There are people I have been grateful not to have buried, presided at their funeral, because I have known them to embody an evil so great and so apparently well-hidden that I would have given in to the temptation to publicly out them.  At least that’s what I thought in the cold of the moment.  Then I hear from people in the community what that person really was like and find that the evil was not so well hidden after all.

So why didn’t anyone do anything about it?  Small communities weigh the benefits and costs of outing someone who is evil.  They may know that the person has a partner who will be harmed by the public shame that would be necessary once the secrets were no longer hidden.  They may put up a fence around the evil so that no one can be harmed by it.  Sometimes it works.  Sometimes it doesn’t.  Sometimes a person has such a good reputation in the community that no one suspects that they are abusing children or people’s trust.  They inflict pain from behind a cloak thicker than the Wizard of Oz’s curtain, and no one thinks to pull it back to reveal a terrible truth.

There have been people of exceptional grace who cared for their elderly parents who subjected them to abuse when they were young because they were able to see what their parents could not see – that they were human.  That the parents were human and so were the children.  They treat them with a dignity the abuser could hardly imagine.  As often as not they don’t recognise it, they just continue to believe it is their due.  They may even believe that they continue to exert control on the child. 

The child, though, is completely free.  They have discovered their own dignity and worth in spite of their treatment when they were younger.  Through a combination of therapy and prayer and finding a place in the community where they are valued they have risen above the demeaning influence.  And it is at their funerals that it is even harder to bite my tongue, because I want to trumpet how they have transcended their pain and are examples to each of us who long for dignity or need encouragement to offer it to others.