Today, March 15th, has been designated by some as “International Forgiving Day”. I am marking the day by writing this post.
After many years of private pleading, after years of having my request for justice callously dismissed, ignored and denied by my family and other Mennonite pastors and church representatives, I have taken a public stand.
I objected, on the basis of my conscience, to the unconscionable rape of a Mennonite child in the Mennonite kingdom of peace.
I exposed the years of concerted cover-up by Mennonite clergy who “bind burdens too grievous to be borne, and they themselves will not lift a little finger”.
My suffering showed that their demand for unilateral forgiveness both causes and perpetuates the cycle of violence.
The demand for unilateral forgiveness from the victim, without any predicating repentance by the offending party, is unconscionable. It is the primary reason that the cycle of violence, both domestic and societal, continues unabated.
In such a world, injustice reigns; tyranny prevails.
If the violator already knows that the victim will always be forced to forgive the horror of the violation, if the violator already knows that this forgiveness will ensure that he/she is never held accountable for the consequences of the horror of the violation, then what incentive is there for the violator to stop?
And the violence MUST stop. It must be “exposed, rooted out, confronted and overcome”.
To that end, I have fasted. I have prayed.
I have shown my face to the public. I have raised my voice publicly to ask that a Mennonite victim in the Mennonite midst be treated with dignity and justice.
I am not the only Mennonite victim. Some lie beneath headstones in quiet cemeteries, having met an all-too-early death, having succumbed to the physical effects of their spiritual, mental, psychological and emotional anguish. Some victims are Mennonite children whose sexual abuse is still not being reported by their Mennonite pastors. Some are known only as “name withheld“, their letters to the MB Herald testifying to their sorrow.
If each victim can be pressured to unilaterally absolve her abuser of all accountability, if no one ever acts to comply with God’s requirement to “do justice, love mercy, walk humbly”, then the cycle of violence never ends.
The Bible is clear: forgiveness follows repentance. The offender is called to “bring forth works worthy of repentance” – show substantive practical evidence of his remorse and his willingness to act to make things right; the offender is to restore what he/she has stolen.
Then the victim can decide to choose to bestow the gift of forgiveness, and healing can come to both parties.
Yet rarely (in my experience never) is the Mennonite demand – that a Mennonite victim in the Mennonite midst forgive – predicated by a Mennonite call for the Mennonite perpetrator to repent and make things right.
Without repentance, and a corresponding substantive change in the behaviour of the perpetrator to show evidence of his/her repentance, the victim is kept in a constant state of “turning the other cheek”, “returning good for evil”, and silently bearing “burdens too grievous to be borne”.
In such a world, it is the victim who is held accountable for the “sin” of not forgiving.
In such a world, it is the victim who is never forgiven for exposing the crimes.
In such a world, enabling of sin and unaccountability for sin brings an entitlement to sin with impunity.
It is a Kafkaesque world.
It has been my world.
It is the reality that I have experienced in the Mennonite midst.
It is this cruel, evil, Mennonite reality that I made a decision to expose.
It took enormous courage.
It took depths of resolve that only God could grant to me.
