Blinder than Bats

I want to talk about incest. About the family members, the perpetrators and their wives and mothers, who almost invariably deny that anything has happened.

Fathers, step-fathers, and boyfriends are usually the perpetrators. I guess I can understand when they don’t come out and admit their crimes. They don’t want to go to jail.

But what sort of mental gymnastics are the women doing, the women defending these men, when they deny their daughters and granddaughters were molested?

Over and over again, I hear it: my mom said I was lying; my grandmother told my mom it was a bunch of lies.

What in God’s name is wrong with these women? I guess they’re afraid of jail, too. The problem is, they seem to believe their self-deception.

Is there anything more dangerous than when blunder around this earth with our eyes shut tight? Is there anything more harmful than ignorance, especially of the willful variety? The Buddha had it right: the root of suffering is ignorance.

I don't know how a victim of incest deals with it. The brick wall is formidable. How is a person supposed to feel any justice has been achieved, or any resolution obtained? Unfortunately, it seems in sexual abuse cases oftentimes the only justice is gotten by a belief that people get their just deserts somehow -- what goes around comes around, or at the least, the lives they lead are ones of darkness. Or maybe they'll be reincarnated as dung beetles.

I have my own ignorance to deal with: One of the greatest problems I seem to have right now because of the rape is one that simultaneously developed out of my divorce around the same time: I haven't accepted the aspect of human nature that is completely self-absorbed, blind to the pain caused others, and capable of such enormous self-deception without remorse or sense of shame. I haven't accepted how people are duplicitous and can change from one thing into a person who appears totally different. I haven't accepted how or why I could be so trusting, and then betrayed – it is so totally contrary to what I grew up believing I deserved. It came as a shock. And then I look back and think, "did I REALLY know I deserved better, or is there something about me that drew these betrayers into my life?" And then I think, I no longer know what is real, who I am, and who other people are. It's very troubling.

I'm turning to Buddhism and meditation to cultivate an open-eyed acceptance of life as it is. And I'm also returning to my Christian roots and looking for a church that welcomes people with diverse beliefs. I can’t seem to get around Jesus as the cultural lens through which my limited eyes are most able to see a very big God. I've spent several decades being an agnostic and sometime-militant atheist. But I'm finding that despair is far worse than just about anything that can happen. Hope is the only thing that makes it worth it to look for goodness in the midst of outrage. And I'm finding that faith is the way I am able, now, to find hope. It may seem ridiculous to people of greater faith, pathetic . . . but a part of me feels defeated in turning to religion, like I have failed to find sufficient meaning and be satisfied with the privilege of simply being alive on a beautiful and fascinating planet. Perhaps I'll look back on this reluctant experiment differently in a few years.

I don't know how to accept that a man could rape me. I don't know how to accept that my first husband, an intelligent, well-educated and well-liked man, can boldly and without remorse refuse to follow the divorce agreement and treat the mother of his child with carelessness and disrespect. I don't know how to accept that families of childhood sexual abuse are so often blind to the pain they cause, and can live with their deceptions.

The only thing I know is that I can't let myself ever be so self-deceiving. I have to look at my intentions clearly, no matter how uncomfortable. And I have to restrain my actions, even where they seem perfectly natural and justified, if it means treating others in ways I don't want to be treated. I continue to believe human beings have that capacity for introspection and restraint. I want to hold onto that belief.

But I’m afraid. I am afraid that in opening my eyes, in allowing my blind idealism to transform into clear-eyed acceptance of reality, I will lose it.

And I guess there lies the tipping point, the murky edge between despair and hope: faith.