To Whom Shall We Go?



Today’s Gospel acclamation (6th Sunday of Easter) is ‘If anyone loves me he will keep my commandments’ John 14:15-24.

I cannot help but hear those words from the Gospels, without thinking about the evocative and compelling film ‘Women Talking’ which I watched recently.

If you haven’t seen it, ‘Women Talking’ is based on a shocking true story and is adapted from the book by the brilliant Miriam Toews, which tells the story of a group of women in a strict Mennonite colony in Bolivia who have been have been systematically drugged and violently sexually abused by the men of the community for years.

The movie mostly takes place in hayloft where the women must decide what to do - Do they leave the colony with their children and start a new life away from the men? Do they stay and fight for justice and change the community? Or do they forgive the perpetrators who left the women waking up every morning feeling drowsy and nauseous, with ripped clothes, covered in blood, bruises and rope marks, until some of the women woke up during the attacks. These are the same men who told the women that they were being attacked by evil spirits and the devil.

The film touches on the challenges faced by many women escaping abusive controlling relationships, such as where will they go? How will they survive out in the world? The women’s fears are compounded by isolated religious nature of a community which insists on forgiveness and stresses that those outside the community in the fallen world, are not saved.

In one scene, an older woman asks; ‘how can they remain in the Kingdom of Heaven if they no longer belong to the community?’ This is because they live a life apart from the world, as the people of God, keeping to Jesus’ word. Therefore, to leave the colony is to break Christ’s commandment mentioned in today’s Gospel.  

What is striking is that despite everything, the women still do not lose or question their faith; they simply have to reconcile what has happened to them with continuing to be friends of God and followers of Jesus.

I suspect that many sincere but damaged and hurting Catholics will be able to relate to this same feeling of being unable to leave a community which has caused them great pain. Especially those among the faithful who have suffered terrible abuse and betrayal at the hands of the Church but somehow still retain the faith. How can they possibly reconcile leaving an abusive institution which administers the sacraments and offers the Mass?  

Similarly, how do victims continue to live on, knowing that God’s holiest servants commit their sins in the darkness?

As John’s Gospel tells us ‘If anyone loves me he will keep my commandments’, it just so happens that some of those community elders and clerics charged with overseeing the regulation of those commandments, have failed badly in their care and duty. They have force us to ask ‘Lord To Whom Shall We Go?’ (Also from John’s Gospel)

Without wishing to disclose any spoilers, the women are eventually able to separate the rules and dogmas of the community from their faithfulness, just as they are also able to move beyond the difference between the need to seek reconciliation and submitting to an ongoing injustice, which Jesus never commands us to do. This is why Justice and Peace always go together.

Indeed, the theme of forgiveness without repentance and the pursuit non-conflict, as a cause of violence and abuse which becomes even more damaging whenever it is unacknowledged or denied, is also covered in many of Miriam Toews other books such as ‘A Complicated Kindness’.

As I watched this film I also found myself thinking about that other great Mennonite writer Rudy Wiebe and his seminal work ‘Peace Shall Destroy Many’ and the way in which the Deacon in this book, loses his authority through his failure to keep evil out of the community and the suffering caused to people by hidden and un-confessed sins within the community.

 ‘Women Talking’ also made me think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s famous quote ‘The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart’.

Most of all, I was left with the feeling that it might just be possible to survive the most evil kind of coercive and manipulative power and still somehow keep the faith, because Jesus is not to be found among the lawgivers or hierarchy but alongside all those suffering and abused.

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