We have been looking at stories that operate often under the surface, creating patterns in the lives of individuals and in the lives of societies.

And we're looking today at a delicate story that has to be understood with great sensitivity.

It's the story of victimization.

Any of us who've read Jim Finley's powerful moving memoir, The Healing Path,

will remember a scene early in his life story.

He grew up with a violent and abusive alcoholic father and with a mother who in many ways

was so dependent upon her husband that it put the children at even greater risk.

There's a story of Jim's mother going to Jim and putting pressure on this little boy to run to the neighbor's house

if he thinks that the father is going to kill the mother.

When I remember as I read that and tried to feel and imagine it, it just broke my heart.

And Jim describes the experience of himself as a little boy that he both describes as a kind

of psychological disassociation, but also as a

genuine spiritual encounter, he is able to hold these two very different interpretations or

understandings of this childhood experience. He holds them in tension. But he says that he felt, as he heard, violence happening downstairs and he was afraid

up in his bedroom.

He describes, in a sense, feeling that God in some way merged with him and that God

in some way let his life be protected. I think of that phrase from the

Psalms where the psalmist says that God is sheltered in the shadow of God's wings, picturing God

like a mother bird who protects her fledglings.

This picture of being a victim of something horrible and inexcusable and unacceptable,

but in some way to have your life not be totally defined by that abuse and oppression and violence. To me, that's the tension that exists in the victimization story.

The stories that we're looking at, that we've looked at in previous episodes, the story of domination,

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