What I Did to My Children

The next morning, I recognized that I was not quite ready to jump into the passages on the fall of man and God sending His son to take our punishment, so I decided to walk the labyrinth at the base of the retreat center. I took off my shoes to walk it barefoot, so that I could feel the Earth and allow Her energies to enter my body more directly.

As I stepped into the labyrinth, I felt my mind settle into a more contemplative state. Labyrinths, which had been part of contemplative traditions for thousands of years, were designed to activate our right-brain functions of spaciousness and awareness, as well as our ability to “settle in,” rather than using our left-brain skills to problem-solve or find solutions and “a way out,” as one might in a maze. The design of the labyrinth facilitated this mindful wondering and mindless wandering.

I walked the narrow circular path, heading in one direction for a handful of steps, then following the path as it turned back in on itself in the opposite direction. My feet mirrored my thoughts. I was still upset by yesterday’s prayer assignments.

I found myself wrestling with some of the scriptures I was absorbing. I could no longer read them in the same way I had in the past, and I no longer wanted to simply avoid them like I had in the last ten years. I could not reconcile the God of the Old Testament with Jesus’ teachings, and I couldn’t even reconcile Jesus’ teachings with the God of the New Testament, who is portrayed as being so disgusted with our sins that He sends His son to shed his blood for us.

I attempted to suspend my revulsion for this God in acknowledgment that I didn’t live in those times and had no clue as to what was necessary, as a matter of survival. Still, I felt resentful. Why couldn’t God simply tell us He loved us no matter what, that He was merciful, that sin only ended up hurting all of us, and that He would always be there to redeem us, to turn us toward goodness, because He was bigger than our sin?

In a way, I could understand it. Ancient Judaism used animal sacrifice for atonement and for thanksgiving, and perhaps God was speaking to his people in the only language they had.

There was the Passover lamb. One without blemish, without a single flaw anyone could find, its blood marked on the doorposts so that death would pass over the house. And there was the Day of Atonement, when the high priest took two goats. One of them was killed. Over the head of the other one he laid both his hands and confessed out loud every sin of the entire nation, and then that goat was led out into the wilderness and let go. That is where we get the word “scapegoat.” They loaded a nation's sins onto the second goat and drove it out into the desert, and the people stood there and watched it go.

They needed to see it. They needed something to happen, in a body, in front of them, before they could believe they were clean.

So by the time Jesus arrived, the vocabulary was already there. John the Baptist looks up and says, behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, and nobody had to ask him what he meant. Paul writes later that Christ our Passover lamb has been sacrificed. Every person in that culture had spent their whole life watching a spotless lamb die and a guilty goat walk away.

And so, he sent a man to them. He sent Jesus, who was led by God to offer himself as a blood sacrifice to end the need for further blood sacrifice. Perhaps this was the turning point. It was what we needed in order to feel free enough to move closer to God without fear of judgment.

And yet, even with all of that behind us, the church kept reaching for the old safety. It has always preferred the law, the comfort of a clear rule you can follow and be sure you got right. I understand the pull. But that was never what Jesus taught. The spirit of Christ was love and mercy.

And Jesus kept choosing the person over the rule, over and over. He honored women. He befriended foreigners. He esteemed people from other belief systems. He “defiled” himself by sitting down to eat with the very people the old law told him to avoid.

So, how was I supposed to hold the Bible? How would I hold other sacred texts? How would I ever reconcile with church tradition? I didn’t know. But I decided then and there that it was better not to know than to blindly believe what I’d been taught to know.

At one point on the labyrinth walk, I gazed down at my feet and saw that they looked just like my father’s feet. I had looked down at his feet many times as I was bent over the lid of the toilet seat, my pants pulled around my ankles, while he spanked me with his leather belt.

He was not a monster. That is the part I have never been able to make fit. My father loved me, and he believed a father was supposed to do what he did, and he had been handed that belief the same way I would one day hand it to my own children.

So how does a person who loves God, and loves you, do a thing like that and never once suspect he is doing harm? I had been carrying that question around for years without ever putting words to it. And as it happened, I had been reading about it all week without realizing that was what I was reading about.

Since I was still in the midst of my own dark night of the soul, I had been reading a book about St. John of the Cross, who’d coined the term. I was learning about his kidnapping and imprisonment for his attempts at revitalizing the Carmelites when I was struck that it was priests who did this, priests who had tortured him brutally and stuck him in a closet not even tall enough to stand up in, so that he had to urinate and defecate on himself, and the scraps of food he was given were often thrown into the feces and urine on the floor. They beat him so badly that he became crippled for the rest of his life.

In light of my current wrestling with the concepts of sin and evil, it struck me deeply that these were men of God who had done this! How could they be so taken over by evil? I imagine they believed they were doing God’s work; that, in some perverse way, it was even out of their love and commitment to Him. In their minds, John was corrupting the message of God with his new ideas, and the evil needed to be driven out of him, to purify him. Perhaps they’d descended into bloodlust and their own repressed rage as they beat him, but at least in the beginning, they must have thought they were doing good and would have not called it evil or even wrong.

I could understand this on a smaller scale. I had cut off from my heart at an early age because it was too painful to feel, and because following it only seemed to get me in trouble. Tragically, that left me susceptible to following the teachings of authority figures without question, and out of touch with my own maternal instinct.

I spanked my children. I believed I was following scripture, that the rod drives out foolishness. I did not go so far as the Old Testament teachings, which instructed parents to stone rebellious teenagers. But if I had lived in those times, I wondered whether, in my zeal to obey God, I might have done something that drastic, for what I believed was their own good and the good of the community. It was unsettling to wonder what I might have done under some deluded notion of “God’s will.”

I walked out of the labyrinth with nowhere to put any of it. I had not come here to indict my father, and I had not come here to indict myself. I had come to be quiet. But this was what the silence churned up, and there was no walking it back.

What I could not stop turning over was the strangest part of what I had felt as a child. The spanking had hurt, and I had been terrified of it, and yet some part of me was relieved. Because the separation was worse. My “badness” put a distance between me and my dad that I could not stand, and the belt was how the distance closed. That was the arrangement. Pain, and then I was clean, and then I could be near him again.

And sitting there, I understood something that had been hiding in plain sight my entire life. I had been reading God through my relationship with my father. Of course the blood made sense to me. Of course a Father who required something terrible before he would have me back felt like love. It was the shape love had taken first, and earliest, and deepest. I did not adopt that theology. I recognized it. It was already the language my body spoke.

And then, right behind it, the other thing. I had done it too. I had reached for the same punishment, and the same certainty, handed down and never once questioned. I did it because I believed it. Spare the rod, spoil the child. It was in the Bible, and I loved my children, and I wanted to give them everything the Bible said was good for them. I was sincere.

That is the part I can never quite get around. I was sincere. Whatever damage I did, and I did plenty, I did it while trying my hardest to do right by them. Which means sincerity is no protection at all. It never was. You can be certain, and faithful, and utterly convinced you are loving someone, and still be the one who hurts them. I know that from the inside, and it makes me slower to throw stones at anyone still holding a rod they were handed and told to use. I don’t agree with them but I do understand them.

Here’s what I didn’t know then, and what I would give a great deal to have known. There is an argument about those verses. There has been for centuries.

I am not going to stand here and tell you the Proverbs say something other than what they say. They are real. I quoted them, and I meant them. But the rod in those verses is the shepherd’s rod, the same one in the psalm that is supposed to comfort you, a thing for guiding and protecting and pulling a wandering animal back toward the flock. People have gone back and forth for a very long time about how literally any of it was meant to be taken.

I never heard a word of that argument. Not one word, in fifty years inside the church. I was handed one meaning, I was told it was the meaning, and I never thought to ask who decided that it was.

That is the thing I keep coming back to. Not that I was wrong. That I was so certain, about something I had never once examined. And once you see that, you cannot unsee it. You start to wonder what else you are holding that you were never given permission to open.

I did not know yet what was coming next. Only that the next passage God would put in my hands was about a woman who had been unclean for twelve years. Who had also spent everything she had trying to fix herself. And who finally did the one thing I had never once been able to do.

She reached out anyway.

Was there something you did, believing with your whole heart it was right, that you would do differently now? And whatever else this stirred up, leave it in the comments. I read every single one, and Thursday is where I pull up a chair and really answer.