Dear Void,
This question punishment&justice and forgiveness has been a journey...
When my mother died and we got home from the funeral, some little kid part of me started skipping and singing internally,'Ding,dong the witch is dead. Which old witch. The wicked witch'. She was a manic-depressive whose mania was always violent. She was hospitalized for many many months many times for trying to kill me. I guess she wasn't very good at it. I also thought of getting a really good weedkiller on dousing her 3x6 grave with it so everyone would see how poisonous she was. I never did it but it was a thought:rolleyes: I still work on forgiving her for that and for the many other ways she tried to wipe me off the planet by removing anything from the house that reminded her of me. It was her absenses that let me be sold into the child prostitution trade time and again.
As for rapists... I think a threatened woman or girl child should be able secreet a substance that would make the rapist's manthing rot painfully and fall right off!!!!! Why should he ever receive pleasure again when his victims never will. Now that would be justice.
:occasion:
As for me, the child prostitute, I feel a great deal of empathy and compassion for the Johns. I think I always knew they were not created to do the things they did. Something had gone terribly wrong for them too.
Forgiveness is a very different thing. I am an Orthodox Christian and I firmly believe that all people are created good, in God's likeness and image, into a sinful world. I believe that our most Godlike gift is freewill. People are free to choose what they choose to do but only to a limited extent. I believe that no one can actually have freewill if they are driven by anything other than the love of God. I believe that God will never intervene in a matter of freewill even when the actions are criminal and tragic. I have felt defiled, worthless,etc,etc..Now many years later, I can see that the temple of God really is within me somewhat obscured by my own sins and is within everyone.....
Forgiveness involves action and a willingness to forgive,
I am alive when I should be dead for the times my mother tried and for the times I survived when so many others did not. BUT I KNOW WHAT THEY DID so I am the right and possibly the only person to bring them before our loving God in prayer. I had to find a way to do that without triggering myself by their deeds against me. :think:
After many years of study,I learned that God lives in eternal time(kairos) and that we live in linear time(chronos). This means that God is present to all linear time at the same time. ex: now is the day Christ was born, now is the day he died. God's name is I am.
I asked my spiritual Father if I could go the communion with one of those who had made themselves one flesh with me, (husband and wife become one flesh with each other, St. Paul- don't make yourself one flesh with prostitutes) and ask Jesus in his body and blood to reveal himself to those who was one flesh with me as I carried them to him. I prayed that way for 6 1/2 years. Gradually, I became aware that I was being re-formed from a garbage can into a communion vessel....WOW....a couple of years ago, I was aware of a soft tenderness towards those men, which can only have come from God. Humanly, I think this would have been impossible for me. And this year, I am more filled with tender compassion for them than ever.
This does not excuse the wrongs they did. I still get caught in flashbacks with them, feel terror and anxiety and need to isolate a lot. I greive my many losses and am full of physical pain.
Now I can sense Christ is within me still on the cross, alive, doing what he came to do-carry away sin and give comfort and companionship. My life will always be hard. My spiritual Father calls this way of Christ's being with me as co-suffering with me.
God shines on the just and the unjust. I think that is because He made them both and loves them both.
Sorry this became so long. I didn't know I had so much to say.
