I’m going to be brutally honest again, just as I was the other day. I insist on being honest about an issue that effects 25% of all women and 10% of all men. It’s rapists that should be hiding in darkness and shame, not the survivors. So I’m gonna be blunt.
Bluntly, the title I gave to this piece is hypocritical. I probably will pray against Brock Turner. I’ve done plenty of praying against rapists; the pain of a flashback comes over me now and then, all these years later, and I say whatever I say. Nasty things, usually violent things. “Lord God, do to that person what they did to me.” That would be brutal. It would hurt them to urinate for about nine months afterwards, and they’d still be jumping when someone touched their left side in that one certain place, years later. I blurt out that prayer against my rapist and against all rapists several times a day. I’ll probably blurt it out against Brock Turner sometime in the next few hours.
But I shouldn’t. I shouldn’t pray against rapists, and neither should you. I should do what I always try to do, when I catch myself praying against rapists. I should stop, not judging myself or feeling guilty for having prayed against rapists again, and I should turn the prayer to something else.
I see all over the news today that a woman identifying herself as a “traditional hereditary witch” has put a hex on Brock turner, to cause him impotence and pain like “pine needles” in his stomach for the rest of his life. She has invited thousands of witches to do so with her online; thousands of people have performed a hex against Brock Turner.
Such an idea is tempting. I freely admit that I smiled when I heard about it. A black candle, a string dipped in menstrual blood or “hexing oil,” a truly evil man experiencing a truly evil consequence a thousand times.
I didn’t do that to Brock Turner, and I’m not going to do it to him. I shouldn’t pray against him either, and every time I catch myself praying I am going to set myself to praying for him instead. I will be horrible at this, but I’m going to try.
I’m not a pagan or a witch, and I’m not an expert on those religions. I have a few friends who are pagans, and I don’t often talk religion with them, but sometimes I have. I was raised to believe that witches and pagans worship the devil, but I now understand that that was as much nonsense as most of what I was taught about the Holy Spirit. I want to stress that I am not judging someone else, or saying I’m better than any other human being. I recognize and completely agree with their horror at his lenient sentence and their desire for justice. But a different Truth has been revealed to me about what to do about it. I am using my tradition and my beliefs, to explain why I’m resolved not to pray for evil against Brock Turner or any other rapist.
Brock Turner is a monster, a rabid animal, and if there was justice on this earth he’d spend the rest of his life in a cage. So is my rapist. So are the rapists who raped that poor high school girl in Steubenville several years ago, and so are all rapists. When you rape, you commit a mortal sin and voluntarily turn yourself into a monster. You blaspheme Christ unspeakably by performing such a monstrous, demonic act of violence while wearing His icon, a human face. You blaspheme the Trinity by taking sexual organs and sexual intercourse– the very organs and the very act by which human beings mirror the Trinity, more than one person becoming one flesh together– and using them for an act of violence. You blaspheme the Creator by taking the organs and the act meant to let humankind participate in creation, and instead using them for destruction. That is an accursed act. That is a curse, a hex and a blight upon all of creation.
I don’t think it would help to add a curse to that curse.
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