All That Is Bitter and Sweet_ A Memoir - Ashley Judd [207]
I nearly lost hope on this trip. The dark night of the soul hit me faster and with more ferocity than ever before. But that is the way it is with Goma. It’s a tough place, perhaps the toughest place I’ve ever been. It challenges the very notion of a loving God. I might even say, Goma defies God. One night in my hotel room, still reeling from the horrors of the day, I wrote an angry letter to God, rejecting the One I had loved in the creeks and woods:
Dear God, These are your children. What is to become of them? Why have you created a world in which you choose to be ‘powerfully powerless?’ I think you and your big plan absolutely suck. I think allowing vulnerable, defenseless children to be gang raped and thrown away, illiterate and unable to prevent and treat disease, is beyond a bad idea. The notion you are a God of justice is a savage lie. I think you’re a cruel charade and that you’re going to be bested by some God who doesn’t let crap like this happen.
I thought about Archbishop Tutu. What would he say about all this? I send him an SOS in an email. A few days later, I received his reply:
God is so glad God has someone like you. Available, impotent, wanting, and willing, bearing an unbearable anguish, crying and offering all that you can, a point of transfiguration, offering, being a conduit of grace, of love, of tears, of impotence, and God will thank you for accepting the foolishness of the Cross, the weakness of the Cross. I love you and pray for you to go on being the caring, feeling, crying, weak centre of goodness in a horrible world …
My prayer was answered, and I remembered that God lives in the space between people, in relationships, is acted out through our interdependence. God had always been with me.
I remember what I believe: God is love, and when I love, God is with me; and, in order to love, I have to have someone to love. And that someone, well, maybe that someone is you, Ouk Srey Leak. And you, Farm Friend. And you, Solange.
As the dogs run ahead, I visit the ironweed, jewelweed, and admire the twining sprawl of passionweed, which looks like a crazy Costa Rican exotic even though it is our state’s wildflower. I kneel when “my” red tail hawk takes flight in front of me, keering. At the creek, I put my feet in the cold water and savor the delicious tingle and relief that swells in my entire body. I will rededicate myself to the Good God who made all this.
I wade a spell, the hem of my knee-length nightgown getting wet. However, I will not take off my gown, I will not swim. I want to keep the Congo on me. I do not want to rinse off where I have been.
I want to remember.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Although it is an account of my individual journey, the making of this book in many ways represents a group conscience, the sustained work and suggestions of, in particular, Maryanne Vollers, Trena Keating, and Pamela Cannon. I am deeply indebted to Maryanne’s unflinching, steady hard work, which included becoming intimately acquainted with no less than six hundred fifty pages of diaries I have kept on trips to the global south, plus my other writings (published, unpublished, academic, etc.) and speeches, which she cleverly suggested I incorporate into the diaries in order to tell more of my personal story (which I resisted, but that’s another story, because in the end, here it is). Maryanne also pushed me hard on the structure and sequence of the chapters, and without her, given I was in graduate school and then on two films, this book would remain but a dream. She is scary smart, which is why I liked her in the first place, and I am grateful she wears her intelligence loosely, and never lorded it and her lengthy experience as a war journalist in sub-Saharan Africa over me! Trena had astonishing confidence in my writing and me, believing my diaries had to be published. She gently guided—without ever directing—me toward the right folks. Those ended up being the good