In early May, I wrote about the wail of sheer agony, utter despair, uttered by Amanda Lindhout during her captivity in Somalia. To refresh your memory, Lindhout was the freelance journalist kidnapped in August 2008, held for ransom, finally released in 15 months later in November 2009.
In early June, Amanda Lindhout spoke at a fundraising event for Syrian refugees sponsored by a collection of Kelowna-area churches. She described some of her experiences while in captivity. I was appalled.
I was even more appalled when I read her book, A House in the Sky. I understand why she chose that title, but it would be better titled Hell on Earth. Perhaps she held back when speaking face to face, fearing that the details would be too much for us. Or for her.
But from the impersonal flatness of black type on white paper, Lindhout described the way her Somali captors treated her.
Two examples will suffice. After she and fellow captive Nigel Brennan managed a brief escape, she was gang raped by all eight of her captors. “I understood later how this mattered, how it kept any one of them from judging the others in the months to come,” she wrote.
It was not the first rape. One man had raped her regularly, sometimes several times a day. But this was the first gang rape. “I bled not for hours or days but for weeks afterward,” she wrote.
Then things got worse. In an attempt to break her, to apply more pressure for getting their ransom, they tortured her. They forced her to lie on the floor on her stomach. They lashed her arms to her chained ankles, behind her back, so that, as she wrote, “My body had been drawn into a taut bow.” They stood on her back to tug her lashings tighter.
When she screamed, they stuffed an unwashed sock in her mouth. They looped a scarf around her neck, and tied its ends to the lashings that kept her arched, so that if she let her head fall forward, she choked.
For 48 hours they kept her trussed. They kicked her, beat her, screamed insults at her. For being a woman. For being evil. For having caused all this.
“They’ve studied this,” she thought. It was planned. Deliberate. Merciless. “They’ve consulted some kind of manual on how to make a person suffer.”
Yes, such things exist. Once, early in my journalistic career, I wrote an article about systematic torture in regimes around the world -- long before America discovered water-boarding. In Russia, under Stalin. In Brazil and Chile, under their military tyrannies. In Iran, under the American-backed Shah. Torturers learned from each other.
My nausea over their intentional cruelty affected me for months. But I got over it. Because none of it had actually happened to me. If I had experienced the Kremlin’s drug-induced insanity, if I had watched Brazil’s torturers sawing living bodies in half, I doubt if I could ever recover.
Let alone forgive.
Four years after Amanda Lindhout was freed, she could write, “I choose to forgive the people who took my freedom from me and abused me…
I suspect that if I had suffered a fraction of what she did, the fire of hatred would have burned me up for the rest of my life.
I have more admiration for her than ever.
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Copyright © 2016 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups, and links from other blogs, welcomed; all other rights reserved.
        To comment on this column, write jimt@quixotic.ca
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YOUR TURN

Last week’s column brought a letter from an editorial colleague I hadn’t heard from in years. Perry Millar wrote, “Very nice contemplation on pronouns. We editors would do well to lift our heads from the style guides occasionally, and think about language in differing ways, as you have.
“I know most of us do from time to time; we are perhaps more conscious of how language or words are used in media coverage or even common usage which often has a subtext, but it can easily go unrecognized. Or something strikes us in the course of our work but we don’t have time to linger.”

Another editor, Laurna Tallman, wrote, “I could not agree with you more. I suspect that all good theology is derived from precision in grammar.”

My aside about “it’s” being a contraction of “it is” rather than a possessive prompted this memory from George Brigham in England: “I used to stumble over this until one day in my 30s when I was corrected by a Yugoslav (now Macedonian) with a very poor command of English. It taught me that having most of the knowledge does not mean that someone with less cannot have a better grasp of some aspect. Thus I have argued since with those who have stridently asserted the absolute supremacy of Christianity or their brand of it.”

Charles Hill drew on his counselling experience for this comment: “You are absolutely correct about We. I had never considered the strength of the need for a ‘we’ relationship. Most of the criminals with whom I work were never in a ‘we’ relationship with successful people. They were not athletes, most came from poor homes, used offensive language because that was all they heard at home or in their peer group. They adopted the behaviors and values of those who accepted them into their ‘we’ group. Those of us in churches, those who are educated, those who have a comfortable lifestyle must work on accepting the unacceptable into our ‘we’ group. Jesus got into a lot of trouble for having meals with tax collectors and prostitutes.”

PSALM PARAPHRASES

It's nice to think of a God who loves unconditionally. But love does not render God toothless. Hence this paraphrase of Psalm 82.

1   God sits at the head of the boardroom table.
2   "How long," God demands, "will you keep making the wrong choices? 
How long will your policies favor injustice?
3   I expect you to be fair to everyone, including those who have no economic weight; 
To defend the rights of those who have no voice, and no one to speak for them;
4   To protect the weak and the struggling from exploitation.
5   Of all people, they need your protection most. 
They do not have education, or money, or friends in high places. 
They have suffered devastating losses in their lives."
6   God says: "You think you have taken over my responsibilities.
7   But you are not God. When your time comes, 
you will die, like everyone else."
8   Come, Lord. 
Come judge the earth. 
We are yours to judge.

For paraphrases of most of the psalms used by the Revised Common Lectionary, you can order my book Everyday Psalms from Wood Lake Publishing, info@woodlake.com.

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YOU SCRATCH MY BACK…
Ralph Milton has a new project, called Sing Hallelujah – the world’s first video hymnal. It consists of 100 popular hymns, both new and old, on five DVDs that can be played using a standard DVD player and TV screen, for use in congregations who lack skilled musicians to play piano or organ. More details at www.singhallelujah.ca
Isabel Gibson's thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Wayne Irwin's "Churchweb Canada," an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
Alva Wood's satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly religious, but they are fun; write alvawood@gmail.com to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” – ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at twatson@sentex.net

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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