Service of Ordination

Post Author: Lisa

Content note: This piece contains discussion of family abuse and religious trauma.

SERVICE OF ORDINATION 2020

I wish you knew
What it’s like
How it feels
To watch your kitchen table tyrant
wrapped in a red cloak of victory

Elevated
Approved
Credentialed
Crowned

How to the world
you’re sitting on a couch with a laptop
but really
you’re in a locked closet
off the master bathroom
with your little brother and his LiteBrite
Your hands shaking
Panic
Fear
Shame
spiraling inside you
You’re singing lullabies to him
to drown out the crashing bookshelf
and the screams

Then you’re in the conference rooms
Large upholstered chairs for
The Inquisition
unbiased and soft-spoken
Liability lawyers in clergy’s clothing
Your guts and dignity
smeared across the diligent notes in their legal pads

“Years ago,” sigh the Inquisitors
As you roll your sleeves again and again
and again and again to
Show the wounds
that will not close
so long as there are grocery cashiers
with glasses and brown hair

I wish you knew
What it’s like
How it feels
You who voted “yea”
You who post congratulations
Who never heard
The drywall crack
The bones break
Touched her hair between your fingers
as she whispered “Just let me die”

I force myself to watch
What Superintendents
did not stop
What Committees and Boards
did not stop
What Commissions and Conferences and Sessions and Bishops
Did not stop
Because even if you
Felt
Knew
If truth escaped from the closets
and the conference rooms
If I poured out my last drop of pride
I finally see-
Oh this the cruelest cut of all-
You did believe me
And you crowned him all the same.

A decorative image of homemade baked goods arranged on a table.

Baking Therapy 2020

Lisa (pseudonym), late 20s, serves in young adult ministry in the Southeast. She writes about her experience in the complaint process against a fellow clergy person who abused her and a family member.

Image by: A Relative of Lisa
Used with permission