In junior high school, I read an article that crushed me. It said that the abused become abusers. Taking in this statement resulted in years of my being afraid of myself and what I might do to others, or what others might think I would do, because of the beatings, sexual assault, and emotional abuse that I had suffered from the time I was a toddler. This self-fear also began a cycle of lying to others, saying that I was well while actually feeling suicidal and practicing self-harm. Despite being shy, soft-spoken, and obedient, I constantly dreaded the monster that I feared lay just below the surface. 

Decades later, when I thought I was past those feelings, they came flooding back one night, triggered by hearing a radio program discussing abused children, their abusers, and cycles of abuse. But what seemed to be an enormous setback led to a transformational blessing.

Sitting open on the kitchen counter were my Bible and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy. A passage from Science and Health on the infinite distance between Spirit and matter seemed to stare up at me, demanding to be read. It said: “The temporal and unreal never touch the eternal and real. The mutable and imperfect never touch the immutable and perfect. The inharmonious and self-destructive never touch the harmonious and self-existent. These opposite qualities are the tares and wheat, which never really mingle, though (to mortal sight) they grow side by side until the harvest; then, Science separates the wheat from the tares, through the realization of God as ever present and of man as reflecting the divine likeness” (p. 300).

That passage, based on Christ Jesus’ parable of the tares and the wheat, led to a breathtaking realization. In that moment I understood that, as God’s likeness, I was untouched by the violence, the shame, and the lies I had endured. That realization led me, in turn, to the spiritual recognition that I was not hurt. And if I was not hurt, then I could not be someone who would hurt others. 

I let every word of the Christ message I was reading in Science and Health wash through me like a rushing river of love, sweeping away all the self-doubt and shame. I let it cleanse my heart of fear and refresh and renew my sense of who I was and always had been—God’s pure, innocent, untouched child. That night, I bathed in this cleansing love of Christ, feeling the divine Science—the godly truth—of everyone’s spiritual reality redeeming me. As I did, a statement from Luke’s Gospel came to me as if it had been a spoken benediction of love and grace on the healing: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (23:34).

This request, which Jesus voiced in a prayer of humble desire as he reached out to God from the cross, with a crown of thorns on his head and with hands and feet pierced by nails, struck me anew. He didn’t say, “Father, show me how to forgive them,” but simply, “Father, forgive them.” 

They needed God’s forgiveness, not his. His persecutors’ hatred, their fear of his message, their desire to silence his voice through violence and destruction, never really touched him and couldn’t prevent him from completing his mission. Jesus also puts the onus for doing what is needed to feel God’s forgiveness right where it belongs, on the person whose abusive acts run completely counter to their own oneness with God. 

I knew I had to follow Christ’s lead in order to find my own emancipation from self-hatred and shame. In that moment, a complete and profound freedom came to me. I felt empowered and impelled to entrust to God’s forgiveness the person who had abused me for over a decade. 

Today, not only have I never become who I feared, but I have dedicated my life to helping and healing people, including helping others know that there is no truth to the claim that hurt people have to hurt people. 

Mrs. Eddy writes, “The cycle of good obliterates the epicycle of evil” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 270). The spiritual truth of the infinitude of Spirit, God, makes every material suggestion of cycles of evil a lie, and Christ—the spiritual idea of the allness of divine Truth—dissolves the lie. Jesus’ life and healings proved that decisively, and my experience has shown how possible such healing still is today. 

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