Our daughters, Jocelyn and Emily, were at our place the other evening for supper and we chatted about a book we have all read, Emma Donoghue's award-winning Room. The story is told by a child, a boy who is the outcome of the rape of a young woman abducted as a teen and held captive in a secret room.Later I called them into the TV room when Elizabeth Smart came on the news. She is the 23-year-old Utah woman who went through a similar experience for nine months when she was fourteen. She spoke in a courtroom to the man who had snatched her from her own home, and held her captive under the pretense that this was God's will. He raped her and psychologically brutalized, her but remarkably her faith sustained her through the experience (she is a Mormon.) In her statement she offered “Nine months of living with him and seeing him proclaim that he was God’s servant and called to do God’s work and everything he did to me and my family is something that I know that God would not tell somebody to do...”
Smart is determined that this event will not set the course of her life and that she won't allow the perpetrator to continue to have power over her. She is a remarkable young woman, and the story demonstrates the polar contrasts of faith. Like virtually everything else in life it can be employed for evil or for good, for harm or for strength.
Any thoughts?
It's people like this, who commit datardly deeds and hide behind the convenience of a spiritual explanation that give all people of faith (and faith in general) a bad name.
ReplyDeleteMy stomach literally churns as I hear Elizabeth Smart's name, and I think of what she endured, and now to have to face him again.
ReplyDeleteI like your term that she is determined that this horrific event won't "set the course of her life"...obviously a very conscious, and I would think disciplined, path given the painful memories she lives with. I wonder how many of us actually consider what does set the course for our lives? Too often life just seems to happen.
A remarkable young woman, for certain.