When Submission Becomes Subjection
By Jo Collette Williams
Joe Collette Williams is a member of the Strong Medicine Women`s Society, an organization founded for the purpose of establishing shelters in the state of Oklahoma for domestic violence survivors of Native American descent. She is acting liaison between the Society and the Non-Indian community and currently resides with her twelve-year-old son, Scott, in Caddo Mills, Texas.
My husband came home from work, declined dinner, and with a can of beer in one hand and more cooling in the icebox, he settled in to watch a football game on television. While he relaxed, I completed my daily routine alone. Having cleaned the kitchen and tended to the laundry, I shepherded the children through their baths and saw them into bed.
While I resented my husband`s uncommunicative conduct as much as his drinking, I did not consider demanding either his assistance or his attention. Interruptions during a football game were forbidden. Even being in the same room with him when a game was in progress constituted a certain risk: it was not uncommon for him to leap from his seat, shouting and cursing, if a play did not go the way he thought it should. During these moments of emotional loss of control, whatever object there was closest to his hand, was usually launched at the television screen. A beer can or shoe might be thrown as readily as a pillow.
I stood in the doorway to the living room and waited until he decided to notice me. When he glanced my direction, I asked, "Would you mind if I spent some time writing since you`re going to watch football?"
Writing had become an escape from the reality of living in circumstances that might at any moment become dangerously volatile. I had always enjoyed writing, even as a young girl, and I believed that whatever talent for composition I possessed had been given me by God. But my husband was hostile toward my goal of writing as a career.
He had for several years controlled every aspect of my existence: how I dressed, where I went and when, what opinions I was allowed to hold or express, when I could have a friend or make a telephone call. But he had discovered himself unable to prevent me from writing. He had come to view what he referred to as "my wife`s little hobby" as a threat to his position as provider, undisputed monarch and dictator of our family.
Knowing his feelings, I did not often indulge in my "hobby" while he was home. Rather, I tried to do most of my writing during the day, while he was away, at the same time attempting single-handedly to care for our children and keep a busy household in immaculate order. I hoarded minutes as carefully as a miser might hoard pennies so that I might have time to write. Rarely did I challenge him openly as to whether or not I should be allowed to indulge myself in the talent God had given me.
My life with him had become a series of sacrifices, all of which were mine to make. I was expected to keep his home clean, prepare the meals, care for the children, manage the budget and balance the checkbook, take care of all shopping and errands, and finally, make myself available for his sexual demands. I had somehow become responsible for almost everything and I accepted that burden with all the guilt and willingness to blame self that are the mark of a battered woman. If my husband drank, it was my fault. If he lost his temper, it was my fault. In short, if he was unhappy for any reason, it was my fault.
In requesting that I be allowed to write while he watched the football game, I was careful to maintain a humble demeanor since I had long since learned that it was foolish to antagonize him. If angered, he could be brutal, and he was easily provoked. He frowned at me for a moment, then nodded his permission and grandly shooed me away.
Rather than going to the den where my typewriter was located, I picked up a writing table and retreated to our bedroom, realizing that my husband wouldn`t tolerate the typewriter`s noise for any length of time. An hour or so passed in tenuous peace, interrupted from time to time by shouted outbursts from the living room as the football game progressed. Then, after what was an abnormally long period of silence for him, my husband came into the bedroom. His eyes were hard and angry, red-rimmed.
"Get up," he said. "Get your stuff and get out."
Surprised, it took a moment for me to respond. "You told me I could write for a while," I said, attempting to reason with him.
"Your writing," he replied, "is your form of rebellion against my authority."
His harsh tone of voice woke our youngest son, Scott. Almost five years old, he left his own room and came into the bedroom where his father and I were. In one small hand, Scott carried a little red sports car. Walking over to where I sat on the bed, he knelt on the floor and nervously began running the car back and forth across the carpet.
"Get up," my husband repeated. "Get your stuff and get out."
Scott started to cry. "Don`t leave without me, mommy."
"Don`t worry, baby," I reassured him. "I won`t."
My response was automatic–purely a knee-jerk reaction. The need to protect and comfort was instinctive, ever operable regardless of fear.
"You won`t go anywhere with these kids," my husband declared. "These kids are mine."
Scott wailed louder and his father shouted at him to go to his room. As I watched our little boy run from the bedroom, I desperately tried to think of a way to appease my husband`s anger.
Once more, he commanded me to collect my belongings and leave our home. Frightened, uncertain what to do, I laid my writing tablet aside and stood on legs that shook, but I had only taken two steps away from the bed when he caught me by both arms. I weighed only a little more than one hundred pounds and my five feet in height was no match for his six feet and two hundred and twenty pounds. He lifted me completely off my feet and tossed me across the bed. I laid there, gritting my teeth, determined not to cry, waiting for the next assault.
"You`re not going anywhere," he said coldly. "When I tell you to leave, you`ll go that instant, but until I do, you won`t go anywhere at all."
I could only stare at him, confused and speechless.
"Your car`s too old to take you more than two blocks from here anyway," he added. "And I`ll see you never have a car that will take you further. You married me, you`re stuck with me."
I sat upright and tried to keep my voice calm and rational. "You`re contradicting yourself," I pointed out. "You`re not making sense."
His expression became haughty, arrogant. "Of course I`m contradicting myself," he said. "If I contradict myself, I can confuse you, and if I can confuse you, then I can control you."
The admission did not particularly shock me. The effects of alcohol often caused him to speak foolishly. In the morning, I knew, he would remember almost nothing of our conversation or his behavior from the previous night.
"If you don`t give up your writing, you`re going to destroy our marriage," he warned, and then he left the room.
I sat on the bed in the wake of his departure, shaking, relieved the confrontation had not been worse. At length, I went to Scott`s bedroom, comforted him for a moment, then crept back to my own bed.
Not for the first time, I prayed for understanding, for my children and my marriage. The thought that I might have to surrender my desire to write in order to save my marriage was bitter. Again, the sacrifice would be only mine to make, but I had been taught, by each of the Baptist churches I had attended in my lifetime, that divorce was a sin and that a wife was to submit to her husband. A wife was to practice forgiveness. She was commanded to love, and love forgave all manner of injustice and cruelty.
Still, I knew my husband`s behavior was wrong simply by the example my own father had set. A deacon in the Baptist church, my father was a gentle man who did not drink. Never had he physically or emotionally abused by mother or my brothers, my sister, or me. My husband claimed to be a Christian, yet I knew by my father`s example that a Christian man, leading a God-centered life, did not mistreat his family.
Neither was I ignorant of the process a woman goes through along the road to becoming a submissive victim of domestic violence. As a feature writer for a small, local newspaper, I had been assigned by my editor the task of writing an article on the subject only weeks before. During the process of researching and writing the article, I had learned the four stages of abuse: denial, which involves rationalizing and then excusing the batterer`s behavior; anger, always suppressed, concealed and unspoken; bargaining, during which phase a woman relinquishes any action or behavior that annoys her tormentor in the hope that he will cease mistreating her; and finally, depression, involving a loss of self-esteem so vast that the battered woman comes to feel herself deserving of abuse.
I had been stunned to discover that I personally identified with each of these four stages. I had become so conditioned to accepting blame–to accepting my husband`s abusive behavior–that I had not realized, until writing the article, that I was myself a battered woman. My husband had never actually hit me, although he often combined emotional abuse with physical coercion to force me into adopting a passive attitude. I had mistakenly thought that because I was not beaten, I was not abused.
That night, though, after our confrontation in the bedroom, I felt too disoriented and hopeless to reflect on what I had learned about domestic violence. As I continued to pray, asking God to restore the love I had once felt for my husband, my spirit remained troubled.
"Oh, Father," I prayed, "if I have only one drop of the love You have for me, I pray it will be sufficient to renew the love I should feel for my husband."
Yet I felt only resentment and misery, no matter how earnestly I prayed. At last, I surrendered my desire to write to God, asking Him to guide me in what I should do.
Clearly, gently, I was reminded of the story of the ten talents (Matthew 25:14-28). My "talent" was not mine to keep or surrender, nor was it my husband`s to take away, destroy, or discard. My talent, no matter how minuscule it might be, was given me by God and belonged to God. Further, God was my supreme authority, not man. If divorce were a sin, was it not also a sin to abuse one`s wife? Was it not a sin to continue in a marriage which could only damage my children? And would it not be a sin to relinquish a talent which God intended, somehow, to use?
Yet how could I support my children alone, I wondered. Where would I go and how would I get there? My husband had many times threatened to kill me if I ever attempted to leave him. Freedom from his tyranny seemed an impossible illusion.
"I`m afraid to leave, Lord," I prayed, "and I`m afraid to stay. If You want me to go, please convict me of that and then please take me and the children out because I haven`t the strength or the courage to go on my own."
Exhausted and despairing, no longer able to wrestle with obstacles which seemed insurmountable, I finally fell asleep. In my sleep, I dreamed that I was in a small house by an ocean. A huge rock, shaped like a pyramid, stood in the bed of the ocean. The rock stood on its point and the ground beneath the house shook. As the earth trembled, the rock teetered back and forth on its tip. The house itself was filling with water and I, alone in the house, standing in water to my knees, hurriedly plucked my childrens` belongings from the water, stuffing them into a bag. I knew that if I did not get out of the house quickly, either the rock would fall and I would be crushed or I would drown. In my dream, in a terrified whisper, I was repeating, "Hurry, hurry! Oh, you must hurry and get out before it`s too late!"
The next morning, when my husband left for work, my children and I gathered a few clothes and other items and fled. The car which my husband had said would not take me two blocks from our home I drove three hundred and fifty miles to my parents` home and sanctuary.
That was eight years ago and I have never regretted leaving that situation, despite the many hardships, cruelties, and separations that my children and I have endured since that time. While I believe it indisputable that divorce is a sin, I am convicted that my dream that night was a vision given me by God. Isaiah 43:1-3 reads: "Fear not, for I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze. For I am the Lord, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Savior."
Many times over the course of the past eight years, I have heard the scriptural passages of Ephesians 5:21-33 interpreted at the pulpits and in the Sunday School classes of our Baptist churches. Often, the intent of the message is distorted. The word "submit" is translated to mean "Obey" or "to subject oneself to" when in fact, Paul`s use of the word implies a Christian willingness to serve the needs of another by choice, not as a result of force, coercion, or intimidation.
Too often, the passage in the remainder of the message regarding the man`s responsibilities in marriage are given only scant attention by our Christian leaders–a cursory, shallow examination. A woman, after hearing the message taught in this manner, may be left with the impression that she is somehow inferior to men. Worse, misled men use this particular scripture to establish what they perceive as proof of their right to dominance. But Paul was exhorting men and women to submit to each other as equals, using Christ`s submission to the Father`s will as their example, for the sake of unification and harmony within the church.
When Paul wrote, "For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, His body, of which He is Savior" (Ephesians 5:23), the intent was to designate men as spiritual leaders in their households–a position of tremendous responsibility, but not necessarily authority. Because the role of spiritual leader demands an attitude of submissive reverence on the part of the individual charged with that sacred office, it is difficult to imagine how a Christian man could delude himself into thinking that this scripture grants him dominion over his wife. Ephesians 5:21 commands husbands and wives to "submit one to another out of reverence for Christ", clearly demolishing any attempt to read female subservience or male privilege into Paul`s instructions.
During the period of Biblical history prior to Jesus` resurrection (and Paul`s teachings), women, for all practical purposes, were the property of their fathers, husbands, or male relatives. They could not request divorce from a husband whom they did not wish to be married to. But according to God`s instructions, a man was commanded to honor, respect, and protect his wife and family, not abuse them.
In Malachi 2:13-14, the scripture reads: "Another thing you do: you flood the Lord`s altar with tears. You weep and wail because He no longer pays attention to your offerings or accepts them with pleasure from your hands. You ask, `Why?` It is because the Lord is acting as the witness between you and the wife of your youth, because you have broken faith with her, though she is your partner, the wife of your marriage covenant."
When a man abuses his wife, he is breaking a covenant made with his wife before God to love, honor, protect, and cherish the woman of his "marriage covenant." By breaking covenant with his wife, the husband breaks his covenant with God. In effect, he divorces himself from both his wife and the Lord.
"`I hate divorce,` says the Lord God of Israel, `and I hate a man`s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment,` says the Lord Almighty.`" (Malachi 2:16)
According to statistics compiled by the Women`s Coalition, a woman is beaten every fifteen seconds in the United States. The most common crime in America, it is also the least reported. One out of every two women alive today will be abused at some time during her life by a man she lives with, according to some who have studied this matter.
Many battered women seek answers to their personal crisis in our churches, as I did myself, yet even recently, I have heard sermons which teach that a woman is to submit to her husband under any circumstances, that she is to forgive, and further, that divorce should never be resorted to for any reason. A battered woman, hearing a sermon of this nature, will probably return to her abuser since she has already been conditioned to accept responsibility for her batterer`s behavior. If she is also a Christian, she may feel it her duty to subject herself to further degradation, humiliation, and abuse simply because she has been taught, "Wives, submit to your husbands as to the Lord." (Ephesians 5:22)
As Christians, we bear a tremendous responsibility for the words we speak to others. God will hold us accountable for our interpretations of His Word. We must recognize the impact our own words can have upon the life of another and that in some particular instances, which we may not even be aware of, the power of our words may hold terrible consequences for one who hears them. I would not wish to be responsible for influencing a woman to return to a man who may eventually take her life or the life of one of her children.
Within the idealistic walls of the church sanctuary, it may seem to most Christians that domestic violence is only experienced by the ungodly, when in fact, a large percentage of batterers profess, if not "Christianity," a belief in God, at the very least. In actuality, this should not come as a surprise to Americans whose government was modeled after a British example which allowed laws approving a husband`s right to "discipline" his wife in any manner deemed necessary.
There is a very real need for a specific ministry to survivors of domestic violence, both adult women and their children, and that ministry should begin in church, with messages of hope and healing. Rather than concentrating on the sinful aspects of divorce, we must instead be courageous enough to confront those sins which are often the very root of divorce, never forgetting that we are called first to bear witness to God`s compassion, love, and forgiveness.
Here are some constructive ways you and your church can help make an impact on the lives of battered women and children:
- Become involved with your local battered women`s center. Take canned goods, small appliances, household items, and gently used clothing to the crisis center in your neighborhood.
- If there is no center in your area, ask your church to sponsor one.
- If God leads you to do so, offer your home as a "safe house" to be used as an emergency, anonymous stop-over point for women and children en route to the nearest crisis center.
- If you see or hear of an incident of domestic violence, don`t ignore it; but don`t place yourself in danger either. Notify the police or other law enforcement agency in your area immediately. Be your sister`s keeper and intervene on her behalf! Whether or not she appreciates your help, take comfort in the knowledge that you may have saved her life.
- Write your congressmen and senators. Get involved with your local law enforcement agencies and social reform organizations. By passing laws which require batterers to undergo intensive counseling for their abusive behavior, we can begin to stop abuse where it starts: with the batterer himself.
- If you own a business, post your employment opportunities with your local crisis center. A job is often the most tangible flagstone a woman finds paving the road to escape from her abuser.
- Post the telephone number to your local crisis center in the ladies` rooms of restaurants and other public places. Add a Bible passage that upholds, uplifts, and lends courage, such as the quotation from Isaiah used herein. There are sometimes telephones located in public restrooms, which is all too often the only place many abused women can go to have a few minutes privacy and freedom from their abuser.
- Pray! Prayer changes people, prayer changes lives, and prayer changes circumstances.
