Introduction: Opening the Curtain of Domestic Violence
Opening the Curtain of Domestic Violence
I had a woman who was in a church that I served, and she was being subject to some abuse, and I told her, I said, “All right, what I want you to do is, every evening I want you to get down by your bed just as he goes to sleep, get down by the bed, and when you think he’s just about asleep, you just pray and ask God to intervene, not out loud, quietly,” but I said, “You just pray there.” And I said, “Get ready because he may get a little more violent, you know, when he discovers this.” And sure enough, he did. She came to church one morning with both eyes black. And she was angry at me and at God and the world, for that matter. And she said, “I hope you’re happy.” And I said, “Yes ma’am, I am.” And I said, “I’m sorry about that, but I’m very happy.”1
The reason he was happy, the Reverend Paige Patterson (then president of the Southern Baptist Convention) explained to a large conference audience in 2000, was that the man, after hearing his wife praying, came to church, and when the invitation was given, “he was the first one down to the front . . . And remember, when nobody else can help, God can.”
Thirteen years before that, in 1987, I scheduled an appointment with the president of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Dr. Ken Meyer. I had asked for the meeting to inform him that later in the week I would be separating from my husband. I was apologetic for the embarrassment this would bring Trinity, and I was prepared to suggest two other professors who would be able to finish my courses for the remainder of the term. In no more than a sentence, I explained that my husband was violent and had beaten me on many occasions.
“Why haven’t you come to me earlier?” Dr. Meyer asked. “Are you okay? Do you have a support network back in Grand Rapids? How is your son doing? Of course, you’re doing the right thing to escape with your son.” And then, without so much as a “poor baby,” he launched into a lecture. In the many years he had served as a pastor, he had repeatedly counseled abused women to get out of their dangerous domestic situations. They took his advice until their husbands wept and apologized and pleaded for reconciliation, promising never to beat them again. But the violence always continued.
When I told him my husband would never apologize, he shook his head and said with a sigh, “Mark my words, he will.” President Meyer insisted that I must separate for at least six months until my husband underwent serious counseling, and perhaps even then we should not be reconciled. Such violence is pathological, and a class in anger management often serves as little more than a Band-Aid.
Ken Meyer was spot-on in his assessment. With the help of a singularly compassionate attorney and an understanding minister at our church, my son and I escaped to safety. Through the court, I was granted a restraining order, separate maintenance, and sole custody of Carlton. Soon thereafter, my husband indeed apologized and agreed to joint counseling sessions with a Bible church minister whose small church was on a country road forty minutes north of Grand Rapids. It proved to be very ineffective. My husband and I were not reconciled. Three years later, I received a call from an attorney in New Jersey, informing me that my husband, whose whereabouts neither my son nor I had known, was suing for divorce. I did not contest.
In the decades since we escaped, friends, acquaintances, and even publishers have urged me to write my story. Why not? Writing is my primary profession. But the pain of reliving those years has always stood in the way. More than that, humiliation. Few can comprehend the depth of shame that still lingers. And not just the shame of being married to an abusive minister, but also the awful acknowledgment of my own complicity—the failure to report my husband to law enforcement when his crimes involved an innocent foster child.
“Your wifely submission [by not reporting him] was the right thing to do,” the Bible church minister assured me. It was not. What I failed to do was self-serving and terribly wrong, indeed, perhaps deadly wrong. By my very knowledge, I was an accomplice, and I will be haunted by that crime for the rest of my life.
Despite the dread in writing and publicizing my story, I was prodded into action by a news report I saw in mid-September 2014. A security camera had captured an NFL player hitting his fiancée in an elevator, knocking her to the floor and then dragging her limp body out of the elevator door. Ray Rice, the perpetrator, had previously undergone sessions in anger management. What good had it done? Should I have been shocked to learn that his fiancée married him some months after the incident?
President Paige Patterson counseled a victim of domestic violence to kneel by the bed and pray. President Ken Meyer counseled a victim to get away from the perpetrator, warning that violent abusers are often left unchanged by counseling.
If this volume saves even one woman from further domestic abuse, my dread in writing will have been worth it. I do not speak as a lone voice. With me are historical and contemporary women whose stories have shaken me even as they have sustained me. More than that, I am bolstered by the Bible and its honest telling of terrible transgressions—transgressions involving God’s own people. Scripture serves as a blueprint for anyone today who opens the curtain on a marriage and reveals ugly secrets. But even more, its pages present in plain sight a model for mutuality in marriage.
Here in this volume, two themes are balanced: black-and-white Bible and black-and-blue wife. During his violent rages, my ex-husband often hurled biblical texts at me, as though the principal tenet of Scripture was, “Wives, submit to your husbands.” He spit the words out, repeatedly beating me over the head, at least figuratively, with his black-and-white Bible. His hitting and punching and slamming me against doors and furniture, however, were anything but figurative. Nor were his terror-loaded threats. I felt trapped and feared for my life, while outwardly disguising bruises with long sleeves and clever excuses, pretending that ours was a happy marriage.