Written for both professional practitioners and a lay readership this offers practical steps to enable churches to be safer spaces for victims of abuse. Drawing on her travels in South Africa and South America and her current role as Director of the face2face project at Holy Rood House, the author asks how the stories of 'survivors' can begin to transform society and the Church. What helps some people 'survivre', that is, to live over and above their stories of trauma and abuse and begin to flourish? What is it that brings resilience to the human spirit, what are redemptive relationships and how can we make 'safe enough' spaces for hidden stories to come to light? How can inappropriate power relations be challenged, and forgiveness be a community activity rather than an individuals' burden? This book comes out of the author's experience as a Methodist minister working alongside survivors of abuse, which began when a survivor arrived unannounced on her doorstep. 'It scared me. I wasn't trained for this and I felt totally out of my depth.As the weeks went by, I learned both the trauma and the resilience that were present in my unexpected visitor - and the need to find a bridge between this experience and an informed theology'. Survivor stories are grounded and echoed in tales from an allotment: of the toil and preparation that are needed, both above and beneath the surface, to enable fragile shoots not only to emerge from the darkness but to grow and flourish. Glasson challenges the victim motif of crucifixion and claims the challenge of the resurrection - for all people, and for the Church-- to 'live'!

Spirituality Of Survival and So What's The Story?

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This is undoubtedly an interesting book, but it does suffer for an absence of periodic summaries and perhaps a surfeit of words. Ideas have to be teased from the dense matrix, though the effort is not unrewarding. There are many valuable examples and the discourse is linked thoughtfully to gospel passages. Glasson adopts ‘sur vivre’ as her key to survival, affirmation of ‘the life-giving possibility of a story surfacing from under the circumstances that have suppressed it.’ She begins in the silence, for the abused that secret silence, that eventually it may feel safe enough to bear a name. Intimating that it may even be God’s name, she explores its boundaries, finding that beyond difference there may be a Christ-like drawing together. It is, she says, a matter of how we attend to each other. She concludes by addressing the Church, with a perceptive and challenging comment on its liturgy. In the end Glasson attests to that gloriously ‘astonishing, strong, bloody-minded determination among those who by rights should have given up long ago’, for alongside them stands the God about whom the same could be said.

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