Into the Darkness
What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
The world would split open.
—MURIEL RUKEYSER
Afew days after the convention, I found myself at my daughter LaWonna’s house. She had just moved back from California a few weeks earlier with her husband, Russ, and her children, Trinity and Ryan. I helped her unpack boxes and ready her new home. I couldn’t believe she’d finally made the move—now my entire family lived within walking distance of my house. After Trinity’s birth I had decided to make a priority of spending time with her, traveling to California every six to eight weeks even during the busiest times. Now her beautiful smile and tender spirit live just around the corner. Flashbacks come like jolts of electricity when I remember that LaWonna was Trinity’s age, quiet and carefree, when Angie died.
My happiness over LaWonna’s move home pretty much defined my life during those post-convention days. On the outside anyway. On the inside anxiety crept up: I didn’t know what the future held or what my role in life would be. What would it feel like not to be Auntie Anne anymore? To cover the anxiety, I busied myself beyond belief: I ran like a marathon trainer; I worked around my house like a full-time maid; I drove from here to there and back again running errands; I set up times for coffee with friends, filled every remaining minute of my day to ensure I stayed busy and allowed no time for thinking. I even stayed up late at night reading, anything to keep my mind occupied.
After Angie died, I felt useless. LaWonna had turned four the previous summer and required little maintenance, especially with all of the cousins around to play with. I found myself holding empty days, with no diaper changing or bottle feeding or baby carrying required. I spent most of the time crying on the sofa.
Jonas seemed to recover well from the accident. I thought he still looked sad, but I don’t remember seeing him cry much about Angie, and our talks about the accident came few and far between. I began to feel embarrassed that I couldn’t deal with her loss, began hiding my crying from everyone. Soon I slept on the sofa, not wanting Jonas to know I cried myself to sleep each night. An emotional wall began to rise between me and my husband.
I remember driving down the road with LaWonna one rainy day in December 1975. She was singing, and I was feeling sad, as usual. These were the days long before children sat in car seats or any of us wore seat belts regularly—LaWonna sat up front with me and edged over against my leg while I drove, put her arm around me, and looked up at my face.
“Shh, listen,” she said with a serious voice. “Jesus is speaking to us.”
“He is?” I asked her, playing along. “Hmm, what’s he saying?”
“He said we’re going to have a little baby sister this year.”
My heart skipped a beat, and immediately I knew LaWonna was right. Not long after that Jonas and I discovered another baby was on the way.
During the January after Angie’s death, I only went farther and farther down. I prayed for God to send me someone to talk to, perhaps another lady who could understand what I went through. Even discovering I was pregnant couldn’t chase away the shadows that taunted me.
One Sunday my despair drove me to the altar at church, where I knelt and closed my eyes, asking God to help me make sense out of my emotions. I felt a strong hand on my shoulder. I looked up—my pastor stood there, concern etched on his face. He prayed with me. I wept. He knelt beside me there at the altar, his arm around me. For the first time in months, I felt comforted. Eventually we both stood up, I to return to my seat, he to climb the stairs back up to the pulpit. He hugged me one more time.
“I love you, Anne,” he said kindly. His words didn’t surprise me—our young church had grown close, and we always told each other, “I love you.”
“I know you do. I love you, too,” I said. Our congregation loved our pastor. It seems nearly impossible for me to describe the complete respect and admiration all of us at our church felt for him. His preaching seemed inspired, his pastoral care for our flock Christlike. Besides those things, everyone simply loved being with him—he made us feel at home.
“No, Anne,” he said, looking into my eyes. “I love you in a special way. Please call me. We need to talk.” That said, he walked back up to face the congregation.
Walking back to my seat, my mind spun. A special way? What did he mean by that? Did he love me that way because Angie died and as a part of the congregation he knew I needed a special love? I stood beside Jonas, finally feeling comforted but also confused. Something didn’t seem right.
I was excited that LaWonna had moved home from California with her family, and I got caught up in helping her unpack, but soon I realized it was getting late. Time to head home. Exercising came at the top of my New Year’s resolutions, so after bundling up and walking outside, I prepared for the run home. The night sky shone clear, the air felt crisp, and my breath puffed out in foggy bursts. I rounded the corner into our housing development and mentally prepared for the long hill ahead.
Over halfway up I noticed headlights coming down toward me. No through roads crossed our development, so very few cars drove down that hill. I heard the gravel crunching and couldn’t tell if the driver saw me running, so I stepped over into the snowy shoulder as the vehicle passed.
As I stepped back up onto the road, I misjudged the ledge on the side and stepped right on the lip. I heard the sound of a small twig cracking, then a searing pain shot up my leg. Soon I realized I hadn’t stepped on a twig—something had snapped in my foot. I fell to the ground at the side of the road, clutching my foot in agony, angry at myself for not bringing my cell phone, wondering how in the world I could make it home.
I told Jonas our pastor offered to meet with me to talk about Angie. He seemed fine with the idea—we respected our pastor and felt that if he thought I needed counseling, well, then it probably made sense. But I didn’t tell Jonas what Pastor said to me at the altar that day. It was the first of many secrets.
“No, Anne, I love you in a special way.”
I drove up through the woods to our church. The trees stood bleak on that winter day, looking cold and very much like stakes driven into the earth. The parking lot sat empty save two or three cars; after all, it was only a weekday. Entering my pastor’s office seemed strange—I’d never gone for counseling before that and felt needy and weak that someone else had to take time out of his busy schedule to walk me through my problems simply because I couldn’t deal with them on my own. I knocked on the thick wooden door.
“Come in, Anne,” he said.
I immediately felt safe just going inside his office. Pastor walked to me from behind his desk and hugged me for a long time while I cried. He motioned towards a seat, and I felt so comforted in that chair across from him. His eyes looked concerned for me. He asked me so many questions. We talked for an hour or two. I couldn’t believe how good it felt to talk about Angie, about the day she died, about how I felt. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of meeting with Pastor before and thought to myself, This must be God’s way of answering my prayer about having someone to talk to.
When the time came for me to leave, he walked me to the door. Nothing could have prepared me for what happened next: Pastor gave me another long hug, but this time when I looked up to thank him, he kissed me square on the mouth, a kiss he held in place for what seemed an awkward eternity. Finally he pulled away and said, “It’s obvious to me, Anne, that you have needs in your life that cannot be met by Jonas. But I can meet them.”
I nodded dumbly, not knowing what else to do. Somehow I ended up outside feeling very guilty and confused. Everything seemed cast in doubt—Why would my pastor do that? I only wanted to talk about Angie. And why would he say those things to me? As I fled to my car, only one thing seemed certain in my mind: I could never tell Jonas about what had just happened; he would never believe me.
I sat in the cold, trying to figure out what to do about my foot. I hoped to get a ride from someone driving up the hill; after all, my house sat only a few hundred yards away. But no cars came by. Eventually I stood up. One step at a time, I told myself. One step at a time.
I could place hardly any weight on the damaged foot, but I began making progress. After fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes finally I arrived at the front door. The door stayed put, locked. I rang the bell and heard someone coming to answer.
“Anne, what’s wrong?” Jonas said, looking perplexed as he opened the door.
I practically whimpered. “I hurt my foot. Please carry me.”
Jonas picked me up and carried me gently through the house to the sofa. He placed me there, propped my foot up on pillows, and got me something to drink. He gently took off my shoe and sock—the pain split my leg in two.
“Just cut it off,” I moaned, trying to joke away the pain but nearly serious in my request.
Finally there it rested, my naked foot, bruised and swelling.
I met with Pastor quite often, usually at restaurants over a cup of coffee. While I felt uncomfortable after our first session, I desperately needed the time to talk about Angie, to work through my hurt, and Pastor seemed one of the few people in my life willing to just sit there and listen. Maybe I imagined things, I told myself. Maybe he didn’t do anything inappropriate. After all, everything else about our meetings seemed so out in the open. I found myself reasoning everything away in order to spend time with someone who comforted me.
When I told Pastor at one of our meetings early in 1976 that I was pregnant, he became furious. He thought the whole idea of getting pregnant so soon after Angie’s death was ridiculous and selfish. I never told him, but I felt happy about that little life growing inside of me. It hurt me deeply that he wasn’t happy for me, but instead of questioning his motives, I questioned my own, wondering if getting pregnant so soon after Angie’s death was the right thing to do.
Three months passed since our first meeting. One day Pastor asked me to meet him farther away than usual at the next town down the highway. We met in a diner and shared discussion over coffee. Then he said he needed to drive me somewhere. We drove a few miles away to a hotel, one of those single-story seedy-looking places you find a lot these days in between small towns. He asked me to follow him. I grunted as I climbed out of the car—my daughter LaVale (although I didn’t know she was a girl at the time) was growing inside of me, and the added weight had begun making it difficult to get around.
I followed him into one of the rooms, feeling increasingly uneasy and confused. The door slammed behind me. Light filtered in around the curtain edges, but besides that the room was completely dark.
I sat in the doctor’s office, the x-rays of my foot shining on the wall. The doctor explained to me why I didn’t need a cast, why an air cast worked just as well in my case, why I needed to rest my foot as much as possible.
“But it’s been a couple of weeks, Doc,” I said, feeling discouraged. “Why does it still feel so tender? When will I be able to run again?”
He chuckled.
“Some things take a long time to heal,” he said. “Some breaks stay tender for longer than we want them to. And you,” he said with a mischievous look in his eye, “are not a young pup anymore.”
“I know, Doc, I know. But right now it feels like I’ll never be the same again.”
“I know, Mrs. Beiler,” he said politely. “You know, it would have healed a lot faster if you would have come in right after you hurt it. But you waited, what, two days? Hobbling around all that time on a broken foot? You did some extra damage by not coming in right away. But don’t worry—now that you’ve come for help, you’ll be fine. It’ll heal. It just takes time.”
When Angie died, I thought I knew despair, but lying there on the bed in that dark motel room, I realized despair takes many forms, contains many different layers. Just when I thought I’d found the center of my despair with Angie’s death, its rotten core split open, revealing hidden depths.
“No one’s ever going to believe you,” he said, sitting beside me in the car. “You know that, don’t you?”
I thought he was probably right: who would believe me? He was the well-respected pastor of a loving congregation, I the obviously unstable woman who lost a child less than a year ago.
I know there were choices I could have made differently that day. Some people may wonder why I kept meeting with him, why I got in the car with him, why I agreed to go into the hotel room. I’ve asked myself those questions hundreds of times, and it’s difficult to give an answer that makes sense. What I can say is that I completely trusted my pastor and that, at the time, he was the only person who cared enough to listen to my sadness. I was broken, grieving, and extremely vulnerable. I trusted him completely. It’s what can happen when people in that position abuse their power—they can lead people down roads they never would have gone down on their own. Many years later I discovered this is called “abuse of spiritual power.”
Sitting in that car, I thought to myself, What just happened? Why did I let that happen? I was so emotionally broken at that point, I felt I was beyond repair. From that moment on, heavy chains of guilt and self-loathing entwined themselves around me, and when I resolved to tell no one, I locked those chains firmly on myself. Telling the truth about what happened was the key to freedom, but I quickly tossed it aside, didn’t even allow myself to look at that key for over six years.