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	And As I Looked and Wept By Jaime Romo Healing and Spirituality February 2, 2010 http://jjromo.wordpress.com/ "And as I looked and wept, I saw that there stood on the north side of the starving camp a Sacred man who was painted red all over his body, and he held a spear as he walked into the center of his people, and there he laid down and rolled. And when he got up it was a fat bison standing there, and where the bison stood a Sacred herb sprang up right where the tree had been in the center of the nation's hoop. The herb grew and bore four blossoms on a single stem while I was looking – a blue, a white, a scarlet, and a yellow—and the bright rays of these flashed to the heavens." According to Duran and Brave Heart, in The Trauma of History, when the young Black Elk saw this vision, he understood it as the restoration of the nation's hoop—the healing of the Indian nations. Black Elk also understood that the healing would take place seven generations after Wounded Knee—our generation today. Today is a good day for healing and to end sexual abuse everywhere. Several survivors I've spoken with recently seem to have gone through a period of being in a cocoon. Some were devastated by the effects of clergy sexual abuse; some fatigued by the public, draining and sometimes re-traumatizing advocacy work to make Church documents public. They've been retooling, re-evaluating, and rebuilding their lives. They're still concerned about the Church documents that have not been released—and they're trying to find balance, find different lives. Eric Dyson, professor at U Penn, wrote, Come Hell or High Water: Katrina and the Color of Disaster. He commented on the tension between generosity and justice, related to the outpouring of attention and individual resources sent to victims of Katrina. He could have been talking about many religious authority sexual abuse survivors and supporters. He said that people have made an initial response, a generous and right response of generosity to the victims of Katrina. However, justice requires an ongoing disposition or habit or practices of generosity and people are 'disaster fatigued', which makes it difficult to sustain the attention and energy necessary to bring about the institutional changes that reflect justice. I think I see fatigue in many survivors and supporters from working so hard to sustain the attention and energy necessary to bring about systemic change re: child abuse. Emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical fatigue. Thich Nhat Hanh's poem, Interrelationship, sounds like it could be written by survivors of religious authority sexual abuse. "You are me, and I am you. Isn't it obvious that we "inter-are"? You cultivate the flower in yourself, so that I will be beautiful. I transform the garbage in myself, so that you will not have to suffer. I support you; you support me. I am in this world to offer you peace; you are in this world to bring me joy." Despite the fatigue, and maybe because of it, it is time for both the bystanders and the victimized of clergy sexual abuse to work differently. The longer the mutual demonization continues, the more both parties find themselves sucked into the vortex of mutually reinforcing victimization. We must see our inter-relatedness. What makes the experience of the survivor of sexual abuse so toxic is that when we bring a heart-felt pain, others silence us because survivors questioning others' profound trust and belief in religious authorities. This calls into question, others' self- understanding and understanding of the world. In this way survivors have triggered a dynamic that is much larger than any of us can individually understand or dismantle. To survivors, it may feel like those who feel protective of the church in which clergy sexually abused children and vulnerable adults hate survivors. In that sense, I believe that the message Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke, is as challenging for survivors as it was for African Americans who were at their breaking point with rage and frustration with the American dream. "Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us, and we will still love you….But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." So on the part of survivors who have experienced some healing, we must be a force that does not bring in hostilities, but rather brings hope and reconciliation to the forefront. A force that creates a platform for reconciliation that forgives but never forgets. I know many survivors and supporters, as with civil rights workers in the 60s, may feel discouraged after so much effort to expose crimes concealed by religious authority seems to produce little evidence of changed behaviors. To anyone who feels discouraged by the ongoing fight be church leaders to release documents promised in court settlements, don't give up. To those who concentrate on the trauma wreaked upon survivors by religious authority abuse and its cover up, take courage in the work that others have done before us to change society. Martin Luther King Jr. said that if you can't run, walk; if you can't walk, crawl. But keep moving. Keep moving. This struggle is, in short, for civilization. This struggle is bigger than any one of us and has an impact on all of us. Keep moving. Hold on to the vision of healthy and happy children and a society that respects and protects the vulnerable. Keep moving. Healing will take place in our generation today.
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