Fighting the Long Defeat

an advent reflection of sorts

Grief feels like tingling pressure in my sinuses and weight in my stomach. My therapist encourages me to approach these sensations with curiosity. After decades of ignoring my cPTSD, my body howls in grief and anger whenever I allow myself to notice. Grief is a heavy burden. 

“What would it be like to put that burden down?” my therapist questions kindly. I find it easier to release the weight after I’ve put it into words. My past is like a jagged rock, but processing through narrative therapy and safe conversations gently tumbles the sharp edges into something softer, less painful.

Sometimes words evoke certain colors or feelings. Grey and gray, for instance. Grey has a cool, blue tone, while gray feels warm and cozy. I prefer the grey. Anguish feels like a sharp prick of distress. Grief feels like a weight on my shoulders. Sorrow is an undercurrent that runs beneath it all. 

Try as I might, words alone cannot assuage my grief. Trauma provokes cellular and molecular changes in the body. So I find myself sitting in a therapist’s office to try brainspotting. My oldest daughter syndrome flares with pride when the therapist notes that I dropped quickly into my subcortical brain. I will be the perfect brainspotting patient. I will do this treatment so well that researchers will compete to include me in their study. 

Except. 

Healing isn’t linear. There’s more heartbreak. I hoped the church would do better. I thought that Christians (at least some of them) would recognize the rampant abuse in the church and do something.

I was wrong.

I understand the impulse to look away; reckoning honestly with abuse in the church is incredibly difficult. It will shake your faith to its core. Acknowledging that people you love and respect have committed terrible sins will utterly wreck you.

Is any church safe? Is there anyone I can trust?

Advocating for survivors of church abuse is hard. It means listening to stomach-churning stories, walking alongside survivors as they process their trauma, and supporting survivors when they want to seek justice through a church’s official channels.

Helping survivors navigate church systems would transform a saint into an atheist. You carefully gather documentation, spend hours revising emails with the assumption that anything could be published online or in a lawsuit, sit in Zoom meetings where church lawyers attempt to discredit survivors—and in the end, it’s mostly futile.

Is any church safe? Is there anyone I can trust?

Most of the time, my answer is no. I see no safe churches. And yet here I am, laboring hours each week in the hope that maybe someday there will be safe churches.

Facing that grief and despair is one of the hardest things an advocate can do. Because even if we can create a better world for our children, our advocacy has changed us to the point where the church is unsafe. We cannot go back.

It reminds me of a scene in The Lord of the Rings (because everything reminds me of Tolkien) where Frodo travels to the Grey Havens to depart for Valinor:

“But,” said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, “I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done.”

“So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”
-LotR VI.9.1006

Why persist in this work if it irreparably changes us? Why fight the Long Defeat (as Tolkien puts it)?

Perhaps because my Advent hope cannot be fully extinguished. Perhaps because I do not disagree with the Quiverfull parents—the struggle for justice will span many generations.

I mostly disliked Amazon’s Rings of Power adaptation, but there was one scene that I thought captured the essence of Tolkien:

Queen Miriel: My father once told me, that the way of the Faithful is committing to pay the price… even if the cost cannot be known. And trusting that, in the end, it will be worth it.
Elendil: Sometimes the cost is dear.
Queen Miriel: It is.
Elendil: We have little choice then but to keep serving. And I, for one, will see to it that we make the end worth the price.
Queen Miriel: Come what may?
Elendil: Come what may.

- ROP S1:E8

For me, fighting for the good in the church means trusting that, in the end, it will be worth it.

The cost will be dear. And I will pay it.