A large crowd of Covenant students waited in the chapel and looked at the alternatively green (for the men) and white (for women) pieces of paper that had been passed out to us. We were gathered for the Stand Up For Your Friend event. We were told the evening would be an opportunity to learn about the importance of consent, to realize the reality of sexual brokenness on our campus and an opportunity to lament and even to hope for the future. It is difficult to describe how much more than that it truly was.
Becca Moore opened the evening. She sat and talked to us in the uncomfortable silence that invariably occurs when sex is discussed in a public place. Some wiggled and squirmed, others listened attentively. A few found the whole thing far too awkward and averted their attention elsewhere. Becca began her talk with a quote from the mother of Emmet Till, Mamie Till-Mobley saying, “what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world had better be the business of all of us.” Becca delivered this line standing in front of the flags arrayed in the chapel for Culturefest. As she continued on, I couldn’t help noticing that directly behind her was the Ukrainian flag. What happens to any of us, better be the business of all of us.
The sheets in white and green we had been given were a list of yes or no questions, ranging from, “have you ever avoided a particular table in the Great Hall” to “I have been a victim of sexual assault” and addressed a wide variety of questions in between. After Becca’s talk, we were asked to move from our seats, step away from everyone else, and answer the questions honestly.
I sat by myself and stared at the spearmint green page in my hand. The reality of the event began to hammer into me. I could answer no to some of them, but I looked up at the dozens of students who were bent over their pages and I knew that there were many there who carried those wounds as part of their story. They still bore angry emotional welts and bruises hidden from the rest of us and I could feel angry swells striking loud and hard in my chest. Other times I had to answer yes. Then I felt waves of shame, guilt, and my own array of scratches and scrapes flared up livid and red inside of me. Some of these wounds were mine and some I had seen others have to bare. All of it was wrong. None of it was how it should be.
We folded our papers in half, hiding the answers, and we gave them to volunteers who took them away and shuffled them thoroughly before redistributing them at random, green pages again to men and white again to women. It was good to hand my page off to someone else, to not have to see it, to not have to hold it for a second, but I also felt a cold sweat creep in at the vulnerability of handing my sins and my pains to someone else.
When the pages were redistributed I felt honored to hold someone else’s questions, to see how they had shared their scars, their history of broken trust, their reasons to mourn and felt very protective of it as well. I had been entrusted with someone else’s life, the parts they guarded, and I needed to own their story respectfully and carefully. It was strange to think, too, that someone in the crowd was now holding my grief, about to stand in my place when they asked, “whose pain is this?”
They read down the list of questions, and for every time the yes on our pages was circled, we were instructed to stand with the corresponding question. For each and every question, several stood, both men and women. Sin and sorrow knew no discrimination. Often, as the questions were asked and people stood to their feet, there were sounds of audible gasps from participants, as it dawned on us, just how many of us were silently hurting, and maybe thinking to ourselves how much we had never really known.
One response was particularly disturbing. Question 17 read, “do you have a friend who has been sexually assaulted.” When number 17 was read aloud there was a sound of dozens of chairs moving in unison and the sound of people standing up all together sounded like a groan as nearly the entire auditorium rose to its feet. We all looked at each other, shocked, embarrassed, angry, and grieved. Maybe we had all been hoping we were the only ones.
When all the questions were read out we sat back down. I felt hot tears pooling in my eyes and I was tugging unconsciously at my lower lip, trying to keep it from quivering as inside of me I could hear silent screams breaking against my ears. Across the room I saw my brothers and sisters bent over, some hiding their faces as the tears came out, others shell-shocked and others simply stared at the page they had been given, unsure, maybe, of what to do.
Two students came up and led us in a time of lament and a time of hope. I held onto the lamentation for a while. It took me time to be ready for hope. As Sarah Erickson prayed for us and for campus and as we were dismissed and we quietly filed out of chapel, I thought more about this strange and sorrow filled exercise. It had felt so comforting to know that someone else out there was holding the paper that bore my grief and my guilt. I had felt, if only for a moment, a kinship with the person, whoever they were, whose paper I had held myself.
How much more comforting to think then, that Christ bears all our weeping, all our pain, our guilt, our shame, our bruises and the angry sores and welts we bare from the lashes others have whipped us with, and the ones we have beaten onto other’s backs. In this time of weeping we acknowledge the sin infesting us and the infection that has grown among us, that what harms one of us is the business of all of us, and that our hope is in one who bears our griefs and brings us to the Father to be loved, healed, and born again to love others one day in unbroken joy.