I met Lia the one perfect summer of my life.
I remember exactly where I was—the parking lot of Home Depot in a cold winter wind, the bright yellow of a cross walk under my feet—when I told Robbie that the biggest regret of my life was that I had not done more for Lia.
So I wrote the following essay to put myself on trial.
It was 2018 after the NYT broke the story on Pastor Andy Savage in Memphis and Jules Woodson, the victim, wrote a guest essay. It was all been too familiar a read where the reputation of Jesus’s churches was more important than the sacred dignity of a kid.
The central character of this piece, Lia, read and approved it when I first sought publication in several major journals and magazines. We had hoped it would change the way pastors and other spiritual leaders structured their communities and took care of people.
The piece was not chosen for publication. This is as much to with the writing as anything else—the piece doesn’t fit an exact genre and the word count is long for formal publications. Which is why it fits here in my substack about language, the place I’m looking at what we say and don’t say.
I hope it can offer a start to those conversations that might lead to change.
An important further note: This is a work of nonfiction. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the identities of characters or to protect the author. Conversations have been reconstructed from memory and some events have been compressed for readability. Like all memoir (aka based in memory), the personal recollections have also been reshaped by time, memory, and the craft of writing. They are no less true.
audio of the essay is available with voice recording by performer Jenna Pastuszek.
You will observe sentence-level discrepancies between the recording and the written text. I edited on a small scale since she first recorded.
Too Expensive to Keep
I met Lia the one perfect summer of my life.
It was a summer of green woods and falling off rope swings and watching coins flatten beneath passing trains. It was a summer of dives into lakes at dusk and meals shared from steaming plates, back doors open to catch any breeze. We camped under the stars and shared couches in living rooms when it rained on our tent-less campsite.
Lia and I became friends the night that we all went camping up at the fire tower and met the bear. The night grew late and we decided to put out the sleeping bags. I saw the bear as it appeared ten feet in front of me in the light of the flashing cell tower. The bear was not scared and searched for the meat we’d cooked in the coals.
We got into our cars, unwilling to face a bear unconcerned with people. I jumped into the car first. Lia came in through the driver’s side and made it into my lap on the passenger side with agility only fear and necessity could bring. We squealed and screamed and held each other as the bear stalked around our car, its face appearing at the window beside our heads.
Somehow, we’d also lost the keys somewhere in the night and it took us a long time to find them. When we finally drove away, the bear appeared out of the woods and ran beside us in the car headlights.
We’ve been friends ever since.
Lia and Jesus became friends that summer too—someone I’d known since before I could read. She found Jesus among the trees and shared meals and Bible studies. I had just turned twenty one and Lia was nineteen, an age difference that made me the leader, the caretaker, the wise voice in her life. We read the Bible together and talked about God and living a life He would be pleased with. The ground began to move underneath her — she left a boyfriend, stopped partying as much. She belonged to our community the way we belonged to each other, rooted in the woods and Jesus. We loved her. I loved her. She loved me. I watched her life like the older sister I felt myself to be in her life—responsible, watchful.
The perfect summer was short. In July, my parents’ marriage began to break permanently—a move out, a move back in, a foreshadowing of the permanent separation that would come nine months later.
Lia was my steady friend throughout that year. Our lives ran in one direction. We talked about everything —our troubles with men and God, her new major and hobbies, my new obsession with dancing.
There is a picture of us together from that fall at a college football game. We leaned together with our group of friends under the bright stadium lights, happy.
She wouldn’t tell me about the rape for another two years.
23yo. My second year in campus ministry.
Lia would graduate in a few months while it was a mere blink from my own college graduation.
She sent me a text: “It’s just hard to go to church when he’s there.”
Who? What was she talking about?
We met to talk. She didn’t call it rape. It was just this moment in time, a night when she woke up in her own vomit, unsure of what had happened. It happened the night before that football game where we all smiled and no one knew. He said he thought she knew what was happening. She hadn’t. She cleaned up, brushed it aside, and kept going. Two years later, she struggled to be in church where she’d see him. She struggled to be where he was respected and how his recent marriage had been celebrated. She wasn’t sure exactly why that moment had hurt her so much that two years later she’d question going to church on a Sunday morning.
But I recognized what had happened. I knew its name. Lia tells me that I looked her in the eyes and said, “Lia, you were date raped.”
We couldn’t go back from that naming. And neither of us knew what to do.
I told no one.1 Lia asked me not to. She wasn’t ready. We both weren’t sure what would happen if she was. I carried this information with me for months without even hinting there might be something to tell. I did not tell my coworkers. I did not tell even my sister to whom I told everything.
I saw the man weekly at church and hung out with his sister in the campus ministry.
I sat, instead, beside Lia as I waited for her to give me permission to get us help.
Almost overnight, she was not the only one to sit beside. More students came to me to tell me their traumas at the hands of men they’d never name. I was the first person they’d ever told; I listened and tried to find us help.
The nightmares started.
I dream of a man chasing me through infinite streets, a man I know will rape me when he reaches me. I take shelter with people who should help me but they tell the man where I am, so I keep running, crying for help as I go. I am hiding in a room. Someone pounds on the door. I know there were men on the other side of that door with guns. I am in a dark room tangled in bed sheets. I run towards the door. I must reach the door before my students, save them from what was on the other side.
I opened the door and the fragments of the dream lift off me like steam from hot cement after rain.
I was in the Dominican Republic with a team from our church. The pounding on the door was our team lead with his enormous farmer first; my room was late for breakfast and devotions. I was safe.
I began to shake and cry. I struggled to inhale and exhale. I was safe. I knew everyone in that sunlit lobby eating their oatmeal. I was safe. I did not feel safe.
Someone took me by the arm and pulled me back into the room, closing the door so the team couldn’t watch this. Breathe, she commanded. She sat me on the bed as my knees gave out and the tears came. Breathe, she repeated, and began to pray aloud. She prayed for the darkness to lift, that the evil that surrounded me would be broken, that evil would leave me alone. I leaned into her, leaned into the sobs, held for the first time.
Lia gave me permission to tell the pastor’s wife after the service trip, though I had not told her about the nightmare.
I do think I told her that I needed to get us help. I arranged the meeting. The three of us sat in Lia’s apartment living room. The pastor’s wife asked questions. Lia answered them. She had her hands clasped between her knees. She leaned forward like she was covering her stomach from a blow. The pastor’s wife was kind and sat adjacent to her, reflecting her posture, listening carefully. The pastor’s wife asked Lia what she wanted to do— and Lia could not answer. How could she? We arranged a time for her to meet with the prayer team to work through the pain she carried with her. Maybe God would lighten this trauma.
The pastor’s wife and I left that meeting together and walked into a day of perfect light, birds singing for the first time that year. “I think we need to talk to Pastor S. now,” she said, naming another pastor at the church who had mentored the man in question for several years. And Pastor Scott’s wife had mentored the woman the man had married the previous fall.
He called me a week later and asked if we could talk. I sat across from him in a local café, the clamor of plates and call of orders falling around us in a blanket of white noise. Most days, Pastor Scott had eyes with instinctive brightness, a smile lurking there just ready to be shared. That day, his eyes seemed to have a rainstorm behind them, like a flood he had to prepare for. He looked down often or out into space, tapped his knuckles on the table—a way to keep his hands occupied. He seemed to slump, as if his bones had gotten too heavy for him to hold up.
I did not know where to look and so looked at his hands or the pattern on the booth cushion behind his head.
“I talked to him,” Pastor Scott told me. “He told me he didn’t know she wasn’t conscious until the next day. It happened before he knew Jesus.”
There was a long silence as he looked away again, eyes distant as he thought really hard about what to do. “I’ve walked with him through the years since. I know him. I’ve seen the way he’s changed.”
Another silence. My body began to close down. I did not want to disappear—just decrease surface area as if my whole body was an ear, that my whole body could not handle taking in what it was hearing, as if it had to grow smaller to decrease the impact, make the noise smaller.
He continued. “He said he apologized as soon as he found out what happened. It was a miscommunication.” The man (who had been a student as well) had texted Lia the day following and said he hadn’t known she was blacked out and that he was sorry.
To be sorry, it seems, was enough.
To have found Jesus since that crime was more than enough.
Pastor Scott told me that he and his wife had decided not to tell the man’s wife. “They just got married. We know they’re struggling with some trust things. It just doesn’t seem right to talk about this. It happened before he knew Jesus. He’s a different person now.”
I thought of the man’s wife, her smile, the way she felt in a hug, how we weren’t friends but were in the same circles. It felt strange to know this about her husband and she not. I thought of it often in subsequent years when I heard about the griefs that follow couples, the losses that come with life, the things none of us could see from that cafe booth.
“What is there to do?” Pastor Scott asked to no one in particular.
A week later, I sat at my small desk in the church office doing some work for the ministry. The pastor for college ministry, my boss, interrupted me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked. I knew what he was asking about. I wondered if I was somehow in trouble but couldn’t see why.
“I couldn’t,” I said.
“Why?”
“I told who I had permission to tell. I told the pastor’s wife. And we got permission to tell Pastor Scott and he addressed it. It had to be kept small to honor Lia’s request for privacy. We’ll go to the prayer team. It was taken care of.”
My boss was not satisfied. “But here’s the thing: I am responsible before God for their souls. I am responsible for my family and for this ministry. I am responsible for you. I will answer to God for this community when I am judged at the end of my life. I can’t do my job if I don’t know what has happened.”
I shook my head. “I would have broken her trust if I did that. When I was an RA, they trained us2 to give the power to the person who was hurt. To give them choice. I couldn’t tell you.”
No, he repeated. He needed to know.
I reached deep towards the ground in my soul, a solid place beneath the way my breath felt like newspaper caught in a winter wind. I resisted to anyone answering for my soul other than myself. I resisted anyone answering for Lia.
I said that next time I would make the same decision.
No further action was taken by the church. The “accountability” the man was to receive was merely a private confession. Meanwhile, Lia’s pain, as if it was as shameful as the man’s crime, was addressed in a private prayer service.
I looked for an exit from my job at the church. I applied for a fellowship to teach English abroad. When the acceptance email arrived in my inbox, I said yes without question. I said goodbye to my friends and family and my job and my church and got on a plane.
I came to distrust churches. I learned to distrust anything that believes one story about the world is more important than individual dignity.
I saw how rarely individuals are protected by spiritual leaders. I saw the impact of Western missionary movements in developing countries. I doubted the structures that I had been told were required for true faith. And, as I came into intimacy and my own sexuality, I also found that these losses were carried in my body. I had never been touched or spoken to in a way that should make me afraid. It didn’t matter. I was afraid.
A therapist told me all of this had a name: Secondary Trauma. It’s when you show symptoms of trauma simply through hearing an account of a firsthand trauma. This can happen on a national or international scale like after a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina or a human caused crisis like 9/11. It can happen on an individual basis, especially in families and close relationships.
In my case, it was both primary and secondary trauma. I had carried something I should not have had to carry. I saw an institution I identified with not identify with me.
When I was a kid, my mom would say that, “Sin never affects just one person.” She tried to make me see how when anyone did something wrong, it hurt lots of people. This applied to how I treated my siblings and also how she commented on events in the world. I think this is what Secondary Trauma really is—how the choices of one person are never about just them. It’s about how harm spreads from one person to another, gaining power as it goes. It’s also the idea of Original Sin that is foundational to Christian theology. When Adam committed the first sin, it wasn’t just about him. His individual sin is carried in the human race; and so our communities carry the sins of a single person. The sickness spreads.
My mom always finished these conversations with this: “Sin will always come to light. It will always catch up with you.”
I called Lia to say hi.
She’d gotten married a few years prior, and I wanted to tell her how happy I was for her. They were happy and were planning a big garden for the summer. I told her about my own wedding and travels and work.
An hour into our conversation, I told her that I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened all those years ago. I told her that my biggest regret was not demanding justice for her; that I regret that all I did was hand her to a prayer team and hope it would work out someday; that nothing came from it that could help her; that maybe it would have been kinder to leave the silence where it was. I said that I never asked her what she needed to heal. I hadn’t known that question existed. I didn’t know we had souls that guided us to healing, who could say what we needed.
Lia told me that what I had done was not nothing. We had listened to the choreography of forgiveness and letting-go that our pastors and church modeled for us.
“We asked for help from the ones we thought might be able to give it. And they wouldn’t. We did the best we could. We did the church thing. That was all we knew how to do. No, it wasn’t what I needed. But you tried and I tried and no one knew any better.”
Lia told me that she’s doing better now. That she told her husband a long time ago.
“At the time, you were the only person I had ever told. The only reason I can look back at that time is because you were there. You were the only one to look me in the eye and say what it was. It would live in a very different part of my memory if you hadn’t. Because you named it, I could name it.”
And in this moment, she rewrote the story for me. I had carried responsibility all this time. Only with her words could I see that I had never been responsible for what had happened to her.
I thought I had failed her. But we were both failed by the structure around us. We did the best we could. I did the best I could.
We talked about what this has meant for us and of church. She and her husband had found a place in the Mennonite community, a structure that depends on communal decision-making around theology, discipline, and structure. I had left church altogether.
Lia and I also talked about how the #MeToo movement brought all of this up again. I had wondered what would have happened to me and to Lia if I’d been louder about what happened.
I then saw what I most feared: that it is easier for a community to protect their idea of one man than to reckon with the grief of his actions and act on behalf of justice.
After years of seeing nothing of the man who raped Lia (quitting church will offer that kind of reprieve), I began to see him around town.
On a holiday, he and his wife ran across the intersection in front of my car just before the light turned green. They were laughing, fresh faced, enjoying the night. On another evening, I saw him at the local bar. He was there with friends, all wearing t-shirts from a new church plant founded by the pastor who had been my boss. I wondered if perhaps he was a Bible Study leader, a mentor for other men in the church plant.
I pretended both times I did not see him. I avoided eye contact, acted as if he and his wife were strangers, that we didn’t know each other’s names, hadn’t held hands to pray. My belly curled into itself like a child trying to hide. I felt like I knew too much, like maybe I was the one who did him wrong. This does not make sense.
I began to reckon with the cost of everything I still carried. I had not told anyone about this experience. In the beginning, it was for Lia’s sake. Even years after I saw how wrongly she had been treated, I kept my silence.
Silence protected a church that refused to address a crime beyond a private conversation. I had believed that my story with Lia was shameful, that my attempts to get help were insufficient and so worthy of silence. My silence also said being raped is something to be ashamed of and should stay a secret, when instead the only shame here belongs to a man who committed a crime.
I thought I was protecting the privacy of someone I loved. I now see that it was involuntary silencing and the continuation of trauma. My silence said that healing from trauma was something people must do as individuals and alone in isolation. My silence said that perhaps there was not a God who calls people to account.
I know I am not the only person to carry the church’s silence and shame. I am not the only one afraid to speak in case my shame might be the truth. I am not the only person to lose God in the shame someone else told me to carry.
I want an accounting of every place that offers new beginnings—which are extracted from silence.
Silence is too expensive to keep. I won’t pay its fees anymore.
Mandated reporting has changed since the training I received in 2008 and 2009. In the instance discussed in this essay, I was not in the employment of a public institution and the privacy of the individual was paramount in her desires for addressing the incident. In 2012-2013, there were no formal rules in place for our church staff to follow in these instances, and so I chose what I thought would best respect Lia.
see above
Thanks for having the courage to dredge this up and share with the world.