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	What Is More Important: the Journey or the Destination? By Virginia Jones Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing February 12, 2010 http://web.me.com/virginiajones/Compsassionate_Gathering/The_Garden_of_Roses/Entries/2010/2/11_February_12%2C_2010What_is_More_Important__The_Journey_or_the_Destination.html UNITED STATES -- Over the years, before hitting the public stage with my own brand of advocacy, I have watched from the sidelines as both sides stated their position. Catholic Church side: forgiveness and reconciliation are healing; it is time to forgive, forget and move on. Survivor side: It is impossible to forgive and reconcile when there is no justice, when the truth is still not being told, when those responsible have not been held accountable. These years have been a spiritual journey for me. There is one truth I have learned. It is not the end that is important, it is the journey that is important. Not just in the clergy abuse issue. This is a universal truth. I am against the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan. I've been against them from the very beginning. 9/11 filled me with sadness not only for the loss of life on that bleak September day, but also for the loss of life that would be. Too many people wanted vengeance, rough justice. Now, after nearly 9 and a half years of war, where are we? You simply can't bomb your way to peace. Peace is the way. OK, now that I am saying that for the whole world to see and not just in my living room, maybe the FBI will open a file on me. Actually they already have an old file on me -- from the days I worked as a US Government Observer -- fisheries biologist on Soviet, Japanese and Polish fishing vessels 25 years ago. I got a little too friendly with the natives. I went to visit them in their own country and fell in love a few times. Love is always very suspicious, very dangerous. You might actually open your heart to your enemies when you fall in love. Can't have that now. But there was nothing more hopeless than falling in love with a Russian man who lived on the other side of the world -- in the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It was not to be. So I married a black man from the US Virgin Islands which is why I have dirty blond hair and my children have curly dark hair and cafe o' lait skin. As a white woman marrying a black man, boy did I learn a lot about racism. A month after we were married, we were walking down the Ave near the University of Washington in Seattle, when a young white man saw my former husband and started taunting him. "Hey, Jungle Bunny, why don't you go back to Africa." The young man taunting my husband wore a black leather jacket festooned with swastikas and wore his hair in a mohawk. Me being me, I squared my shoulders and stood up to this skinhead. "You'll never be half the man he is," I said, indicating my husband. My husband started tugging on me, "Be quiet, Virginia," he said. "You don't know if he has friends around here. We could be in danger." I have so many more stories like that one. Just face it, we white people don't know how much racism still exists until, well, we become part of a black family. Knowing the other, living with the other, loving the other seems to be the theme of my life. Reconciliation and peace between people with very different points of view and life experiences is a good thing. But sometimes it is not a such good thing. I will call the survivor Bob. He told me to tell people his story, but I am not sure we agree what his story is. He has shared bits and pieces of it with me, but not the whole story. I suspect someone told him to keep the complete truth confidential. What I know for sure is that Bob is really hurting. Our group, Compassionate Gathering, works on forgiveness and reconciliation. Many of our members are Catholic, but we are not of the Catholic Church. We bring abuse survivors together with other Catholics and other members of the community for mutual healing and understanding. We use the spiritual discipline of Compassionate Listening adapted from The Compassionate Listening Project to do this. We don't work with Church leadership because they have chosen not to work with us. We work with individual priests and parishioners. On this small scale, reconciliation works beautifully. When I first met Bob, he was very angry at the Catholic Church. He had no faith that anyone in leadership would ever do the right thing by him. But through our Compassionate Gathering, Bob reconciled with other Catholics, including priests, and the reconciliation was very uplifting. Bob Walked Across Oregon with us, not the whole way, but part of the way. I helped him get interviews on television and with newspapers. Bob spoke eloquently about his own story and the need to prevent future abuses. He seemed to gain confidence and heal a little more from the experience he had with us. Bob was also involved in some of our discussions about the Sackcloth Penance Patch and how to get other Catholics involved in the apology and reconciliation process, but Bob wanted to go further. He wanted to meet the priest who abused him for mutual understanding. But since Church leadership does not work with me, it was a journey I could not go on with him. Bob found the priest who abused him and e-mailed him. The priest e-mailed him back. Bob shared these initial e-mails with me. They seemed promising. The priest seemed sincere, and I have private knowledge of the priest's attitude which leads me to believe that he did want to apologize to Bob. I encouraged Bob to go further. However, after he shared these initial e-mails with me, I stopped hearing from Bob. He forwarded no more e-mails to me. However, I did caution Bob not to go through the reconciliation process alone, not to face church official alone but with the support of his choice. Bob did not follow my advice. A couple months passed. I spoke with Bob on another matter, and he confessed to me that he was continuing with reconciliation. He told me that his e-mails to the priest who abused him passed through people who worked for or contracted with the Catholic Church. Again I cautioned Bob not to go through reconciliation with support. Bob assured me that everyone had been very appropriate with him and that things were going well. A couple weeks passed, and I heard again from Bob again. This time he was in agony. He had started drinking again after many years of sobriety. He was going to meet with the priest, but he wanted to be left alone. He wanted to stop being a victim. I was puzzled by Bob talking about being a victim. I never thought of Bob as a victim. He had faithfully attended therapy for years. He had long ago sought drug and alcohol treatment. He studied yoga and became a yoga instructor and retreat leader himself. He sued the Catholic Church for damages caused by his abuse and used his settlement money to earn a bachelor's and master's degrees. And he spent many years working with at risk children to help them on the right path. If there was anyone who was a poster child for the effort to heal one's self and become a survivor and thriver, Bob was it. When Bob told his story before our Compassionate Gathering, he was very gracious and kind to us Catholics and to the Catholic Church. He just wasn't a man steeping himself in victimhood. I sent Bob two medals - St. Catherine of Sienna -- because she wrote to Popes and told them what to do and because she inveighed against clergy abuse, and Bernadette of Lourdes for healing. Bob wrote back to me and thanked me for helping him reclaim his Catholic identity. He hadn't started going to church. He had simply started wearing the medals and seemed to derive some comfort from them. After that I left Bob alone for a very long time. I missed him on the Walk Across Oregon, but I if he wanted to be left alone, I wasn't going to ask anything from him. Several months later I needed his permission for something and wrote to him. He was very pleased with what I was doing, but then he dropped a bomb. He was in deep pain still. He was going through a divorce and was still struggling with alcohol abuse. He asked me to tell everyone. I told people who had worked with him his story in a private e-mail, but his troubles stayed with me in my mind and heart. I still feel responsible. The fact remains that his current downward spiral started when he sought reconciliation with his abuser -- a reconciliation that I encouraged. Recently Bob repeated to me what he had said before -- that everyone involved in the reconciliation was nice to him. He had no complaints about the priest or anyone connected with the Catholic Church or the survivor they selected to support him. But the puzzle remains for me. As long as Bob was working with me, he continued to thrive, when he went into the Church controlled situation, his wounds opened up and he went down hill. I spoke with Elizabeth, my clergy abuse survivor/therapist coworker about it. I often turn to Elizabeth for guidance. "The Church took him out of his supportive community in that reconciliation. The reconciliation opened up his old wounds, and he did not have his usual supports with him." I can't say our group was his source of support. Bob's work was more with me than with our whole group. I can't even say that I was a major source of support for him. He did most of his healing work on his own. All I can say is I gave him the opportunity to speak publicly and privately about his abuse and to meet other supportive survivors, supportive Catholics and other supportive members of the community. I don't know of many survivors who have reconciled with the priests who abused them. I do know two, but I don't have permission to tell their stories, and I don't even know their stories well enough to say much about them. What I do know is that those survivors were able to write to and meet with the priests who abused them without interlocutors in between them. The survivors controlled the contact they had, when and where and how, and no one told them when and where and how and with whom they could associate. I think that is the difference. Genuine reconciliation and forgiveness are healing, but the survivor needs to be in control of the process. The most important factor for a survivor of abuse is the psychological damage cause by having control taken over his or her own life taken away from the abuse. Restoring control over the process of healing to the survivor is probably the key factor in healing. Moreover, because perpetrators of abuse are often not able to accept responsibility for the harm they cause, probably the reconciliation that is most important is not that between the survivor and the priest or nun or brother or minister who abuses them, but between the survivor and the church community that covered up the abuse and then failed to support the survivor. Therefore, the reconciliation needs to involve the community, not just the individual abuser and individual survivor. And that is what happened to Bob. The Church bureaucracy controlled the reconciliation and left the community out of the process, and Bob ended up hurt instead of healed by his experience. There is a name for the healing process that involves the whole community -- "Restorative Justice." I came across the concept of Restorative Justice in an article posted on Abuse Tracker back in 2005. Some professor somewhere spoke about this form of justice before a Voice of the Faithful group. A few years ago someone connected me to the person involved with that Voice of the Faithful group. He said he had tried to interest both the Church and survivors in Restorative Justice, but neither side wanted it. However his approach was for abusers to apologize to survivors. Church leadership obviously doesn't to apologize in such a personal way because they want protection from further lawsuits. Honestly admitting abuses opens up the path for more lawsuits. And most survivors are too wounded to want to be re-traumatized by abusers who are not necessarily sorry and who are supported by a structure that doesn't want open apology. But I remained intrigued by the idea of Restorative Justice. There are two definitions of Restorative Justice that I've seen. One is to restore what is lost. It is really hard to restore what an individual survivor loses -- lifelong struggles with depression, suicide attempts, problems with jobs and relationships, problems with touch, structural and chemical changes in the brain that make it difficult for true change to happen. I think the idea of restoring what is lost is too limited. The other definition I've seen, the one I saw in the article on Abuse Tracker so many years ago -- is the whole community is wounded by a crime and the whole community needs to be involved in the healing process. Not only does the individual lose their own peace, the whole community loses it's peace when a crime is committed. Hopefully the intractable dysfunctions of the abuser are not shared by the community. Hopefully the community can heal and learn how to do better, how to prevent abuses, how to support survivors, how to heal everyone who has a question about what happened, how to re-assure everyone that steps are being taken to prevent future abuses. I wonder what would happen if Bob could do the reconciliation over again and be able to chose the setting and the support and be able to communicate his own way, in his own time, would he be as wounded as he is now? I wonder what would happen if the community that brought Bob back to the Church he had left so many years ago was there supporting him through the reconciliation process? Could the process of how reconciliation is carried out be more important than the actual reconciliation itself?
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