it caused disaster. My father, who was a clergyman, was forced to resign from his church; my brothers and I were removed from the home; my mother and I became permanently estranged; and I entered a very long period of my life where I was not only self-destructive, but permanently enmeshed in self-hatred, depression and suicidal impulses. While I struggled with these problems, I had to deal with the overriding need to keep a roof over my head, to eat every day, to finish my education, and to present a reasonably normal face to the outside world while I kept my secret in a dark pit of despair.

    The abuse also affected my religious life. Like Job, I became convinced that God had set me up for this agony. Since I was enduring something no one ever talked about at that time, I had no evidence that it had ever happened to anyone else. What other conclusion could I have drawn than that I had been singled out? But my first friend had been Jesus, of whom I had read in the Gospel of Matthew in my early years. So, I was caught in a dilemma that would take me many years to resolve.

    On a very practical level, one of the things I discovered was that escaping my father did not mean I could escape the problem of sex. Men are always out there, and a girl with no emotional or financial support is certainly going to look for some kind of security—which she will inevitably find she can get only at the price of having sex. So, the very thing I was most anxious to avoid became the exact thing that I was required to participate in if I was to find any emotional security. As far as I can tell, there are no men out there who will love a woman and take care of her without wanting her to attend to their sexual needs.

    After van Derbur Atler’s book came out, I saw another called Father’s Day, written by an abused daughter, but reading it caused me too much pain. After a few pages, I had to put it down. With the pain of possible readers in mind, as I have written this account, I have tried to focus on a much larger picture—one that says as little as possible about the uglier parts of my childhood—in order to draw attention to the train of consequences that persist throughout the long life of the abused person and which affect every aspect of her life, including her marriages, her children and, in indirect ways, even her grandchildren.

    But this book is not just about sexual abuse, which is really only one portion of a larger picture. As I pursued my academic career, I devoted myself to trying to understand the world I found myself living in. The subject of my doctoral work was John Ruskin, the great Victorian writer and social reformer. Ruskin and I had similar minds. His great mental drive was to understand the direction in which the world was going. At a time when the Industrial Revolution was in full swing, Ruskin, almost alone, foresaw what the machine was going to do to human beings as they struggled to live their lives in an entirely different context than humans had ever lived within before. Like Ruskin, I wanted to understand the world I was living in and how every part of that world affected every other part. Like him, I was interested in the big picture. It seems to be how my mind works.

    The other major influence of my life was Henry David Thoreau, who wrote Walden in order to think about life and how one should live it. The mass of men he said "live lives of quiet desperation…. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats. A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind. There is no play in them, for this comes after work." (my italics). The kind of life I was living arose from my quiet desperation, and both Ruskin and Thoreau interested me because they had attempted to explain its sources.

    Over the course of my life, lived primarily in the United States, I have been continually impressed by the level of unconscious despair manifested here in the land of the free and the brave. When I became a teacher, I noticed it especially in my high school students, who seemed to me unfathomably bored and unhappy. There are probably many ways to measure human despair, but it can’t be done directly in a society where everyone is pretending that all is well. So, let’s try measuring it indirectly, just by the level of drinking and drugging that goes on. Or, by our addiction to films, television, pro sports, speeding, video games, guns, and violence. People who are happy in their lives, I think, probably do not require so much escape. As I’ve lived my life, what I have seen around me every day is precisely what Ruskin predicted: millions of workers servicing machines, that do the actual making of things—all exactly alike—in order to get the paycheck at week’s end with which to pay their rent and buy their food and the various trinkets at the mall with which they attempt to divert their attention from the basic emptiness, even meaninglessness, of their lives.

    From my work on Ruskin, I graduated into the struggle against nuclear weapons and the plans of the Committee on the Present Danger (which was the behind-the-scenes force within the Reagan Administration) to ratchet up the arms race to unprecedentedly dangerous levels so as to drive the Soviet Union into bankruptcy. Since, by training and by habit of mind, I was a researcher, I began with quantum physics and worked my way through Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project, the detonation of the first bomb at the Trinity test site in New Mexico, and the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I began to research the Cold War, which was then at its height, and the rapid expansion of our nation’s military-industrial complex.

    The unprecedented dangers I discovered our government was courting horrified me. Along with many other activists, I realized we were running the risk of ending the world as we know it. Although the Cold War did end without the destruction of the world, all the weapons and attitudes remain in place that could bring about the end of this civilization and, perhaps, of most of the life forms now living on the Earth. No one seems to be paying much attention to this fact, but we are continuing to run all the risks we’ve been running for the past sixty years. So, I asked myself some serious questions.

    If the Industrial Revolution, which began with machines that would reduce human drudgery and improve human life, has ended up with nuclear weapons (which could easily destroy the planet, even now), I wondered where had we, as human beings, gone wrong? This was a question that took me back to the thinkers of the incorrectly-named Enlightenment, thinkers who preceded the Industrial Revolution and Ruskin. As a scholar, I could see the division between the pre-Enlightenment thinkers and writers (who were orthodox Christians) and the writers like Rousseau, Newton, Voltaire, Kant, Descartes, and Leibniz, who were not only the trendsetters for Enlightenment ideas, but who also disdained Christianity.

    As I suppose many college educated people do, I had previously thought that the Enlightenment was just an historical blip that accompanied the Industrial Revolution and the rise of the machine world. But now I saw that during the Age of Reason (the other label we use for the Enlightenment), the premises of human thinking had changed utterly, just as our concept of god had changed from the personal God of Jesus Christ to the impersonal god of the Deists, who wound up the clock (their metaphor for the machine world) and left it to run down on its own.

    This abandonment of the God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures for the god of the Deists created a deep change within Christianity that went largely unnoticed by church members but of which clergymen were usually aware. The advent of textual criticism (sometimes called the higher criticism) simply added to the ongoing erosion of the foundation upon which Christianity had rested for nineteen hundred years.

    Then came the Nineteenth-century search for some merely historical Jesus. This search was really a direct attack on the doctrine of the Trinity, because, depending on whose version of the historical Jesus you were reading—Renan’s, or Bultmann’s, or John Dominic Crossan’s, or Marcus Borg’s—you were getting a Jesus who was an itinerant rabbi, who was not born of a virgin, who had no power to do miracles, and who was not raised from the dead by God the Father. In brief, the search for the merely historical Jesus helped create many of the problems the church is currently enduring. If you look closely, you will find also the other reasons—such as the disappearance of the concept of sin—why the church has lost influence and credibility in the modern world.

    The concept that tied all my lines of inquiry together is the concept of the commodity view of life. I did not come up with this myself. I found it in Karl Polanyi’s profoundly insightful work, The Great Transformation. In this path-breaking book, Polanyi asserts that the world as we know it now was made possible by the transformation of the earth’s resources, its people, and its money into commodities. A commodity is something that can be bought and sold on the open market.

    As earlier peoples always understood, the earth and its resources are sacred. Use of the earth’s resources is to be a response to human need, and resources are to be used with care and with attention paid to their replenishment in order to meet the needs of future generations. People are also sacred. The Bible instructs us that the other person is my brother, and that I must have a due respect and reverence for his life and his needs, for which every decent society has to provide.

    So, let’s look at Polanyi’s commodities. Money, which once was a medium of exchange (a symbol of value, whether it was shells or coins or paper bills) to be given for food, clothing, and other life supplies, now became a commodity to be traded on the market, to be loaned out at interest, to accumulate as capital etc. As a commodity, money now had other functions than that of being a symbol of value and a means of exchange. And those other functions have distorted the world’s economy in ways most people who are not professional economists do not understand. I will say more about this later.

    In some areas, we did see the dangers of commodity thinking. Abolishing slavery grew out of our recognition that treating another person as a commodity rather than as a human being was wrong. But we have not come to grips with the manifold other ways that we continue to treat other human beings as commodities. I will not go into them here because I give examples in the book itself. But I will just observe that the sexual abuse of children—indeed, sexually abusing anyone, even a prostitute—derives from a commodity view of life.

    So, I believe Polanyi was correct: our entire civilization is based upon making money, resources, and people into commodities. That is what capitalism is all about—creating, buying, and selling commodities, no matter how stupid, trivial or dangerous they may be. We are now so accustomed to this way of life that we have lost our ability to perceive that it is killing us, not just physically in our wars, but spiritually in our inner lives. It is the reason we have become a having society rather than a being society. We measure our well-being by the accumulation of commodities, by our Gross Domestic Product (GDP).We express this, we think humorously, by our saying He who dies with the most toys, wins. The terrible truth is that he who dies with the most toys has done exactly what Jesus, the Christ, said should never be done; we have traded our living time for junk: "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul."(Matt. 16:26, KJV, my italics).

    This is a book that only I could have written. It represents not only my own traumatic experiences, it represents my entire education, my understanding of the world we are now struggling to live in, and my perception that the direction in which our civilization is now moving will, inevitably, lead to disaster because it is based upon commodification of resources, competition for them, and the mass killing that inevitably ensues. As a Christian, I see that Czeslaw Milocz was right when he declared that the mechanization of a society de-Christianizes it.

    When I am tempted to despair over the situation we are now facing (which is often), I cling to the Biblical concept of the remnant. You may remember Elijah sitting in his cave, overcome with despair, because, despite his zeal and faithfulness, his life is in jeopardy and it looks to him as though nothing good has come of all his efforts on God’s behalf. But the Lord reminds him Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal…. (I Kings 19:18, KJV) The seven thousand that had not bowed the knee to the false god of that time were the people who had followed the narrow way that leads to life that Jesus spoke of many years later, during his ministry on the Earth. Jesus Himself took the narrow way, and it led Him to the cross, which gave life to those of us who trust Him and follow His way of sacrificial love. But it appears to me that those who follow His way today are still a remnant, like the remnant that God described to Elijah.

    The reason I think the concept of the remnant is accurate lies in the fact that Jesus’ way of sacrificial love is no longer, shall we say, popular? Enlightenment ideas coupled with the power given by the machine, and, now technology, have given us a world where our unlimited power to destroy puts the created world and the whole human enterprise in the greatest possible danger.

    The irony of the Enlightenment project is that it has done the exact opposite of what Enlightenment thinkers predicted it would do: improve not only man’s life but man himself. Instead, Enlightenment thinking has led humanity in a very dangerous direction. It has made man more arrogant, while blinding him to the increasingly clear dangers the possession of unlimited power presents to human beings who, after all is said and done, remain sinful and, in some cases, insane. Those who think I am overstating my case should reflect on Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung, Idi Amin et al. They should also reflect on the fact that it is absolutely possible for such leaders to arise again in the near future, and that sinful human beings are only too anxious to follow such men.

    I absolutely believe it is past time for us to change our minds about the world we are living in and the projects of exploitation and mass killing we appear so willing to endorse. As always, the choice put forward in the book of Deuteronomy lies before us: "I put before you, this day, life and death: choose life." Or, we could think of the choice in the way Jesus put it: I put before you the narrow way that leads to life and the broad way that leads to destruction. Choose the narrow way.

    One confession I feel obliged to make. My assertions in this book do not indicate some level of purity or faithfulness that I think I have achieved as a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ. I say the things I say as a warning, not at all as evidence that I personally have achieved a better life than other Christians. Like all of you, I am simply on the path and am trying to keep my eyes on the goal marked out by scripture to those who have received the high calling that is ours in Christ Jesus.

    The Greek word for sin is hamartia, which means to miss the mark in the sense that an archer misses the mark when he fails to hit the bulls-eye. I am certain that a society that puts such confidence in weapons, war-making, and violence has missed the mark in a way that is leading us, whether we want to acknowledge it or not, to disaster. But society is composed of individuals. Our society will not change until the individuals living in it examine their lives and develop some insight into the ways their lives are not conforming to the example of Jesus, who came here not only to save us, but to show us the Narrow Way that leads to Life.

    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

    I begin by acknowledging the patience, expertise, and devotion of my two psychiatrists: Dr. David S. Kazzaz, and Dr. Margaret Grant. It is safe to say that without their expert care over a period of so many years, I would not have lived long enough to write this book. As a sexual abuse survivor, I was fortunate to have two such excellent therapists to help me to endure and to overcome my many problems. Their efforts were taken up and carried forward by my husband, John, who is my best friend as well as my beloved husband. His compassion and understanding have been a blessing on all the many occasions when I needed human love and someone in whom to confide.

    I cannot ignore my profound debt to Henry David Thoreau, whose Walden I read for the first time during the year when I left home. Over the long years since then, whenever I felt overcome by the agonies of my life, reading Walden one more time encouraged me to take up once more the task of living. The nobility and fundamental honesty of Thoreau’s character, which are revealed in everything he wrote during his short life, never failed to straighten my spine. He was, in my view, the true American, and still represents for me, everything genuine that has been lost subsequently in our national experiment.

    As for the book itself, it is a one-person work, but I owe thanks to Katie Hanke for her expert editing of the first half. I am also grateful to the following friends who graciously agreed to read the manuscript in part or in full over the years I have been working on it and to offer comments: Mary Jane Steed, Gail Chodera, and Catherine Virden.

    Because of God’s mercy in permitting me to be a teacher, I wish to also acknowledge each student I taught during my years in high school and university teaching and during the years I’ve been blessed by teaching in the jails and prisons. My students may not have realized it, but they were a great gift to me, as was my life as a teacher, which is the highest honor I can imagine receiving in this earthly existence. Being a teacher was one of the ways I learned to know Jesus. It is meaningful to me that on that first Easter morning, when He appeared to Mary Magdalene, she called Him Rabboni, Teacher. He was the greatest of all our teachers, and the One from whom we find it most difficult to learn.

    INTRODUCTION

    To know that all is well, even if late we come to know it, is at least some gain.

    SOPHOCLES

    I n fairness, I feel I should warn my reader that this is a different sort of book. Not only is it a book about an individual life—completely lived, as I, its author, must hope—it is a book about a difficult subject: the sexual abuse of children in our society and the long-lasting consequences of that abuse. Although I have been working on this narrative for several years, it is this year, 2012, that has featured a notorious case of a paedophile football coach—who worked for many years at an eastern university and who founded a charity for troubled boys—coming to trial for numerous instances of sexual assault on young boys over a period of ten or more years. I would judge that the fact that this particular paedophile was a respected football coach has had something to do with the social attention and outrage his trial attracted.

    Since from my own experience and from years of research, I am perfectly aware that there is a lot of child sexual abuse in the United States, I have found the social fury, aroused by the case of this coach, striking. These days, since news articles are often followed by long threads of comments from readers, it has been easy to gauge the sentiments of my fellow citizens toward those who, like this coach, come into the spotlight. I believe that when citizens protest so vehemently, it is a sign that a nerve has been touched. Whether the nerve is connected to our national fetish about football or our national ambivalence about sex is hard to determine. Compared with somewhat earlier, but continuing, cases about Roman Catholic priests being prosecuted for molesting children in their parishes, it appears to me that the outrage against this coach is even more intense than the previous considerable outrage against abusive priests.

    Whether I am correct in this observation, however, pales into insignificance next to the problem of why our society makes so little progress in understanding and preventing behavior that is happening so frequently in all social classes and that inevitably has devastating consequences for victims and, for all we know, for the victims’ children in their turn.

    Unfortunately, our spates of social outrage subside fairly quickly. When the perpetrator has been tried, convicted, and locked up, everyone breathes the proverbial sigh of relief and goes on to other things, usually after expressing a desire that the general prison population will give the sex offender the ugly treatment he so clearly deserves. And it is true that the sexual abusers of children are often killed in prison by the other inmates, probably because, as the reader will see in my chapter on prisons, so many of our male prisoners were, themselves, sexually abused in their childhoods.

    Good statistics are hard to obtain because male victims are very reluctant to report sexual abuse (confessing that one is a victim violates a man’s sense of his maleness), but estimates indicate that the majority of imprisoned men experienced sexual abuse during their childhoods. The reader should also keep in mind that when we talk about sexual abuse, whether of girls or boys, we are talking about abuse ranging from one experience to multiple, repeated incidents. Because so much sexual abuse occurs within the family, I myself believe that single assaults are rare. Repeated events are far more likely, with child victims being abused, even on a daily basis. The degree to which the perpetrator was a person the victim trusted, as is the case in families, increases the long-term psychological damage to the victim.

    As the reader will see as the book progresses, sexual abuse is not just about sex; it is about the power and deviousness of the perpetrator in relation to the powerlessness of the victim, and it is about the long-term damage to the child’s ability to trust the people in her immediate environment. As the abused child matures, this damage will work itself out in many ways in most areas of her life. It will affect her own sexual decisions, her choice of marriage partners, her failures in marriage, and her relationships with her own children. In some cases, it will affect her work choices. As far as I know, sex workers are consistently drawn from the ranks of those who were sexually abused during childhood.

    In describing my own life, I have deliberately given only the barest outlines of abuse that began when I was quite young and persisted until I reported and left home at thirteen. My approach here is deliberate: I want readers to reflect upon the larger role that sexual abuse of children plays in our society, not the more disgusting aspects of my own personal experience. I am aiming neither at titillation nor outrage; I am aiming at a deeper understanding of a social problem with many very serious ramifications.

    Sexual abuse in childhood, with all the emotional trauma it caused me for the first fifty years of my life, is only one portion of my life story. Although every part of my life was affected by the ugly experiences of my early life, I eventually had considerable success as a scholar, as a teacher, and as an artist. Later, as a person who worked in the jails and prisons with inmates who were trying to understand their lives and get onto a track that would not keep them recycling into and out of our nation’s prisons, I had opportunities to help many men and women. This is work I am still doing. My chapter Isn’t There Something Wrong Here? describes my personal knowledge and experiences of working with men and women prisoners.

    Sexual abuse extended also into my religious life. Because my abuser was a Presbyterian clergyman, I was also obliged to, somehow, separate my decision to follow Christ from the many negative attitudes I developed toward the institutional church, the male clergy, and toward the fact that in my case, and in virtually every case I have come across, the institutional church prefers to protect itself rather than to protect the suffering children. The world-wide scandal that came to light in the Twentieth Century is now being focused on a church administrator in the diocese of Philadelphia, who has been found guilty of knowingly protecting paedophile priests. That this church official has been remanded to jail to await sentencing is unprecedented; it does show some slight movement in the direction of the court’s punishing not only perpetrators but those who shield them from detection. But we have to get beyond punishment to prevention, because the punishment really does not help the victims.

    What I want to elicit from readers who may be willing to devote their time and thought to my story is not shock and revulsion so much as a deeper understanding of the complexity of the problems that victims face in attempting to achieve some level of mental health for themselves.

    When I left home in 1947, the sexual abuse of children was a forbidden topic. No one would discuss it, not even those who knew I had been abused. Nor would anyone really help my brothers and me. Although my brothers were also removed from the home, neither one was helped with his personal trauma any more than I was. What all this meant for me was that I not only badly needed a roof over my head and daily food, I needed emotional care and guidance. This, I found, was simply impossible to get. Met everywhere with a blank wall of refusal and incomprehension, I soon began to understand that I was totally alone with my pain and trauma, and that whether or not I survived was just as completely my own problem as if I had been dropped from another planet into the Kalahari Desert to fend for myself. The fact is that, in many ways, the terrible isolation I endured from the time I left home until I reached legal maturity was even more damaging than the original abuse.

    The last turn of the knife in my wound derived from the anguish of believing that no other child in the history of mankind had ever been marked out for such a fate; that it was peculiarly mine and, as such, inescapable and incurable. When what has happened to you is both unnamed and unmentionable, how are you going to get the knife out of your wound and begin to heal? I had no idea. Nevertheless, I had to work, attend school, attempt some kind of interaction with people I encountered. I had to keep breathing, to take a shower every day, to eat meals, to scrub floors, to do my homework, and to try hard not to think non-stop about killing myself. Above all, I had to project some veneer of normalcy so I could keep my job.

    On the very rare occasions when my parents showed up, I had to manage my highly conflicted feelings about them. Thus, the foundation had been irrevocably laid for many years of external struggle to survive, accompanying an intense internal struggle to get my emotional gyroscope stabilized. Like Melville’s Pip, the little black boy who falls into the illimitable ocean in Moby Dick, I would have many years to thrash around and exhaust myself before I could find help. The difference between Pip and me was that Pip went insane; I did not. Nor did I drink or take drugs. Instead, I learned to live with my pain, my depression and my desire to kill myself.

    In my long effort to survive, I had only my inner resources, but because I was intelligent and strongly attracted not only to constant reading but to formal education, these resources served me well. My true friends were all thinkers/writers who had lived in earlier time periods. My interests were comprehensive. Whether it was philosophy, theology, literature, quantum physics, economics, sociology, history, music theory, linguistics, or art, I was deeply interested.

    Eventually, when I began working on my doctorate, I found John Ruskin, a Nineteenth-century thinker with a similarly comprehensive mind, who also had wanted to construct a coherent picture of the world he found himself living in. Ruskin and that student of human civilizations, Lewis Mumford, got me started on my forty year preoccupation with the Enlightenment and its many damaging, but largely unrecognized as damaging, contributions to the world we are now struggling with—a world where the population is outstripping the planet’s resources, where globalized capitalism is impoverishing the multitudes in order to enrich the few, where the promise of democratic institutions is increasingly seen to be empty, where the progress Enlightenment thinkers like Descartes, Kant, and Rousseau, envisioned has bumped into a mass society of poorly educated people kept deceived by non-stop propaganda and amused into insensibility by increasingly vacuous and vicious entertainments.

    Our current situation has been described by many fine writers, but they have not appeared to make much headway against our society’s pronounced self-conceit. American writer Joe Bageant, who grew up in our blue-collar society, has described its preoccupations and fixations well, especially in his book, Deer-hunting with Jesus. On a different level, theologians like Reinhold Niebuhr not only analyzed the problems of mass religion, here in America, but lamented Americans’ general immaturity as a people. Niebuhr, who died in 1971, did not live to see the end of the Cold War or the accession of the United States to its position of global hegemon, waging our present evil and unnecessary wars in the Middle East to protect our access to oil, but I feel sure he would have spoken forcefully against all of it. Present commentators often refer back to Niebuhr in their analyses of our current situation, so we know his criticisms are not forgotten.

    All this is by way of acknowledging to my readers that this is not just a book about sexual abuse of children, or my life as an anti-nuclear activist, it is also a book about what I discovered about the structure of our particular civilization. Because people living in this country generally have not outlived their self-conceit about things like American exceptionalism (as the politicians like to call it), because we are still deep in the embrace of our fascination with the machine, and because we still believe military weapons will have the last word, readers are probably not going to like much of what I have to say in this book. I am sorry for that, but if I only put down what you already think you know, my book will give you no new ideas and will, therefore, have no real reason to exist.

    Perhaps sexual abuse is a metaphor for something lying much deeper in our communal experience, such as the quest for power, which is, of course, what the Pentagon is really about, but for those who ask why a sexual abuse survivor should also be addressing big questions about the way we live now (and why), and about our national religion (which is certainly not Christianity), and about our fixation on technology, I can only say that what I set out to record here is a whole life, lived as completely and as earnestly as I could live it. Having gone to so much trouble to try to understand the big picture, I have wanted to share my findings with others—in the hope that these findings might be useful. Make no mistake about it; we are in serious trouble. If the Nineveh of Jonah’s day needed repentance in sackcloth and ashes, I would say, in all honesty, the United States is desperately in need of that same decisive turn toward repentance.

    If you think mine is a negative viewpoint, I have to agree that it is. The Biblical record shows that the people the prophet Jeremiah spoke to thought he was terribly negative. They really hated his message because it concerned their sin, which is never pleasant to face. But the fact is that they were, nevertheless, carried away into Babylonian exile.

    Biblical Christianity itself starts from a negative position about the human being—that he is a sinner, alienated from his God and helpless to save himself. The world is a place inhabited by billions of sinners, like me. How could it, then, be anything but a mess? Anyone who has read Western history extensively, or who knows much about the dismal history of the church, or who just honestly looks at what is going on around us right now, at the beginning of 2013, can scarcely have anything but a negative view of the world. If you are still comfortable in America, you may not want to see how desperate is our situation, but the fact is that all our expensive weapons will not save us from the spiritual desert in which we live or the problems of environmental collapse that are already upon us.

    The only positive factor I see is that the God of Judeo-Christianity offers us the opportunity to repent—which does not mean to be sorry but to change our direction. Changing our direction will be very hard because we have been on this track for far too long, and because we have become obsessed with acquiring the power that belongs only to God, not to mere human beings. The most extreme example of our power lies in our nuclear weapons, still deployed all over the western U.S. But, as George F. Kennan said before he died, no human being, no human government, is wise enough or far-sighted enough to have the control of nuclear weapons. Nevertheless, we retain our optimism that we Americans are good enough and smart enough to possess these supremely evil weapons.

    As I will discuss later, the optimism of the Enlightenment thinkers has been proven false. The world is now composed of two kinds of people: those who don’t realize this, and those who do. I realize I may be in the minority. But I don’t think any person or any society can repent without waking up and realizing that what it’s been doing is wrong (which means both that it is morally evil and that it won’t work.) The need for repentance, I believe, applies both to the individual and to his society. But society can change only to the degree that the individuals within it change.

    To a considerable degree the ability to change depends upon the philosophical stance you take. In philosophy there are only the transcendentalists (who believe in God and the spiritual world) and the materialists (who think what you see around you is all there is). Today, the materialists seem to have the upper hand: they think the world we see is the only world there is and, as leading physicist Stephen Hawking recently announced, God was not needed to set off the Big Bang.

    Nevertheless, the transcendentalists, who began with Plato, and ran up through Bishop Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant, and all the great Christian thinkers, predominated for most of Western history. So, as the reader will see, one of the things I wish to do is defend transcendentalism and point out that the conflict between science and Christianity is actually an unnecessary conflict. As the great Russian philosopher, Lev Shestov, observed, Truth and scientific knowledge cannot be reconciled. (In Job’s Balances, p. 65). That is because truth belongs to the transcendental world, whereas scientific knowledge, which is merely useful knowledge, belongs only to this world.

    Shestov’s seven word statement lies at the base of our present problems, because we have, since the Enlightenment, become convinced that scientific knowledge is truth. It is not, any more than the god of the Deists is the God of the Judeo-Christian scriptures. What science gives us is a tool for determining certain regularities contained in (and confined to) the natural world. These regularities can be made useful, usually via technology, but they have nothing to do with the truth of the transcendent world, a truth that is contained only in the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments.

    So, let’s look at this squarely. Either you are going to invent your own god to suit your own desires and ideas, or you are going to have to accept that the God of the Bible is the only God we can know anything about. I personally am not interested in worshipping a god that I myself have invented; that was always called idolatry, and it still is idolatry.

    All our Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment efforts to bring the sacred scriptures of Judeo-Christianity into conformity to science (and subordinate to it) have been the most profound mistake and have put Christianity on the defensive. A Christianity on the defensive is a weakened and ineffective Christianity, which leaves mankind in the dire situation humanity finds itself in today—at the mercy of the forces and technologies bequeathed to us by the past 250 years, a few of which have been useful, but the majority of which have had to do with non-stop warfare, the destruction of our planet, and the rapidly multiplying methods of social control that are steadily removing, via our many secret intelligence agencies, every single one of our vaunted freedoms. We don’t wish to think so, but Big Brother really is here, and our technology gives him the means to do his worst.

    So, although we transcendentalists may now be in the minority, I remain a transcendentalist. God is not immanent (existing in, and confined to, all that we see around us); He transcends all that we see and experience. Whether the created world continues to exist or not, God exists because He is the Creator. If the created world should disappear, God will not disappear with it.

    Similarly, my personal position, as one of God’s created beings, is that I too existed before I came here and will continue to exist after my life on this plane of existence is over. The Third-century church father, Origen, taught this concept, but it is not well known because his book, On First Principles, was anathematized by the Council of Trent and nearly all copies were destroyed. Whether Origen was right or not, I know my aging physical body will continue to deteriorate until death claims it, and my spirit returns to God, who created it and who gave me this particular incarnation to struggle through and to

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