I do not want to turn suffering into an icon. I do not want to polish it, frame it, and pretend it ever did me favors. What happened to me was ugly—bloody, raw, body-level harm with the kind of psychic splatter that reaches years into the future. Still, I keep circling the same threshold: my relationship with the Rabbi formed inside the weather of being cast as a scapegoat—first in my family, then in the workplaces and friend groups and community rooms where I tried to belong. I do not romanticize any of that. But I refuse to let silence name it for me. If faith is a river through many rooms of the Heavens, then this essay is me walking a lamp along the river’s edge, saying out loud what the water knows. In short: this is a reflection.
This reflection engages religious imagery to explore trauma and healing. It’s not a claim of sainthood, salvation, or Christhood—only a meditation on what happens when the machinery of blame meets the longing for mercy.
Stations of Blame
The scenes repeat with small costume changes. In my case, the choreography was set long before I learned its steps: the rotation of suspicion, the sudden argument that doesn’t have a starting gun, the inventory of my supposed defects as a way to keep everyone else pristine. Years later I watched the same drama in fluorescent-lit break rooms and group chats—someone makes an error or behaves cruelly, and the room decides that my reaction is the problem. I say, “That hurt,” and the chorus answers, “Stop making everything about you.” I pause to consider my words before sending them, and that restraint becomes evidence that I am calculating, conniving. If I speak, I am dramatic; if I go quiet, I am withholding; if I leave, I am disloyal. The accusation is a fog machine: it fills every space until the sprinkler system of my own nervous system goes off, and now I’m drenched and they call me hysterical for dripping.
At first I tried to disprove the fog. I organized receipts: dates, messages, screenshots, quotes. I brought my carefulness like a spotless lamb to the altar of their certainty. It never worked, because the purpose of scapegoating is not to find truth but to prevent it. The point is cohesion—everyone else gets to remain bonded in innocence by sacrificing me to the story. “See? We agree: it’s them. We’re fine.”
Eventually I learned to name the pattern. I stopped debating the details with people committed to not seeing them. I learned to say to myself, Oh. The role has been assigned again. The relief was not immediate or absolute, but it gave my body a place to stand that wasn’t the trapdoor under my feet.
Girard in the Break Room
The French thinker René Girard described the scapegoat mechanism as a way societies contain their own violence. Mimetic desire leads to rivalry; rivalry leads to crisis; crisis is resolved by selecting someone to blame and expel. The community experiences relief and calls it peace. The victim’s innocence is beside the point; what matters is their usefulness to the spell.
You don’t need a university to watch this happen. You can see it in a family text thread, on a church committee, at staff meetings where the same few people speak for the room. When the pressure inside a system rises, it searches for a vessel with enough empathy to absorb it. That person is often sensitive, conscientious, and attuned—traits that make them both easy to target and unwilling to retaliate in kind. The community’s sickness is transferred onto them like a liturgy spoken in reverse: Not us. You.
The violent poetry of the crucifixion is that Jesus walks into this apparatus on purpose. He doesn’t become a better scapegoat; he exposes the machine. Power needed a convenient body to bear the lie that violence is order, that expulsion is healing. He refused to play the part—neither by resisting in a way that confirmed their fear nor by confessing to something that wasn’t true. He stood, mostly silent, and let the accusation exhaust itself in public daylight. The point was never for him to be admired in pain; the point was for the mechanism to stand there naked, ashamed of its own unmasking.
When I recognize that, I stop confusing endurance with virtue. Endurance can be a survival tool, a bridge from one day to the next. But I am not righteous for surviving; I am simply alive. The wisdom, if there is any, lies in refusing to let the lie keep working through me—in refusing to carry the smuggled shame any further down the road.
The Body Keeps the Parable
Trauma is a theologian. It teaches in the muscle, not the mind. Hypervigilance is an exegesis of danger; fawning is a hermeneutic of survival; freezing is an unintended sabbath in which the only commandment is do not move. My body learned those scriptures first, before words arrived to parse them. So when I say crucifixion, I do not mean a symbol. I mean the sickening lurch in the stomach when I hear my name spoken in the wrong tone. I mean the sleep that will not settle and the eyes that scan every sentence twice. I mean the way my throat tightens when someone says “we need to talk” because historically that invitation contained a pre-written verdict. Those are not metaphors. They are the nails.
In the Gospel stories, the wounds do not disappear after resurrection. They are not edited out for the final cut. The Rabbi shows them like windows into a larger country. “Put your hand here,” he says to Thomas, not to glorify the puncture but to anchor recognition: It’s me, the one you knew—still embodied, still marked, still beyond the reach of what marked me. There is profound relief in that scene. I do not have to pretend that what happened to me did not happen. I do not have to call pain “growth” to make it acceptable. I can let the mark remain and still be in motion toward a life the wound could not imagine.
A Hall of Rivers (Plural Heavens)
My faith does not live in a single room. I hold plural Heavens—layered worlds with different acoustics, jurisdictions of mercy, halls that river into one another. There is a hall where justice is not delayed by politeness or hierarchy. Another where tears are translated into the native language of dignity and returned as clean water. There is a hall of perpetual dawn where the first light does not humiliate the night for losing; it simply arrives and keeps arriving. The crucifixion sits in one hall, heavy and unavoidable. But another hall opens from it, and then another, until what looked like a dead end becomes a corridor of air.
In that architecture, the Rabbi is not a lamb or priest or altar. He is the witness who refuses the room’s groupthink, the teacher who opens a window when others are building walls. He is the companion who walks beside, not above. And in the far, quiet halls—beyond language, past the borders of what I can say—he lays a steadying hand on my nervous system and says, Peace to your cells. Peace to your startled heart.
Refusing the Costume
If scapegoating is a ritual, then healing is an un-ritual—an unbinding that returns names to their rightful owners. Part of my practice is embarrassingly simple. When someone casts their shame onto me, I give it back—not with cruelty, but with precision.
“That’s yours,” I tell myself, sometimes aloud when I’m alone. “This feeling that I am fundamentally untrustworthy? Not mine. This sense that I must explain myself to avoid punishment? Learned, not true. This impulse to edit my laughter so it doesn’t get me in trouble? A relic of survival, and I can set it down.”
Another part of the practice is boundary without homily. I used to write paragraphs to justify a no. Now I try a sentence:
“I’m not available for that conversation.”
“I’m stepping out.”
“I don’t share that view, and I won’t continue this.”
The reaction is predictable—a flare of accusation that I am selfish, or dramatic, or cruel. I remind myself: scapegoating escalates when the sacrifice steps off the altar. The noise is not evidence that I am wrong. It is evidence that the ritual has been interrupted.
The Workplaces, the Friend Groups, the Sanctuaries
In offices, scapegoating often hides inside “professionalism.” The rules are written around comfort for those already comfortable. When I name harm, I am told I am “not a culture fit,” as though my refusal to swallow disrespect is a flavor objection. In friend groups, it hides inside “vibes,” that hazy category used to dismiss any challenge that asks people to look at themselves. In community spaces—even sacred ones—it hides inside “unity,” the plea not to divide us by bringing up what’s actually dividing us.
The temptation is to become a hermit and call it wisdom. Sometimes withdrawal is necessary triage. I respect my need to leave rooms that will not allow me to exist. But I also refuse to let the logic of expulsion become my logic. Plural Heavens means plural communities—some I have not met yet, some we will have to build ourselves. I learned to look for people who do not require a sacrifice to feel together, who can sit in conflict without casting a role. It is astonishing how quickly the body calms in the presence of that kind of maturity.
Confession as Liberation, Not Capitulation
Christian language is crowded with confession. For years I thought confession meant admitting I was as bad as they said. Now I hear it differently. I confess that I carried burdens that were not mine. I confess that I confused self-erasure with love. I confess that part of me believed I could earn safety by being small enough to pass unnoticed. I confess that I am learning a better faith, one in which love has a spine and tenderness has a tongue.
When the Rabbi says, “Take my yoke upon you… for my yoke is easy and my burden is light,” I don’t imagine a burden like the ones I used to carry—secret, heavy, unending. I imagine a harness that distributes weight correctly. I imagine a pace that honors breath. I imagine walking beside someone who matches my stride and refuses to let me drag carts that belong to empires I do not serve.
Resurrection Without Amnesia
Resurrection, in this essay, is not an event that erases the file. It is continuity with difference—the same life, returned, with new jurisdiction. The people who scapegoated me may never admit what they did. The file may remain unsatisfactory by earthly metrics—no public apology, no perfect restitution. But resurrection shifts the center of gravity. The lie no longer has veto power over my memory. The ritual no longer controls my weekends, my inbox, my bloodstream. I become difficult to cast, slippery to the old narrative, not because I am better than anyone but because I have located the door in the wall.
There is a quiet joy in this that does not need audience. It’s not triumph; it’s temperature. The room of my life is not cold anymore.
Litany for Returning What Isn’t Mine
When the old story gathers, I pray in plain speech:
I return the guilt that does not belong to me.
I return the fear that taught me to rehearse apologies in advance.
I return the pressure to be convenient in order to be allowed.
I return the lie that love is proven by how much harm I absorb without protest.
I return the costume of the scapegoat, piece by piece: the silence, the nod, the practiced smile.
And then I ask:
Rabbi who stood inside the machine and would not perform for it, stay near when I’m tempted to.
Rabbi who showed your wounds without shame, teach my body how to be unafraid of its own history.
Rabbi who walks the halls of many Heavens, river me toward rooms where truth is not a threat to belonging.
The Last Word Isn’t Theirs
If there is a single sentence that threads my faith to my history, it is this: being blamed is not the same as being guilty. It sounds obvious, but it is an exorcism. It frees my conscience to be what it is—a compass, not a courtroom echo. It lets me learn from the Rabbi without mistaking him for a throne. It lets me love myself without negotiating with people who only feel together when someone is missing from the table.
I used to think hope meant the system would change if I could just explain myself well enough. Now I think hope means I am changing even when the system doesn’t. I am not the designated problem. I am someone who lived, who lives, who will live in the many-roomed mercy of the Heavens. I am learning to bless the door each time I find it and to leave quietly, without ceremony, when a room demands a sacrifice. The last word isn’t theirs. It isn’t even mine. The last word is the river, moving, carrying, opening—the Rabbi’s steady, untheatrical life beside me, through me, beyond me, toward halls where blame has nothing to drink.
This is not a romance with pain. It is a refusal to let pain define my theology or my self. I keep the wounds because they are mine, and because they are windows. I keep walking because there are more rooms ahead. And when I am tempted to fall back into the old choreography, I hold the simplest creed I own: I do not perform for the machine. I am not the offering. I am already free.
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