No.

Epstein, Haas, and the collective testimony to the truth.

When this video of survivors of Epstein’s horrors was released just a few days ago, my whole body was jolted back four years prior to this video, the first of its kind in the world of liturgical music, filling out a greater picture of real names and faces of those who came forward with credible allegations of abuse against DH. Yes, I know that sentence was long, but there is no time to take a breath when you are in the middle of an out-of-body experience. No, I won’t say or type his name. You can do the research: the brave women and their fierce advocates have made it very easy for you. https://intoaccount.org/reports/

I know some of these women quite well. All of them let me into their world in the wake of the 2020 revelations. I was there when they filmed parts of this PSA, and I wept in humility, awe, agony, pride, completely overwhelmed by bearing witness to a valiance that seemed to defy possibility. Yet there they stood, rising from the ashes of a fire that had been leaving scars for decades. One by one, what was once a cavernous echo of individual voices soon became a battle cry, a protest song, the beat of a drum that accompanied their linking together, one chain to another, marching hand in hand, loud, louder, and even louder still.

I don’t know… something about seeing their faces and hearing their voices all together in once spot becomes too hard for the conscience to ignore. Please tell me that’s true for enough people to make a difference.

And still, as time passes from one cry in the wilderness to the next, the insidiousness of abstract conjecture creeps in and drowns out the truth so often made manifest right before our eyes. “What is truth?" Pilate once asked, as now we hear the handwashing of our day piling onto an already mind-numbing heap of word salad, endless philosophizing and justification ultimately geared towards absolving us from doing anything at all, let alone what is just or—God forbid—uncomfortable. “What is truth?” or perhaps better interpreted in this instance as “Why should I care? Why should this disturb my own peace?” is what I see in the comment threads, as arguments begin to trip over themselves to see who can spill more ink to explain why this all-too-familiar, yes-of-course-horrible, but such-is-life reality need not change a social norm, or *gasp* require a personal or communal action. “If we enforce this consequence for x, then we have to do it for y, and then z, and then where does it stop?” they ask, as though that abstract hypothetical is as personified as the real, human flesh standing before us, showing us their wounds and asking us to believe. It “stops” when thy Kingdom come, on earth as it is in heaven.

These women are not fictional. They are not from another planet, or from storybook retelling of dramatized hyperbole. This is flesh and blood. Body and spirit. These are the manifestations of Creator’s genius that was so beloved that God’s own self came to be one of us, frail and vulnerable, in need of care and protection, Incarnate. Flesh and blood, poured out for flesh and blood. Not for status quo or creature comfort, but for a world turned upside down. For lifting up the lowly, and casting the mighty from their thrones and private jets and islands and wealthy webs of self-interested protection.

Release the files. Choose another song. Amplify the voices of victim-survivors, and don’t let abstract suspicions drown them out. And for God’s sake, affirm for your children that the word “no” is holy.

God Bless Our “No,” Text: Hannah C. Brown, Tune: SHE-WOLF, Kate Williams, © 2023 GIA Publications, Inc.