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 ...