Elizabeth Smart responds similarly when discussing her kidnapping: that she's moved past it, that it's no longer worth discussing, that even though her career involves activism and such, her own ordeal is not central to her life.
They have allowed their lives to remain central to their experience, rather than acquiescing to life-changing ordeals becoming central. They have fought to remain who they were.
__________
Sometimes, it's easy to nitpick at all the things Christianity gets wrong. There are lots of things. Lots of particulars, and lots of big-picture items, depending on your perspective, beliefs, life experiences, yada yada yada. Christanity has an oft-earned reputation as a bully, and, as a result, it's sometimes a sitting duck. As with all the realest things, it is uneasy; it exists in the same tension as a circulatory system, wherein life-carrying blood chafes against the walls of the vessens which bear it: the functions of a body for and against itself. It will never be ideal.
Sometimes, I think Christianity considers it unchristian to consider something completely dead.
The interworkings between life and death are central to Christianity, and the heart of Christianity is built on God/Jesus "defeating death, hell, and the graaaave!" which, if you grew up in church, you will have read in your finest sweaty-spitty booming preacher voice, and let the church moan amen. Death bad, life good, power over all. Simple.
I was raised on that formula, toddled aisles under the gaze of people who saw bad situations as either punishments for wrongdoing or as vehicles for God's power to be wrought more abundantly in the lives of the faithful!! Any bad circumstance was treated as fertilizer to grow God. Unexplored, unfelt, unrealized, folded and tucked into the back of something, like a Sunday morning bulletin, week after week after month, shoved into the back of a Bible until the spine began to rip apart under the pressure of so much.
If you're taught that your bad experiences give more room for God to grow in your life, you know what you become? A broken spine. A martyr; a narcissist. Breathlessly starstruck in your pain, unable to see your bad experiences as things which should never happened to you. Forcing your God-formed and God-seen heart into the ground, screaming and gagging, in exchange for the idea of God's power breathing life and beauty into the rotting corpses you've fastened around your neck. Isn't that what God does? Won't God make sense of this, eventually, if I just hold on? Won't he make it beautiful?
Oh, honey; just stop. Because no. None of it means what we've always thought it means. None of it is simple. None of it makes sense. None of it feels right or beautiful. None of it is your responsibility. None of it is your fault. I don't know why it happened, and I never will, and it will never be okay, and I don't know what to do with that.
But I know what's beautiful, and what isn't.
Driving yourself nuts, trying to make it mean things that it doesn't, is not beauty. It's not fruitful or healthy. It's not kind, patient, loving, gentle, temperate.
You know what's beautiful?
When you look it in the eye, grow in the shoulders, lean into it, and hiss from your diaphram: fuck. this. shit. When you finally let yourself understand: not a fucking iota of this should ever have happened to me. The language may not be beautiful, but there's fierce, holy beauty in owning every vulgarity you utter toward every death you suffered, because you know that there is no holy language for any of it. Not a word; every word. God knows it's true. And it will be no more or less beautiful if you can ever use sweeter words for it all.
It's beautiful when you sit long enough with the pain to understand that you begin to come full-circle toward yourself again; it's beautiful when you begin to understand that you can be you again. That it's okay. That you don't have to change for it. That finding yourself again isn't evidence that you've failed to become more. And that throwing up your hands is really just refusing to engage it all on any terms but yours anymore.
It's beautiful when you stop driving yourself crazy with it, when you accept that you will not be made more beautiful, more worthwhile, more valuable, more exceptional, more anything by unlocking the secrets of how God turns shit into flowers.
Sometimes, it's just dead. And you leave it. Because otherwise, you start to stink.
It's all stream-of-consciousness while people are talking to me, and there is no pretty ending, and I'm sitting here in Georgia without a laptop, so I had to go buy a tiny keyboard at Best Buy for my iPad..... I don't know what my life will mean or do, if anything significant. I don't know if every person "finds" or "communes" with God in specific paths, if the center of my life with God will flow from a place of pain or not, if God's pleasure finds me best in suffering or industry or I don't even know what.
But I know I hate this keyboard.
And I can breathe a little better.
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