My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints. By Dawn Eden, Ave Maria Press, 2012.
FULL DISCLOSURE ALERT: Dawn Eden is a friend of mine, but nepotism has not affected this review in any way, shape, or form.
What do you do when you have a wound that you feel will never heal? One of the deepest and hardest to alleviate wounds is an intangible one: the pain caused by sexual abuse. In My Peace I Give You: Healing Sexual Wounds with the Help of the Saints, Dawn Eden explains how the examples of some saints can help rape victims to deal with the aftermath of these traumatizing events.
My Peace I Give You is Eden’s second book. Her first book, The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On, was written after her conversion to Christianity but before her conversion to Catholicism. The Thrill of the Chaste is a stirring defense of Christian sexual morality, drawn upon Eden’s own poignant life experiences with relationships and dating. A brief autobiography is included in My Peace I Give You, expanding upon some incidents mentioned in her previous book. Having read her previous book, we already know that Eden’s parents’ divorced when she was quite young, but a further, even more harmful scene is revealed. Eden was sexually abused as a child. Eden describes her personal experiences clearly, strongly, and beautifully. The subject matter is very disturbing, but Eden writes with quiet grace and dignity. There is no trace of anger in her words, but her prose reads as if it has been touched by grace:
“The tears came because, even at that young age [seven], I had suffered sexual abuse. What’s more, for the previous two years, since my parents had split up and my mother gained custody, I had been living in an environment I would now consider to be sexually porous. I don’t recall any clear boundaries; I was not well shielded from adults’ nudity, substance abuse, dirty jokes, sex talk, and swearing.
Like many victims of sexual abuse, I identify with the words of the messenger in Job 1:15: “I alone have escaped to tell you.” As far as I know, there is no other living person who admits to witnessing the evils that were done to me. Certainly, my mother recalls things very differently than I do. When I told her of the incidents I planned to relate in this book, she denied several of them, including that her home was a “sexually porous environment during my childhood.”
Eden’s main point is that even though being molested as a child leaves lasting intangible scars, that healing, happiness, and peace can come eventually through the grace of God. Eden has a rare gift for talking about her own life experiences in a way that it does not sound so much like she is talking about herself as she is speaking of the entire human condition. There is no smug sanctimony in her words, she is only stating facts about divine grace.
“Learning about the ongoing aid that grace provides in the moral life was encouraging, helping me be patient with myself as I began to “walk the walk” of a faithful Christian. As time went by, however, my initial confidence began to erode. My greatest desire was to have the blessing Jesus promises to the “pure in heart,… for they shall see God” (Mt 5:8). Yet, even when I was doing everything I could to live in purity, I was unable to feel pure. I felt stained– because of what adults had done to me, or had bid me do, when I was a helpless child.
On an intellectual level, I knew there was nothing for me to be ashamed of. No child is responsible for what an adult does to her, or induces her to do. The sin of abuse belongs to the abusers, not their victims. Children depend on adults and have to trust them in order to survive. It is adults’ responsibility to show children what is good, and it is in children’s very nature to accept what adults call “good” as being truly good. One cannot speak of “consent” in such an unequal relationship.”
Despite the darkness of the subject matter, this book’s tone is consistently warm, friendly, and reassuring. References to fairy tales and Peanuts comics give the book a gentle innocence. Readers should not be afraid of reading this book, because it will be sure to leave them more spiritually renewed than emotionally drained This is not just a book for victims of abuse, the lessons in it can be applied towards any traumatic experience.
“Over time, as that image of the loving and merciful light streaming from Jesus’ wounds deepened its hold on my consciousness, I began to re-examine the times in my past when I had doubted God’s mercy. That in turn led to a conversation with God that I had been putting off for a long time– asking how I could embody his mercy toward those I found hardest to forgive.”
It is too easy to think of saints as paragons of virtue to which mere mortals can never compare. Unfortunately, many people believe themselves to be incapable of living up to the high standard of piety exemplified by the saints so they never even try, rather than set themselves up for failure at the slightest sign of bad temper. Eden points out that the saints were not perfect all of the time:
“Another surprise was discovering how human the saints were in their reactions to abuse. They weren’t all sweetness and light. It was a guilty pleasure to read how the young Bernardine of Siena reacted when a rich man propositioned him while he was playing in a field with schoolmates. According to an early biographer, the little saint to be promptly whopped the man upside the head. (While he may very well have been justified, perhaps this is an apt moment to recall the old saying– often quoted by Dorothy Day– that one could go to hell imitating the imperfections of the saints.)…
Here is where the saints have something to show us. We tend to think of the saints in heaven as being perfect, which they are, but it would be more descriptive to say they have been perfected. Likewise, we think of the saints as being pure, which they also are, but it would be truer to say they have been purified. The prophet Malachi spoke of this purification when he described the Messiah as “like a refiner’s fire,” adding that “he will purify the sons of Levi and refine them like gold and silver till they present right offerings to the Lord” (3: 2-3).”
My Peace I Give You should be recommended reading for everybody who needs help or healing. The lives of the saints demonstrate that there is no wound so great that God cannot heal it, and Dawn Eden has created a stirring and genuine reminder that no matter what problems one might have, there is always cause for hope.
–Chris Chan
