Photo: Travis Dove for The New York Times
Marcia Mount Shoop, as theologian in residence, leads a workshop at the White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh, N.C.
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: June 29, 2012
RALEIGH, N.C. — On the Sunday after she was attacked, Marcia Mount Shoop went to church. The descendant of three generations of ministers, she knew of few more familiar and reassuring places. The Presbyterian Church of Danville, Ky., was the congregation in her hometown, where just about everybody recognized her as the daughter of two college professors, a star miler on the high school track team.
Standing amid the faithful on that morning in 1984, just 15 years old, Ms. Shoop felt her thoughts returning to that night — the pressure of the boy’s body on top of her, her voice pleading with him to stop, the sight of her blood-drenched underwear after she ran home through the dark.
Church brought no relief. It made everything worse. Church, at least in the wake of tragedy, was the empty predictability of confession recited in unison, hymns sung by rote, sermons about the glorious soul and the sinful body and magical forgiveness. A favorite verse from Romans in her copy of the Good News Bible now sounded like a lie: “We know that in all things God works for good with those who love him.”
Only at home, alone with the secret of her rape, could Ms. Shoop find something to grasp for survival. “I felt Jesus so close,” she recalled in a recent interview. “It wasn’t the same Jesus I saw at church. It was this tiny, audible whisper that said, ‘I know what happened. I understand.’ And it kept me alive, that frayed little thread.”
By now, more than a quarter of a century later, that thread has led Ms. Shoop, 43, to become a Presbyterian minister herself, one who has developed religious teachings aimed at repairing the rift between mind and body, soul and spirit. Born out of a survivor’s struggle, they form her variation on the broader field of “incarnational theology,” which focuses on the living, breathing, physical Jesus.
Ms. Shoop’s ministry took her most recently to a monthlong stint at White Memorial Presbyterian Church in Raleigh as theologian in residence. In that role, she gave sermons, taught yoga, sang meditative songs, led prayers with Celtic and Native American origins and motivated dozens of members to “walk with God” in the church’s gymnasium. Every part of the program was intended to put the body back in the Body of Christ, and specifically to challenge the polite and restrained norms of Presbyterian practice.
“We always say, ‘We’re fine,’ ” she put it during an adult-education class in late June. “That’s where mainline Protestants have become most comfortable. We’re fine, and our role is to help other people be fine like us. How did we get ourselves into this fix of being only the helper, but never the one who needs being healed?”
In Ms. Shoop’s case, the reasons were both personal and theological. Her own sense of shame, and her attacker’s threat to kill her, kept her from telling anyone about the rape. She used distance-running as both a welcome catharsis and as a way to punish her body. And she threw herself into good works as an approved form of escape.
“Part of what my faith tradition gave me is trying to ignore what I went through by working for other people,” she said. “I was a service machine — Habitat for Humanity, the soup kitchen, outreach to the homeless. Being present for other people in their pain was a way to displace my pain.”
All the psychic scaffolding collapsed in 1996, when Ms. Shoop and her husband, John Shoop, went to see the film “Dead Man Walking,” about a nun who ministers to death row inmates. One scene showed a man’s body lying crushingly atop a woman’s. Within hours, Ms. Shoop had a nightmare about being raped. It recurred night after night after night.
At the urging of her husband and her sister, Ms. Shoop went to a rape-crisis center, beginning twice-weekly counseling. She also happened to be attending a multiracial Presbyterian church in Charlotte, where she was then living. One morning, two black women sang a spiritual titled “The Rough Side of the Mountain.”
“I realized that I’m coming up the rough side,” Ms. Shoop recalled. “I had to sit down. I couldn’t stand. I just started crying. I felt this new sensation — that church was a place where I could tell the truth.”
Soon after, Ms. Shoop entered the doctoral program in religion at Emory University in Atlanta. Her first class was about “the problem of evil,” and it was taught by Wendy Farley, a prominent figure in incarnational theology. From Professor Farley, Ms. Shoop began to learn about a Christianity that emphasized compassion for those who suffer rather than judgment on those who sin.
Ms. Shoop’s doctoral dissertation was eventually published as a book, “Let the Bones Dance,” a reference to the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of dry bones being reincarnated. As a pulpit minister, Ms. Shoop conflated the stories of rape survivors with the account in Matthew 15 of the Canaanite woman who will not let Jesus ignore her plea to heal her daughter.
“Forgiveness that is premature can be just another violation — it is a form of denial,” she declared in that sermon. “If it’s held out like a carrot for victims as that which makes them true Christians — if it’s the only litmus test we offer them for healing — then it is false forgiveness and it covers up the problem instead of transforming the situation.”
Her agenda for transformation, though it is grounded in the experience of and recovery from sexual violence, has grown broader over time.
Becoming the mother of two children allowed Ms. Shoop to see her body “as a place that was life-giving, not a place of death.” The lesson of recovering her physical self was one that she came to believe could be applied to mainline Protestant churches through petitionary prayer, more soulful music and a truly communal celebration of the Eucharist, among other forms of divinely inspired disruption.
“What happened to me wasn’t ‘for the good,’ ” she said, referring again to her favorite passage in Romans. “But God took the garbage, the stench, and gently, tenderly, indignantly wove it into this moment of redemption. What a gift.”
E-mail: sgf1@columbia.edu
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