The Garden of Roses: Stories of Abuse and Healing

This year, as she has every year for many years, Elizabeth Goeke is leading an icon Advent Labyrinth Walk, at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral here in Portland, Oregon. Elizabeth might have led an Icon Advent Labyrinth Walk in Benedictine Monastery as she once was a young Benedictine Nun. But fate intervened. A priest tried to rape her on a Christmas Eve in the mid 1960s. She fought the priest off but ended up bloodied and shaken. She pulled herself together and played the church organ for Christmas Eve Mass, but inside she struggled with what had happened to her. Her confessor ordered her to remain silent or face ex communication. When she could no longer remain silent, he told her she had lost her vocation and could only speak of the attempted rape in confession. So she returned to her parent’s home and sought advice on what to do during confession with the priest in her parent’s parish. The priest accused her of lying and threw her out of the Church. She left the Catholic Chu...

I like to go to the mall with my daughter. We don’t clothes shop. We eat cheap Chinese food at the food court and then go to Barnes and Noble cafe to share a cappuccino or Frappuccino and read books. Browsing through the bookstore before retreating to the cafe, I saw a book entitled True Police Stories of the Strange and Unexplained by Ingrid P. Dean. The book included stories of encounters with angels, encounters with ghosts, intuition saving lives, and odd coincidences and twists of fate. I browsed through the until I chanced upon one particular story about a police man stationed at a high school. He was assigned once to show a new student around the school. She wore her hair piled on her head, a sun dress, and oversized high heels. He worried that she would be bullied by other students because she dressed oddly, so he sought out the student twice a week or so after school and between classes to ask her if she was OK. She repeatedly replied that she was doing fine. Over ...

The Occupy Portland protestor held up a sign based on the words of Dom Helder Camara, “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint; when I ask why the poor are hungry, they call me a communist.’ I had taken my children down to Occupy Portland for the fifth time to see the scrappy protest progress from people with sleeping bags sleeping on tarps to a tent city with a kitchen open to feed protestors, the homeless, supporters and even the occasionally hostile passer by. Both my children wanted to see the protests, but my daughter was apprehensive because of the presence of so many homeless people with drug and alcohol problems. I told her that the main group of protestors would not want people to engage in public drunkenness and drug taking because these activities could give the police an excuse to shut down the protest. Indeed, during this fifth visit we had seen a number of signs posted asking people not to engage in public drinking and drug use. My children,...

My son and I arrived late at the One Spirit, One Call event this Sunday in the Park blocks here in Portland, Oregon.  One Spirit, One Call is a group that formed last year in response to the announcement by the Vatican that the ordination of women was a sin against faith as serious as the abuse of children.  The group is not about the ordination of women, but about women having a more respected and responsible role in church life.  Last year’s event as well as this year's centered around a woman oriented service paralleling, to some degree, Mass without the Eucharist. The role of women in the Church is not my particular issue.  I am a woman doing what I do, so I feel that my own conscience overrides my obedience to authority, but women abuse children and cover up abuse the abuse of children too.  Ordaining women as priests won’t end abuse in the Catholic Church, nor will it heal the wounds caused by abuse.  However, there is a relationship between the two ...