David Mills
“’With Peter, I say: ‘To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,’” Dawn Eden, being interviewed by America, says in response to the question of what she says to those who lost their faith after being sexually abused.
[W]e who have suffered need to be proactive about our own healing. Jesus is present in the sacraments, in Scripture, in the prayer and life of the church. Even if everyone in the church is sinful, Jesus assures us that he is still really present with us in our sufferings. . . . For victims, however much it may help you to distance yourself from the church in the short term, ultimately you’re not going to find healing in the rest of the world more than you will in the life of the church. No matter whose hands give us the Eucharist, those hands give us immediate contact with Jesus Christ, and that’s what matters.
Dawn has just finished a Catholic edition of her first book, The Thrill of the Chaste, and an S.T.L. degree studying the subject she wrote about in My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, a book that reflects her own experience as well as her immersion in the stories of the saints. Of her own healing from sexual abuse, which began when she five, she writes that
Through Scripture and prayer, I’ve learned that God heals people gradually, just as the long desert experience of the Israelites was part of their salvation. The Catholic faith teaches us that there’s an end in sight and that this end is good. When I used to experience symptoms of PTSD stemming from my abuse, like flashbacks, anxiety, loneliness and tears, I didn’t see any good in it. But now those symptoms don’t make me feel hopeless, even though they are evil in themselves. They may make me uncomfortable, but they are no longer toxic. They can’t really hurt me; they can only purify me. I can say that now because my faith has brought me to understand that my suffering is not meaningless, but has incalculable value in Christ.
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