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Delhi rape protests: demonstrators clashing with police in the capital yesterday

Yesterday Andy and I participated in a protest march here in our city. Earlier this week in Delhi, where we used to live, a young woman was brutally gang-raped on a moving bus, and this horrendous crime—an extreme case of the rape and violence against women which are commonplace in India—has aroused national outrage and a public cry for justice and change. As we marched with our flickering candles in the cold dusk, I thought about the pain and the terror that woman in Delhi had endured, the grief and shock of her family, and the trauma shared by so many other victims who have not been wealthy or important enough to garner the media’s attention when they have lived through (or been killed) in other life-shattering sexual assaults. I thought about all the women in my neighborhood who suffer violence on a regular basis, and yet were not even able to take part in a protest like this because of how strictly controlled their lives are.

Those flickering, vulnerable flames we carried as we marched made me think of Isaiah 42:3: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out” (“…til he leads justice to victory”). These words are describing Jesus, but lately I am coming to see that Jesus himself is also that bruised reed and that smoldering wick. He is vulnerable and fragile. He himself was stripped and tortured and killed by the powers of evil in his day. Even today, his kingdom comes through the weakness of human beings, often human beings who fail or who are overpowered by the colossal systems of injustice and evil that they oppose. The strange and wonderful thing about those seeds that fall to the ground and die is that their life is actually multiplied and continues (John 12:24)! Those words from Jesus are a wonderful explanation of the paradox of resurrection.

As John chapter 1 says, “The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not overcome it.” The thing I struggle with is that, at least for the present, neither has the light overcome the darkness. Following Jesus is often like a candlelight vigil in the dark. The darkness of an entire room can be lessened by the presence of a single candle. But the harder you focus on the light the more pitch-black the surrounding darkness seems, and the candle cannot completely dispel the darkness after all—only the sunrise can do that. Jesus’ life was that candle, that flame of truth to light our path through the dark; that sign of hope that the Dawn is coming and we can begin to walk in the light even now. Our lives are that fragile, flickering candle, burning with love through the night with the desperate hope that Day will come and the shadows of violence and evil and confusion will recede once and for all.

There were signs of hope in that protest. Unlike the protest in Delhi going on at the same time, the righteous indignation did not descend into violence: none of the protesters forced their way through blockades, and the police did not fire water cannons and tear gas at us or beat us with their wooden rods. At the rally, people spoke not only of the need for police to make cities safer for women and for government to actually prosecute rapists and mete out harsher sentences. They spoke also of the need for men and women to begin to address the degradation of women in society at a root level by raising their sons and daughters as equals in the family. There were placards that spoke of how backwards it is to teach women to be careful in order to avoid rape, instead of teaching men not to rape. These messages are closer to addressing the heart level of the matter.

But there were also discouraging placards calling for retributive violence. The anger everyone feels is completely justified, but we were especially disturbed to see men carrying signs that advocated torture and death for rapists. It’s easier to completely dissociate themselves from the “monsters” who have done this than to acknowledge their common humanity—and to have the chilling realization that those roots of selfishness and lust which grew into this savage act of brutality are lurking in their own hearts, too.

We are still waiting for the dawn. In a society where domestic violence, rape, commercial sexual exploitation, and routine sexual harassment of women are a virtual pandemic, it would be more useful for men to examine their own role in creating this unsafe atmosphere for women than to demonize the few men who have acted out in an extreme way. As long as women are objectified for male consumption, as long as their bodies are turned into sexual commodities, and as long as they are denied equal status in marriage and the family, we can’t honestly claim to be surprised by horrific rapes like the one that has turned India upside-down this week. But we raise our candles and we renew our commitment to throw our lot in with the Bruised Reed who could not be broken, and the Smoldering Wick who lit the world on fire.

view from the train window, somewhere in Madhya Pradesh

We rang in the new year on a cold railway station platform in the middle of the night, waiting for an 11 pm train which finally arrived at 2 am. An overnight train and an all-day bus ride later, we found ourselves in a small town in the hills of Madhya Pradesh, where we spent the next four days praying, resting, and venturing out into nature to hike. It was a welcome reprieve for our souls: sunny days in the wild under the big blue dome of the sky, instead of the cold, grey days we had been having in the city, with the clouds hanging like a low ceiling over the rising smoke of plastic and wood fires our neighbors were lighting everywhere to keep warm. After experiencing so much of the ugliness and grime of the world, we needed to sit in a garden, surrounded by trees and flowers and birds that reminded us there is beauty in the world. We needed this quiet, peaceful place to pray and think about God and suffering and resurrection and what it all means for us now, living in the world that is groaning for the transformation that is still out of reach. We felt truly rested after our time there.

a view from one of our hikes

But on another cold platform at another train station on our way back, we came across a baby lying on the floor, seemingly abandoned. The shop owner who was standing within inches of the infant carrying on his business vaguely told us upon inquiry that the baby belonged to someone vaguely “over there”. We couldn’t see anyone, and after having ascertained that this guy actually had no idea who the parents were or where they had gone, we took the shivering infant into our arms and wondered what to do next. People seemed surprised at this, and other bystanders began to offer bits of information about a “husband and wife problem” and an argument during which the couple had left the baby and gone outside. Apparently lots of people had seen what happened, but no one had felt responsibility for the child lying helplessly on the cold ground while they bought snacks, sold bottled water, or sat waiting for their trains. A moment later, a woman in a sari came hurrying down the platform. “Oh, that’s her,” the shop keeper motioned vaguely. As she approached, we saw that blood was flowing down the side of her head and dripping onto the platform. Too shocked to think of anything to say, I wordlessly handed the baby to the bleeding woman. Too embarrassed to look anyone in the eye, she wordlessly took him and walked back in the same direction from which she had come. “Yes, husband and wife problem,” a man standing near me re-affirmed. “No,” I retorted. “Husband problem.” We were sickened by the collective passivity of everyone throughout the situation, and by the total lack of compassion for either mother or child. Going outside could only have meant that this woman was probably beaten on a crowded street instead of in a crowded train station.

weekly market in town

Back home, we found our community much as we had left it nearly a week before, except much colder. There is beauty here too, in the warm welcome of our neighbors, some of children’s excitement at our return, and the invitation to drink hot chai around an open fire in our friends’ room. But temperatures are dipping into the thirties at night now, and some of the animals (not to mention people) aren’t faring too well. There was a cow on the alleyway behind us who could understand Hindi and tell the future. Well, we never quite figured out whether she truly had some strange ability or whether her handler had somehow trained her how to respond appropriately to pretty much any yes or no question you can think of, but she did seem to know more than the average cow. This week two cows, including that strange creature, have succumbed to the cold. And this whole story would just be a bizarre side note if it weren’t for the fact that two families depended on those cows for their livelihood and will now be scrambling to find work in the midst of a cold season during which much of the community’s other work—furniture making and recycling collection—drastically slows down anyway.

natural beauty was everywhere

Life here is just so full to bursting that within the same day you can find yourself laughing with abandon, hot with rage, struck with curiosity or wonder, and later sad enough to cry (and maybe you do). This week was a little slice of everything, with the confusion, the disappointment, the joy, and the downright strangeness all thrown in together, the way real life always is.

mother monkey crossing the road with baby in tow

Trudy Smith

Living in the tension of the already and the not yet

Tag: suffering

This night is dark

A new year begins…