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“I’m just glad it happened to me,” said Jud.
His nails dug into the opposite palm in a rhythm like the hooves of a warhorse conquering the earth. He didn’t notice Langstrom was looking. He didn’t even notice that he was doing it.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” said Langstrom, his voice flat and no-nonsense.
Jud froze beneath the straightforwardness of Langstrom’s tone. The garden was only sun-warmed and it didn’t thaw Jud easily. Langstrom didn’t bother to peer up at him, so he watched Jud’s old black shoes.
Jud was behaving as though he had been asked a trick question and Langstrom for all his patience had reached his tipping point. For three days he had been watching the changed, cautious hallmark in the way Jud moved. For three nights Langstrom had been kneeling by his bed and calling out to God for forgiveness.
Langstrom could not help but take responsibility. He had consigned Jud to Wicks’s church. He had called periodically to check in, but he had not pried. He had not asked Jud real questions. He had let Jud backslide into the kind of person he hadn’t felt the need to be for years.
“I just mean that I’m glad it didn’t happen to anyone else.”
Langstrom pinned Jud with a look. Jud, pacing like an imprisoned animal, did not notice. Langstrom had the self-control to stop the frustrated grumble in the back of his throat.
“I would have preferred it didn’t happen to you,” he said instead.
It made him nauseous to think of the way Wicks had treated Jud. Langstrom remembered Jud’s admittance in confession so long ago it felt like another life, when he said he wasn’t sure he had really forgiven his father. When he said he thought he had but sometimes he still found himself crushed and angry and that it didn’t feel as free as forgiveness. When he had promised he was trying. When he had wept and asked God for help to repent rightly.
Langstrom was not an earthly father but he was a spiritual one. He had been given the privilege. In that confession booth as Jud struggled to keep a handle on his cracking voice Langstrom had promised to himself that he would keep Jud safe from the betrayal of mistreatment as only a father can make so useless and self-assured a promise.
Of course, as earthly fathers don’t, he did not have the power to make that guarantee. Once again Jud had been abused. That was what it was, Langstrom knew. He was not afraid to name evil. Even before Wicks had physically hurt Jud he had been breaking him down in less and less subtle ways.
“No, no, you don’t understand,” said Jud, hands waving. “I just mean that it could have done more damage to someone else, you know? The Church saved my life and nothing can take that away. It’s easy--”
The way he stopped abruptly signaled that a lie crystal clear. Nothing about this was easy.
“It’s-- I can, you know, separate Wicks from the Church. He can’t take away my purpose. God has-- God has entrusted me with something and Wicks can’t steal that.”
That was very pretty, but way too neat. It sounded like the kind of thing you tell yourself when you can’t sleep. It sounded like a bedtime story you use to soothe a scared child. It sounded like an excuse and an empty promise. It sounded like Jud leaning on his own understanding and not trusting the Lord to make his path straight.
“Jud,” said Langstrom, because at first that was all he could say.
He could not begin to parse all the things that were wrong with Jud’s arguments. Nevermind that Jud couldn’t sleep and paced the grounds praying. Nevermind that his reflexes were once again those of a haunted young man Langstrom had met in a halfway house recovering from every mistake he’d ever made and everything that had ever been done to him. Nevermind that Saint Lazarus had to be unbound from his burial clothes after Jesus called him from the tomb. Nevermind that God offers us the grace of time, that we don’t have to start claiming redemption with our first breath out of the grave. It had only been a week since Easter.
“What else do you want me to say?” said Jud.
Langstrom could see his shoulders tightening, winding up to defend his silly fairy story.
“I want you to say that you’re angry, Jud. I want you to say that you wish it hadn’t happened to anyone. You’re acting like what Wicks did is fine because it happened to you, and I want to make it clear that that’s not the Church’s official stance.”
“I’m sick of being angry,” said Jud.
His nails were digging into the heel of his hand now at a slower and more deliberate pace. The skin was reddening there like the threat of stigmata from the inside out. Langstrom had seen the police report with its evidentiary photos of fading bruises across Jud’s skin. Langstrom was nauseous again. He prayed for patience. He prayed for a respite from the impossible weight in his chest until he could be alone with God. If seeing abuse of church power hurt his heart this much, he could only imagine the pain in God’s heart.
“You don’t have to be angry, then,” said Langstrom, opening his hands in appeal. “You can mourn for your parish. You can feel betrayed that the Church put you in that position to begin with. Just don’t be so happy about it.”
Jud stopped pacing and sat finally on a wrought iron bench. He stuck a hand into his pocket and tugged out a block of wood and a pocket knife. In the absence of another occupation he had been whittling a crucifix. Though Langstrom still wasn’t convinced about trusting Jud’s jittery hands with a blade, he couldn’t argue.
“I’m not happy about it,” said Jud, one shoulder falling as he chipped off one corner of the block of wood. “I just feel powerless again. I feel twelve again and scared of whatever is coming next. When I was a kid, hate and resentment felt like the power that would save me, and you know where I channeled that,” an absent thumb bumped over his knuckles feeling for the ghost of a fight’s bruises. “It feels powerful now to say that Wicks can’t take me there again.”
Langstrom let Jud sit with that. There was no noise but the rustle of the plants and the rhythm of Jud’s knife.
“I’m not trying to be cruel, Jud,” he said after a fortifying silent prayer, “If you are angry or sad or whatever it will come up somewhere else. You told me once you just wanted to be a good priest. To show the world Christ’s love as we are called to do, we have to recognize this world’s pain for what it is. That includes yours, Jud.”
Langstrom had been in ministry a long time, and one of his most important duties was to love the hurting. He had seen how people fester when they start insisting at the horizon of trauma that their pain is for the best. There is a fine line between understanding the way God can use your experience, and insisting you’re thankful for it to the detriment of your own broken heart.
Jud was walking that line drunkenly, stumbling all over the place. Of course he was, these wounds were still fresh. Though Langstrom was already sick of Jud’s caution and his renewed fear and his absurd honesty about himself he had to remember that while seven is the number of completion, seven days is not enough time for grief to run its course.
The sun watched them coldly, two priests in a garden only just beginning to come back from winter’s false death. Jud took a leaf in his hand and ran his fingers across its slick new life. He returned to his tiny crucifix as if he had never been distracted. He gently carved out the hollow beneath the figure’s miniscule ribs with the tip of the pocket knife.
“I need to be able to forgive him,” said Jud, his voice growing thick. “I’m not a good priest if I can’t forgive him.”
That sounded so shatteringly like something he had said once about his father that it knocked the air from Langstrom’s chest. It drove home just how much Langstrom had put Jud right back where he’d promised he’d never have to go again.
The thing about hearing confession is that you are stuck sometimes carrying one person’s admittance of another person’s sin. This is sin you are in no position to absolve. In that way Langstrom carried what Jud had given him of his father’s sin. His father was abusive, a word it had taken Jud years to use. The thing about being abused is that it is often remembered in snapshots of humiliation that make up a pattern where the person in power gets away with whatever they want.
This was what Jud had described to Langstrom. In fits and starts, Jud (who had at the time been teaching himself to give his shame to God), described the sting after a bad report card and the sound of his skull bouncing off tile. He described the subtleties, too. He described the way his mom gave up begging his dad to stop and the way his dad stopped insisting it was for Jud’s own good. The way his father would sometimes give him an ice pack for a developing black eye and they’d make up a story together (before he had the easy and implicit excuse of fighting). The way he had gained some value in his father’s eyes when he started bringing home winnings, and “I provide for you,” became “You have to provide for us.”
That’s the complexity of a relationship like Jud’s and his father’s. There’s love and hate and both flow, like the blood and water from Christ’s side. It had been bad enough listening to Jud describe Langstrom’s manipulation and finally his attack in that same disjointed way, with both respect and disrespect, generosity and betrayal.
“I’m not saying you can’t forgive him, Jud. You do have to forgive him so that you don’t keep carrying the weight. In order to forgive him, though, you have to admit that what he did to you is sin that God hates.”
Jud put the knife and the crucifix on the grass and dropped his head into his hands. If they had been boxing this was the KO. He knew what it was to lose when someone expects a lot of you.
“You’re doing great, Jud,” said Langstrom.
This seemed so incongruous that Jud looked up. Langstrom leaned forward, his elbows resting on his knees.
“You don’t have to feel like you deserve to be blamed. You don’t have to be serenely at peace with what happened right now. You are a good priest who has been deeply wronged. Jud, I’m sorry. I'm sorry for the part I played in that.”
“I forgive you,” said Jud, and getting him to admit that there was something to forgive felt to Langstrom like grace.