Kirkepiscatoid

Today’s readings are about the plight of women in the third world—malnourished, abused, sold into slavery or pleural marriage from childhood on, forced to endure mutilating procedures like infundibulation.

Reflection questions:

1. Meditate on the lives of women around the world who live in poverty and under social oppression. Write about your feelings.

I have a tendency, in my moments of being angry, to “take on the pains of the world.” This problem is so prevalent in some places, it is hard for me to think about without feeling profoundly upset. Having grown up in a violent household I got a taste of this...but I also realize what I experienced might have been “mild” compared to other places in the world where from childhood on, women’s lives are controlled by others in oppressive, violent, and life-threatening ways. I can’t even imagine a life with that level of hopelessness.

2. Do the many ways of violence against women affect your spiritual life? How? Why or why not?

They definitely can affect my spiritual life, by making my anger and my pain over the sins of the world come to the forefront of my mind. What really bothers me about it, is that it can basically have the same type of effect that violence can have—to paralyze me and stop me from moving forward. When one has been a victim of violence, he/she learns to repress feeling, repress hope, repress the truth. This is how the abuser “wins,” in a sense. When I allow my spirituality to become stagnant or stunted by my anger about abuse, the abusers “win” again, and this bothers me a great deal.


3. Reflect on your observations of violence against girls and women.

Sometimes, as a person who survived childhood violence and growing up in a violent household, I forget how “standing up and fighting” can get you killed, even though that is exactly how I survived mine, by resisting and getting to a place in my young adulthood and saying “no more.”

I still remember an episode as a bystander on the Metro in Washington DC in 1995. I was sitting near a couple and they were arguing with each other pretty vocally. I could tell by the way the guy was acting he was in the habit of abusing this woman he was with...it was the little secret code words and body language that tipped me off. I just started staring at the guy. I had one of those little folding umbrellas that folds up in to a cylinder of about a foot and a half and I kept staring at me and flipping it in my hand, like I would use it on him if he came near me.

Then I happened to glance at the woman with him and she was looking at me with a look of utter betrayal. Suddenly, it dawned on me...because I looked like I would challenge this guy if threatened, he would simply take out his anger about that on her when they were alone. I realized I had done exactly the wrong thing although my instinct was to stand up and not be threatened by this man. My standing up for myself had most likely caused her harm later. That is when I first understood the intricacies of the powerlessness of violence against women.

I also remember one time attending a seminar where this tough, decisive, female ER doctor talked about being a victim of spousal violence and how the fact she was seen as a “tough cookie” and as a doctor who REPORTS abuse in her job was exactly what kept her from reporting her own abuse. She knew people would think, “I can’t believe she puts up with this.” Her self image as a “strong person” was in this case, the thing that kept her trapped.

These are hard messages, and it underscores just how complicated this issue can be.