A couple of days ago I heard from a friend who is from my hometown, and who is reading The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming  (which, I’ve just learned this morning, debuts on The New York Times Bestseller extended list). She wrote me about this excerpt from the book:

And this became a problem for me when everything in my life fell apart in the summer of 1981, not long after I turned fourteen. A group of kids from our school, including Ruthie and me, took a trip to the beach. Before this vacation I had been one of the most popular kids in my class, from the time I started school until then. But for some reason, a handful of kids a year older than me decided that I was going to be the mark on this trip.

I wandered one afternoon into a hotel room where the kids were hanging out with two of our adult chaperones. Before I knew what was happening, several of the older boys, including football players, had me down on the hotel room floor, threatening to take my pants off in front of the girls standing on the beds giggling. The girls, especially two popular ones at the center of the preppy clique, egged them on. I thrashed and flailed and begged them to let me go. I called out to the chaperones, the mothers of classmates, and begged them to help me.

They stepped over me, lying pinned to the floor, and left the room.

The gang let me go without stripping me naked—they probably only intended to give me a good scare—and I fled down the hall, into my room. I wanted to catch the next flight out, but had to endure the next few days, hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. Ruthie, who had been off at the beach with one of her friends, never knew what had happened, and wouldn’t have understood what it meant to me if I had told her. I made it home without further incident, but the world looked very different to me after that. To this day my mother remembers a sea change: “I knew something had happened on that trip. I didn’t know what, because you wouldn’t tell me. It was in your eyes.”

I probably would have left St. Francisville anyway to pursue my vocation, but this, and the bullying that followed back at school, is why I left the town so embittered. I only began — began —  to heal from that when I became a Catholic ten years later. And then, 12 years later, the anger — the rage, really — I felt over the Catholic sex abuse scandal consumed me, and destroyed my capacity to believe in the truth of Catholic Christianity, I couldn’t figure out why I lost my Catholic faith when I had Catholic friends who were just about as angry as I was, but who held on without difficulty. One day, a friend to whom I told the hotel-room bullying story said, “You know, that was sexual abuse.”

I told him I didn’t understand what he meant.

“That was sexual abuse,” he said. “They sexually humiliated you. Even though they didn’t get your pants off, they sexually humiliated you, and terrorized you in front of the group. That’s traumatic.”

And then a lot of things made sense to me. At an emotional level, the Catholic bishops were to me the same as the two adult chaperones who had stepped across me to get out of the room so they wouldn’t have to be responsible for what the cool kids did to me. Except a) what abusive priests did to little children was far, far worse, and b) encountering Jesus Christ in the Catholic Church had begun my own emotional healing and spiritual maturity, which made the fact that Catholic clergy had done these things to children, and worse, bishops had stepped over the children and their families to get out of the room because they were too cowardly to confront the abusers, so much more intense for me, emotionally.

Well, so much for that. When the friend contacted me earlier this week, she said how much she loved Little Way, and how much it made her think of growing up in our town. And she said she too had been on that same beach trip — I hadn’t realized that, because she was younger than I — and that the same kids who did the number on me did it to her. Except she was a girl, and she was 12, and they held her down and went significantly further in terrorizing and sexually humiliating her.

I had not known. I thought I was the only one.

I struggled to hold my emotions in check as I read her e-mail, and wrote back expressing hope that we could meet to talk about it.

Because I’ve lived away for so long, I’ve not had the chance to get to know this old friend well, but I think we would both say that we’re happy with how our lives have turned out. I know I can say — in light of what I was able to do with my life because I never wanted anything to do with our town after that —  that what those teenage bullies meant for evil, God used for good. And I can say that too in light of the fact that all that is in the past, and God, mostly through the grace that came to me through my sister Ruthie and those who helped her through her cancer, totally healed me of my own wounds from all that.

Still, when I heard from this friend that she had gone through the same thing all those years ago, at the same time, and had not known either that there was anybody else who suffered as she did — well, I don’t quite know what to say how I felt. Comforted is not the word, because I was genuinely and deeply grieved to learn this. But also comforted, in a strange way, because I know now that there is one other person in the world who knows with incomparable intimacy exactly what I went through, because it also happened to her.

I’m not sure why that comforts me, but it does. It also makes me understand in my bones the importance to telling our stories, and talking about these things. Yes, we can talk them to death, and tend to do that in our confessional culture. But to carry trauma in Stoic silence is not necessarily a manifestation of courage, a willingness to bear up, but rather a form of masochism, of self-poisoning. You never know who out there needs to hear what you have to say, if only because it also happened to them, and there’s comfort and healing in knowing that they didn’t go through it alone. One of this blog’s readers wrote me yesterday saying how much Little Way meant to him, given his relationship with his late brother, and with his father. He wrote, “Just being able to eavesdrop on your struggle has given me peace. No self-help advice, just a sort of communion.”

That’s it. That right there. Telling stories can give us direction on how to get out of the fire, but sometimes the point is simply to share communion. And that can be enough.

It’s also important to tell good stories. Last night, I received an email from a reader who heard the last five minutes of my Dallas radio interview, and came to my talk and signing there. We spoke at the signing table, and she was crying, saying that she hoped the book would be a bridge across the years and a river of pain between herself and her father. In last night’s e-mail, she wrote about why they were estranged — he was a violent man — but how his violence wasn’t the only thing about him. He also is brilliant, and saved lots of lives in his profession. After hearing me talk about Ruthie, including the struggle Ruthie and I had to love each other as we ought to have done, she bought a book and decided to reach out to her father after all these years. Reading her e-mail last night, the details of which are far too personal to share here, I find myself thinking of all the similar stories I’ve heard on the book tour trail from people who are hoping Little Way makes it possible for them to find healing and reconciliation.

I would, therefore, love to start an occasional series called What’s Your Ruthie Leming Story? I’d like to hear from readers whose lives were changed by reading the book, and who found healing and/or reconciliation from Ruthie’s story. I deeply believe that these stories are part of the mystery Ruthie identified when she said, of her cancer, “We just don’t know what God is going to do with this.” She said this in a hopeful way, meaning that we should be hopeful, because God might bring great good out of her suffering.

Did He? Is He doing that? Tell me, I want to know. Rod (at) amconmag.com.
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Hey New Orleans, I’ll see you on Friday at the Garden District Book Shop at 5:30 for a talk and signing. And Baton Rouge, I’ll be at the Perkins Rowe Barnes & Noble at 2pm for the same, marking the end of the Little Way Of Ruthie Leming tour.