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Foreword to Soul Murder God Priest and Me by Sara Atman
Friday, July 20, 2007
Rated "G" by the Author.
'Foreword' to autobiography of a victim of clergy sex abuse.
Foreword
Dear Father Middleman
Many years ago you said that I should write about you one day. This surprised me, for I was then very much in awe of you. I could not believe your comment a serious one, and I doubted my ability to do justice to the subject! So I dismissed it from my mind.
But here after all these years is my account - the offspring of a turbulent period in my life when you volunteered your pastoral care. You did not help me; you helped yourself. You used me for personal gratification, and by that use you worsened my problems – by trading in guilt, by overlaying Christian precepts and practices with your weird mysticism and demeaning rituals, by diverting me from the solid and reliable traditions of the Church. For a long time, I was taken in by you. I responded as I was directed to respond, and you expressed your pleasure at my ‘progress’.
Then I rebelled. I rebelled because I became repulsed by the ritual, the secrecy – the sheer corruption and the make-believe – and by your paranoia. I quit your service, and my quitting caused you to vent your anger. I became frightened for myself and for my fellow-disciples in your ‘New Order of Women’. After you had abused my body and my soul, I needed more counselling and healing than I had needed prior to meeting you. The spiritual trauma was deeply damaging. It took me years to overcome your ‘healing ministrations’, to sort out the chaff from the wheat.
I thought you were a holy man and that the relationship we had was a sacred one. I had hoped you would be a ‘bridge’ for me, some sort of middle man between God and myself, which I understood as being the essence of all priestly work. But I have yet to discover where your bridge was leading… to yourself?
You made yourself intrinsic to your doctrines. That I did not understand. You did not bridge the chasm between God and myself. Instead, you bridged lesser objectives and brought me into experiences that I did not need. These kept me in a quasi-shadowland of ignorance for several years. Indeed, I sank deeper into a mire of confusion, self-doubt, pain and darkness, as a direct result of your spiritual desecration and phoney pastoral care.
How could you commit soul murder and at the same time call yourself a man of God?
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