A Resurrection Manifesto

April 4

PBS and Independent Lens released a documentary this week, titled Keep Quiet and Forgive. I watched it yesterday, Good Friday, periodically pausing the video to wipe away tears. There was little in the documentary that was new to me. I’ve devoted a lot of time to researching abuse within Anabaptist circles, and I know the deep level of depravity baked into our culture. But knowing the facts is different than watching the faces of men and women recount the stories of their abuse, to see the shame, horror, anger, and grief flicker in their eyes and to hear the strain in their voices. I kept thinking, “How have we done this? How have we done this, O God?!”

We’ve established rhythms and cycles of abuse, beaten the bodies of children into compliance and then ravaged them, silenced the voice, dignity, and worth of women as equal image-bearers of God alongside men.

There is one scene in the documentary where an advocate, Linda Crockett, displays a picture that an Amish woman drew to describe what it felt like to be a part of her community. The picture is heart wrenching—women in bonnets stand with shoulders hunched, fear etched in the crooked lines of their mouths. In their midst, a man stands over a child, clutching him in anger. Crockett tells Lizzie Hershberger, an abuse survivor sitting next to her: “These are Plain women, and they are weeping, and there’s children among them that are obviously hurt.”

These women find themselves blamed no matter how they react to sexual assault. If they resist, their communities proclaim they are condemned to hell for not being “nonresistant.” If they don’t physically resist, well, their accusers proclaim, how could you rape someone who’s willing? And even outside of Plain circles, the legal system often enforces little accountability and does not ensure the safety of the victims, whether past victims or future ones. One man in the documentary gets off with 45 days of jail time; another walks right back into his community after being charged with a misdemeanor. Another, Willis Hilty, was convicted to 10 years after horrifically abusing his wife and children, but was released after serving not even half that time. His Amish community members wrote letter after letter vouching for his character, promising that he was not a threat to his family, and accusing his wife, Elizabeth, of exaggerating the pain of her husband’s assaults on her body.

It’s easy to see the horrific abuses that loom over our secular society, chief of which is Jeffrey Epstein’s blatant trafficking and rape of over a thousand young girls and young women. When I was sharing with my husband some of the things I read in Virginia Giuffre Roberts’ memoir, Nobody’s Girl, he replied, “Goes to show that people can get away with anything when they have enough money.” But I countered that thought: “It’s not just about money. It’s about entitlement.” Even if you’re dirt poor, you can wreak havoc on the lives of other human beings, because you believe you have the right to their bodies. And the abuse that’s endemic in the lives of the wealthy elite is also endemic within the faith community that raised me, formed me, and became the seed of my own Christian faith. As one Amish bishop told Linda Crockett, if he reported every instance of abuse in his parish, “all the Amish men would be in jail.”

Even as we publicly eschew violence, we have clothed ourselves in violence.

April 5

And then there is the violence of this Easter weekend. There is the violence of the Roman cross with the horizontal beam, designed to sharpen the torture of the one hanging there, arms outstretched. In the little church that welcomed our family for the services of Holy Week, I knelt with my son before a wooden cross and he reached out his hand to touch it with such force that it swayed and I reached for it, too, panicked. Here is our visceral reminder that the God who stretched out his arms to create the universe also stretched out his arms as a human being to meet us in our suffering, to welcome us to Himself at such bloody cost.

Sally Read writes in the introduction to her poetry collection Dawn of This Hunger: “In the course of writing I realized that all our own stories, our griefs and our joys, fit into the shapes of the events and emotions in Christ’s life and the lives of those surrounding him. We can find refuge in Him precisely because of that fit” (ii). Indeed, in the Triduum of Holy Week, the three days of Thursday, Friday, and Saturday packed with the richness of Christ’s last supper, last breath, and harrowing of hell, I take comfort.

On Thursday, I take comfort that “though we betray him, though it is the night, / He meets us here and loves us into light.”1

On Friday, I take comfort that He came to “breathe beneath the pall / Of our pollutions, draw our injured air / To cleanse it and renew. His final breath / Breathes and bears us through the gates of death.”

On Saturday, I take comfort that “He blesses every love that weeps and grieves, / And makes our grief the pangs of a new birth.”

And on Sunday, I am ready for joy. I am ready for an empty grave. I am ready for a woman turning to see her Lord and Savior and gasping with the realization and running to tell everyone who has ears to hear. I am ready for the end of the story.

I see a familiar teenage boy passing by our house, his face grim and shoulders hunched as they always are, and I pray for resurrection hope to alight in his heart like I feel it in mine. I see the neighbor across the street kneeling in her garden for the first time that I’ve ever seen, pulling away the dead growth, and I wonder if she feels the sprouting of hope in her heart, too.

April 6

But though the end of the story is already celebrated in my heart, the gloom, grief, and horror of Fridays and Saturdays still clings to me. I celebrated my birthday on Holy Saturday, and I thought to myself: Certainly, one thing I have learned so far in life is that evil is more evil than I ever imagined—and that does not exclude the evil that can lurk in my own heart.

It is difficult to keep searching for the light, the triumph, the unexpected flourishing of resurrection power. But that’s what I set out to do this Holy Week in service after service, with believers in Christ from three different denominations.

And the light came, in a rush of images and experiences:

A priest’s kind face and encouraging words.

A slow, meditative walk through the Stations of the Cross.

A whoosh of flame consuming lists of sins scrawled out on bits of paper.

The receiving of bread and wine, with my children and husband beside me.

A huddle of believers around a fire, shielding the Paschal candle lit to give us hope.

The baptism of a young woman.

The sprinkling of water on us all as our vow to follow Jesus is renewed.

The Psalms sung, soothing my tired mind as my eyes close.

If evil is greater than I ever imagined, so is the stunning brilliance of God’s redemption. In the end, indeed, it will be like a sunrise washing over this world’s darkness, making it new. And like I’ve recorded and catalogued the stories of betrayal and trauma, institutional failure and baked-in false doctrine, so, too, I must catalogue these moments of goodness and hope. And they are not only found in the walls of a church—they are found in my children’s eyes, in my husband’s embrace, in a circle of friends laughing together, in the swelling of tender pink buds, in the lace of white flowers on a swaying tree.

As Malcolm Guite points out, even my breath itself indicates the story of resurrection hope: “For a Christian in prayer the very act of breathing can become a return to our birth: a receiving of original life from the breath of God . . . an offering of all that needs letting go and redeeming as we breathe out with Christ on the cross; a glad acceptance of new life in the Holy Spirit as we breathe in again receiving our life and commission afresh from the risen Lord” (Word in the Wilderness, 167).

So like Lizzie Hershberger takes a shaky breath at the beginning of Keep Quiet and Forgive as she lays aside the dark bonnet she wore as an Amish girl, I, too, take a shaky breath, and another, and another. Even when my cynicism feels like a physical object in the room, a rock that stands between me and the worship on a Sunday morning—I know stones get rolled away in the end.

And like Lizzie, who so bravely undertakes the work of restoration and walking with survivors and educating the Amish community, I, too, open my arms to my own calling of love in the world. Because Someone else has His arms open for me.

O God of unchangeable power and eternal light:

Look favorably on your whole church, that wonderful and sacred mystery;

By the effectual working of your providence, carry out in tranquility the plan of salvation;

Let the whole world see and know that the things which were cast down are being raised up,

And things which had grown old are being made new,

And that all things are brought to their perfection by him through whom all things were made,

Your Son Jesus Christ our Lord;

Who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit,

One God, for ever and ever. Amen.2