| Tina Beattie: God's wounded love on the city streets 04/07/2001 By Tina Beattie Guest column
As a volunteer working with women in prostitution, I often find myself challenged by the suffering wisdom of women on the streets. Ours is not an evangelising project, and we rarely initiate conversations about God or religion.
We see it as our task to befriend and empower the women we meet in whatever ways we can, accepting that in these wounded spirits and damaged lives, dramatic transformation is not always a realistic hope. And yet, as a professional theologian, I have learned a great deal from the insights which these women offer when they speak about God.
Theodicy can be a tedious academic debate: How can a good God allow suffering? But sitting huddled in a dark van in a city street, washed by the orange glow of the streetlights, that question takes on new urgency when a mother asks it of her daughter's suffering. She accepts her own suffering – sexually abused from early childhood, addicted to heroin because that is her only escape from the torment of memory, and now selling her body for the cost of her next "fix" – all this she accepts as part of some mystery known only to God.
But her daughter's illness she cannot accept. Her daughter is innocent. Why should her daughter suffer? What kind of God is this? She wrestles with God, a modern Jacob who will not let go. And in her dry sobs in that lonely corner of the night, innocent suffering is poured out upon the wounded feet of God. Why? Why? There are no answers. I am reminded of Mary at the foot of the cross, her heart pierced by the suffering of her child.
"It's not the fear, it's the loneliness," says another woman, when someone comments on the frightening danger of the streets. Night after night, she gives of her body in the most intimate possible way, and yet her greatest suffering is loneliness. Perhaps there is no worse solitude than the void which separates body and spirit when the body is abused and abandoned, and the spirit is crying out for love. "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" It takes wisdom and courage for such a woman to acknowledge that the suffering of prostitution is the desolation of loneliness.
Then there is the young woman who had a Catholic upbringing.
"I know I'm going to hell," she says. "A priest told me so when I was six."
She is dying. She cowers, coughing and drugged, in her dirty coat. I long to take her to Mass, to sit with her up in front of the church and to ask the priests why they never preach about the prostitutes who were the friends of Jesus. The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Paved, perhaps, with the good intentions of that man of God who had such power that he had condemned a young woman, by the time she was six, to the hell of the streets.
"Was Jesus a punter?" asks another woman, laughing in incredulity.
"Punter" is the name they give to the men who prowl the streets, looking for women's bodies to buy. She is explaining to me how difficult she finds it that Jesus should have died.
"After all, he'd have done much more good if he'd stayed alive," she says.
I find myself telling her that Jesus was a man who loved the same way she loves, giving everything, holding nothing back, and so inevitably the world turned against him and destroyed him.
"But I'm a prostitute," she says.
"Some of his best friends were prostitutes," I reply. She stares at me and laughs.
"Was Jesus a punter?"
I assure her that Jesus wasn't a punter, his friendship came without strings attached; he did not abuse women in that way. But somehow, the phrase remains with me, and I think that maybe the respectable people of Nazareth would have called him that. How were they to know that the women he mixed with really were his friends, that he saw them not as prostitutes but as the original inhabitants of the Kingdom of God?
To commune with the women who walk the streets at night is to peel back the glossy façade of city life. It is to enter an underworld that few choose to acknowledge, a marketplace buried deep beneath the commercial glitter of the shopping malls.
And yet it is also to enter a world where the hypocrisies of our daily lives are laid bare, and a strange kind of honesty comes into being. In the laughter and tears of these intimate encounters, the scourged and beaten body of Christ whispers through a hundred different lives, and in each life, beyond the failure and misery, there is something inexhaustibly loving and beautiful.
Most of us can afford to bury the raw beauty of our humanity beneath many layers of respectability. Yet it is where respectability is worn away to nothing, that the dignity of the human being is exposed. It is there, in the person without majesty or beauty, that the wounded love of God shines out.
Tina Beattie, a freelance lecturer and writer, lives in Bristol, England. She is the author of The Last Supper According to Martha and Mary (Crossroad).
|
