Kneeling at the Cross: A Protestant Looks at the Crucifixion

It’s two hours past my bedtime. The building is quiet and in my little office cubby covered in chatchke of my narrative, the last four edits, teeny tiny minutiae of details having to do with the text, have just been sent to the printer. We are hours away from uploading to the distributor. I have used everything I learned from the Artist Trust Edge Professional Development Program for Literary Artists to get my book of poems to readers throughout the world.

Previously, a writer of poetry could wait until hell froze over before a marketing committee might decide such a compilation was ready for the public and take it on. Now, any author can have their voice spoken in the world.

I have the good fortune, the blessing, of a phenomenal production team. It takes a team.

But now, as I sit with a sense of accomplishment of a race, a very difficult race run to the finish line, I think back to the first night I tried to get on the Island.

The ferry line was clear back to the Texaco it seemed. I didn’t know any of the protocol. I had an interview and I drove past the line and stopped as it turned into the ticket selling area. There was a cop directing traffic (do you remember those days?) and I got out of my car on that rather warmish night and asked, ‘Is it always like this?” The cop lied and said ‘No, this is very unusual’ and two drivers with their windows down behind where I was standing burst out laughing. It was not a good omen.

Most of you, I suspect, moved onto the Island volitionally and have stayed enjoying some sense of paradise and productivity and increase. Not me...time to start telling my big truth. I had been asked to apply for this particular job on the Island by higher ups and got really bad advice about moving my kids over in the middle of the school year (which I took because at the time I had zip confidence in my own thoughts and ideas) and thus began twenty years of living hell. Straight from the pit where old red legs lives, dark as evil can be,  horrible in every way, hell.

So wait...that’s not the whole story. Eventually I’ll tell you how I found more good people than ever, became strong through adversity and reached what some might call a happy ending. Me, I’d call it a ‘beat the odds’ ending.

The book I mention at the top of this column is the ‘how’ of making it through hell. Now here, in this little hamlet I’ve experienced more spiritual and personal persecution than I could conceive of in my imagination. Let’s see, I’ve been accused of being a slut who comes on to men, which doesn’t explain nineteen years of joyful celibacy. I’ve been accused of being an embezzler, which doesn’t explain why I’ve been living below the poverty level for almost all of the same number of years. I’ve been accused of being an abusive child beating mother, which doesn’t explain why I teach parents how to train up their children using the thinking chair and positive reinforcement and have been employed happily by so many people in their homes loving and supporting them and their children.

Mostly I’ve learned to let time work things out. I’ve learned to stand in my truth. But why haven’t I exacted revenge? Why haven’t I gone after the people who hurt me? Well...let me tell you about my breaking point.

Three weeks ago, I discovered myself at the middle of a huge hoax someone was trying to involve me in and I had absolutely had it with the underbelly of bottom feeders. I knew I was going to snap. Life is a gift people. You don’t waste it on deceit and cowardice and greed.

I called everyone I knew, like they say you’re supposed to do, and told them, by voice mail mostly couldn’t get anybody face to face, that they needed to be very worried about me because I had absolutely had it.

And then I moved through the next week minute by minute knowing that only my enormously sane mind was going to keep me from exacting revenge. To this day there are about three dozen people carrying me because I couldn’t carry myself. BUT... and this is a huge BUT. This was all happening simultaneously with getting this book to print.

You know how I survived twenty years of living hell? Well...prior to coming to said shady bucolic rural village and surrounding tree engulfed ‘burbs, I had spent three years cantoring the 5 PM Saturday Mass at St. Benedict’s in the Wallingford District and conducting their children’s choir which I actually created.  Now if you want to talk injustice and persecution, Jesus on the cross, especially a thirty five foot tall Jesus on the cross kinda sums it up.

As I became acquainted with liturgical worship, I wrote a set of poems about it.  

What tipped me over the edge was hearing someone who had been delivering a carefully rehearsed performance go off script and start to quote one of my poems about my childhood. Nobody gets to tell my story, or steal it. I have a story that is full of victory. Horribly abused for most of my childhood and adolescence, I healed myself so none of my kids ever knew that kind of abuse. Horribly crippled in a car accident at the age of nine, exactly fifty four years ago as this goes to press, I defied the odds and carried two children to term and delivered the first one in two hours and the second went from 3 centimeters dilated to delivery in forty two minutes and, am still not in a wheelchair.

With a mentally ill mom, and a clinically diagnosed depressed, with underlying anxiety disorder, spouse, I survived divorce and have endured everything bad with a positive attitude and more love for the human race than resentment and a fierce determination and cheerful hope because of those three years talking to Jesus hanging on that cross.
The poem I wrote that was quoted is called ‘By His Stripes’ ( and essay). It begins

“When I was a little girl, my mother would take the belt or wooden spoons to the backs of my thighs till there were welts. I cannot imagine hitting a child thus. Now I know there was such sorrow in her soul, she was capable of enormous violence upon her only daughter. It was not lost on me that my three brothers were never hit. I took it personally.
Part of me remained in defensive suspension until I saw the movie The Passion of the Christ. The flogging scene held me spellbound. For the first time in my life, I knew Jesus Christ knew my pain. And by His stripes I was healed. He became my Savior. He became my Personal Savior. I realized.…
By……actually, the very means by which I’m healed. No substitution, not metaphorical or mystical, not through, or in spite of or because of, but BY. His……no one else, alone, bracing for each direct hit, drawing His breath in to absorb the sting, over and over, again and again, pulling into Himself for the strength to keep from passing out, aware there are spectators which only increases His solitude.
Stripes……the skin separating to reveal lower fleshy layers where blood seeps to the surface. Leather snapped so harshly it embeds itself, creating an etched crevasse, one crisscrossing the other. Forty random gashes meant to make death come more quickly.
We……you, me, your aunts and uncles, brothers, sisters, mother, father, red and yellow, black and white, gifted, delayed, rich, poor, conscious, unconscious, believer, nonbeliever, insider, outsider, CEO, janitor, driver, passenger, baby, toddler, child, adolescent, adult, Jew, Greek, male, female, everyone.
Are……not a promise, reality, right now, present tense, in this very moment, currently.
Healed……brand new, as if it never happened, restored, refreshed, cleansed, all better, ready to roll, picking up our beds and walking.
“By His stripes we are healed!”
c. 2015 all rights reserved. Printed by permission of the author Deborah H. Anderson

Come hear the rest of the collection. Will and I are very pleased to offer hope for healing to all who so desire to receive it.

Love,
Deborah
“Kneeling at the Cross:
A Protestant Looks at the Crucifixion”
finally...1 April 2015, 5PM
Vashon Bookshop
Release Reading by author Deborah H. Anderson
with presentation of select original paintings and drawings
by William Forrester