**Content note: This essay describes emotional and physical abuse in a marriage. Please read with care.
Covenant is the arrangement that says you belong here even when you’ve been difficult, and even when you’ve failed at it outright. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield describes home as the one place that’s obligated to open the door when you turn up needing it, and that’s how I think about covenant, too.
It sounds tidy: two parties and agreed terms and God standing there as witness. In practice it’s about the messiest thing people do, because you’re binding yourself to somebody you can’t predict, and one of those somebodies is you.
I’ve learned that a covenant that gets broken doesn’t end at all; you go on living inside the wreckage. When it shatters and the shards pierce you as you try to hold the pieces together, the concept of home stops being anywhere you can actually go. I stopped believing in covenants for a long time, although it felt less like despair at the time and more like survival. There is actually covenant on the far side of that kind of breaking, but it took me a very long time to believe it was there at all.
My first marriage began in front of God and everyone I loved. And the next thing I knew, my new husband was yelling at me on our honeymoon, over some small way I hadn’t done what he’d told me, and I remember thinking I’d never heard him sound like that, and then thinking, almost right away, that maybe I had. After that the most predictable hour of my week came on Friday afternoon, when he’d sit me down and go through his list. I was too friendly. I’d taken over a conversation again, or laughed too loud at somebody’s joke, or talked to a person he hadn’t approved of. He’d read the items out in order while I cried and asked him to stop, and he’d look at me with steel eyes and wait for me to get quiet and then keep going, because the crying went on the list too. I stopped calling my friends that first year and he never had to make me. Everyone loved him, which was the trouble. He was sweet in public, and if I’d said one word about Friday afternoons I’d have been the one who came out of it sounding unwell.
He came to those afternoons with scripture, and scripture is what he hit me with. A godly husband is the head of his wife and of his household. A wife submits to him as the church submits to Christ. So by his reading, what happened in our house wasn’t cruelty, it was order, and what rose up in me during those hours wasn’t my dignity, it was my rebellion. But it was my dignity, and it took me years to be able to say so. He was fluent in the only religious language I had, so to say he was wrong about the marriage was to say God was wrong.
I left anyway, in the end. What he did, and the shape of the night I finally went, is the part I start to tell and then pull back, here and in most conversations I’ve had about it since. Two questions wait at the end of a story like this one, whether it was really that bad and how a woman could be foolish enough to stay as long as she did, and the minute I start answering either one, then I have agreed there’s a line somewhere under which I should have stayed. And I would be arguing that case against myself, because those two questions don’t only come from other people. He spent years telling me that what I felt wasn’t real, and some of that took, so there’s still a voice that asks whether I made the whole thing bigger than it was. That voice is a liar, and I know exactly where I got it, but on the darkest nights I can still hear it echoing.
A few weeks later, wrecked and frightened of everything ahead of me, I went to my pastor and told him I was thinking about a divorce. He told me God hates divorce. So I asked him straight out whether he was telling me to go back to a man who hurt me, emotionally and physically, and stay for the rest of my life. He looked me in the eye and said yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. He didn’t think he was being cruel. He thought he was being faithful. But I had gone to the one place that was supposed to have to let me in, and it sent me back to the house I’d run out of. I lost that church, and most of the people in it.
It took me years to understand what I’d actually lost, because at first I could only name it as two people I trusted who had hurt me. That wasn’t wrong, it was just too small to hold what had happened. What went was the thing underneath both of them: the belief that people can bind themselves to each other and mean it.
After that, I avoided covenants in any form, including with people closest to me, and I hurt people in those years. I’d gone numb to survive, and the numbness stayed and spread until I was heart blind. Careless is too soft a word for it. I did real harm to people who hadn’t done a thing to deserve it. Not everyone who gets hurt goes on to hurt somebody else, but I did. That’s the hardest part of any of this to say out loud.
All of us get hurt at some point in our lives. We end up inside a covenant that comes apart, although what we do with the wound while it’s still open is a separate question from what was done to us. A wound left alone doesn’t close. It gets older and teaches you its habits until you can’t tell it apart from your own personality.
Nothing was going to close my wound on its own, and I learned that forgiving somebody who never apologized is hard work. Most people never get the apology, or the acknowledgment, or the moment where the one who hurt them says out loud that they did it and it was wrong. I didn’t. So I did the work without him, in a restorative process in a therapist’s office. Somebody else sat in his chair, a surrogate, and said the things he was never going to say and took back from me the burden I’d been carrying with nowhere on earth to set it down. I knew it wasn’t “real,” but my body didn’t care.
When I was ready, I said my own part out loud to the person in his chair. That I hadn’t been perfect in our covenant either—which is true and is not the same as saying the rest of the brokenness was ever mine to carry. That what he did broke the covenant we had made and hurt me, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise. And also, he isn’t a monster. There’s a great deal of beauty in him, he got somewhere terrible by a road I can partly trace, and I don’t wish him a single bad thing. I didn’t say any of it until I believed it, because I’d spent years waiting on him to say his part.
I should say that none of the work I did in therapy and on forgiveness meant going back to him, and none of it meant giving him access to me. Releasing a debt and handing somebody a key are two different things, and you can do the first without ever doing the second.
None of that process came quickly. I spent years avoiding any covenant with others before I could do any of that work, but they weren’t faithless years, though it took me a long while to see them that way. Hiding—from other people and from myself—was easier than being present or trying to heal, and it didn’t always look like hiding. Sometimes it looked like certainty: I sorted people into the ones who did it and the ones it was done to, and I kept the ledger, and nobody ever moved categories. I felt safer putting people in those categories. And it allowed me not to move either. Every wrong had a name on it, and none of the names were mine. Until they were.
Putting the ledger down is what forgiving the church turned out to be. My pastor stopped being the category I’d filed him under and went back to being a man who thought he was doing right by me and was wrong about it. That doesn’t undo what it cost me. It only meant I wasn’t carrying him around anymore.
Even after that, I didn’t return to trusting and deep covenantal relationship with others or with myself. But I wanted to. Staying near a door you can’t yet bring yourself to knock on is its own kind of faithfulness, and nobody counts it, because from the road it doesn’t look like anything at all. Being frozen in place isn’t the same as being finished with something. Staying by the door turned out to be the first step on the way back for me.
I still hadn’t forgiven myself. That’s what kept me waiting at the door, not knowing whether to knock or run, and doing neither. Shame held me outside a place that would have let me in. Forgiving myself came last because it was the heaviest, and it cost me the cocoon I’d built out of shame and hurt and inner numbness, because coming out of that cocoon meant standing in the bright light. It meant finally knocking on that door to covenantal relationships again.
For a couple of years now I’ve been working with Rabbi Brad Hirschfield, Rabbi Elan Babchuck, and Rev. Dr. Herbie Miller on a Clal course for churches called Coming Home to Covenant. I came to it not as an expert but as somebody who’s both had my covenants broken by others and who has broken them myself. Our team named something plainly at the outset, that faithfulness to covenant has always been a perennial problem for both of our traditions, and I have never once sat in that work without thinking about my own house. In the Bible, the parties fail, generation after generation, but this showed me that failing a covenant, even badly, doesn’t put you outside of it for good.
Most of us end up carrying a broken covenant of some kind: a marriage, a friendship, a congregation, a family, a country. Usually more than one, actually. And there’s two parts to each covenant that is broken: There’s the part that someone else broke, the one we can talk about, and there’s the part we broke, which takes longer to get to and costs a great deal more to say. My story has both.
All those years I stood outside that door unable to knock? God didn’t leave the other side of it, either. I’ve learned to give thanks from inside the failure rather than waiting until I’m safely past it, because inside the failure is where I actually live, and I don’t know anybody who lives anywhere else.
Forgiveness didn’t open the door. What it did was get me as far as knocking, which turned out to be the only part that was ever mine to do. It didn’t settle anything and it didn’t make what happened all right.
What it bought me was being back with people fully and authentically, unguarded, deeply known by those who can fail me and those whom I can fail. That’s what’s on the other side of that door, for anybody still standing out there deciding.