When the villain is vanquished

one of the villains in question

We all love the demise of an evil villain. Everytime Wile E. Coyote gets flattened by an anvil, smashed by a boulder or exploded by dynamite, we cheer. When Harry Potter shouts that final “Expelliarmus”, taking the Elder Wand and finally destroying Voldemort, his victory is ours. Like the Munchkins of OZ, we can’t help but break out into a chorus of “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead” when we see ruby-slippered feet beneath a house. There’s something primal about wanting the defeat of our enemies, even though most of us have never been stalked by an unhinged coyote with an ACME addiction. 

But what would it really look like to have your arch nemesis meet a just demise? I imagine that most of us left our arch nemeses back in middle or high school. There’s probably some person at your office who always leaves their dishes in the sink, or a neighbor who always blocks your driveway, or a TV anchor who makes you spew fire every time you hear their latest soundbite, but as much as these people take up space in our lives/brains/text threads, they’re not really on the same level as Dr. No or Thanos or Hitler.

My arch nemesis died this week. He went out not with a bang, but with a whimper after a months-long struggle with a sudden, undefined illness. The funny thing is that I did not set out to have this person be my arch nemesis. Yet the origin story is not unlike the most common ones: once we were close, but then we weren’t. Apathy turned to anger. Anger turned to assault. Assault turned to vengeance. Thus an arch nemesis is born. Who is this person? My childhood pastor, of course.

I knew he’d been sick for a while. Heard it through the grapevine. I casually followed the few updates via the church Facebook page. Though old and weak, he maintained an iron grip on the church to the very end – never retiring or choosing someone to take his place. I’m sure the eulogy will say something about how he “died in the saddle.” One could see it that way. I see it as a dictator maintaining control at all cost. 

Two years ago, he threatened me. I dared to speak up when he announced through a local news segment that he wanted to build a “Memory Garden” for Confederate statues that had been taken down across the state. If you’ve read any of my past essays, you know that I started a petition. I talked to the local news. His response was to leave me a voicemail that said I had “misinformation” and that “God almighty will judge me”. He then took it a step further saying, “I don’t know if she will live or not because God will judge her for this.” I cannot tell you how otherworldly it is to have the pastor you’ve known since third grade to essentially say God should kill you. 

I called a lawyer. I talked to the police. They said it wasn’t really a threat – as if God’s judgment isn’t the literal worst thing someone could do to you – and that I didn’t really have a legal case. As a result of the popularity of the petition, I talked to people who told me the pastor was laundering money. That the pastor had said of a staff member he had beef with that he “hoped they slipped on a bar of soap in the shower and hit their head.” Nothing ever came of the accusations. There was never really enough evidence for a conviction. 

My cousin told me about his death. It was a singular text with a YouTube link to the song “Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead.” I knew exactly who she meant but asked “what does this mean?” anyway. An electric shock ran through my body. I got light headed. The whole earth shifted off its axis for a millisecond. I looked around me to see if anyone else felt the shock. Nothing had changed. I giggled, weirdly enough, and then the world unpaused. The people at the restaurant I was at with a friend were still trying to remember who wrote “A Christmas Carol” for a round of holiday-themed trivia.

This person has loomed large for nearly two-thirds of my life. He’s the reason my parents stopped letting us girls wear pants. He’s the reason we stopped watching Veggie Tales. He’s the reason I went to Bible College. He’s the reason I had so many abusive “preacher boy” boyfriends. He’s the reason for much of the dysfunction in my family. He’s the genesis of my family’s Fundamentalism – not the notorious Bill Gothard, founder of IBLP. Not Bill. Clarence. He was our God and we did as he said. And now he’s gone.

I’m shocked at how little this fact affects my life. I’m also shocked by how much space he took up. Still takes up. All that power, all that fear, all that manipulation, gone in an instant. A big man made small by the only thing big men cannot conquer, try as they might. I feel though that we have unfinished business. Its closure with all sorts of loose ends. 

I hope now that he’s gone that people who spent so long fearing him will speak up. As I know all too well, this fear was legitimate. I hope that now that he can no longer hurt him, that they will reveal him for who he truly was, so that his death won’t codify his spotless image. 

Weird as it may sound, I never wanted anything bad to happen to him. All I hoped for was justice, for the record to be set straight about what was happening in the name of “ministry”. I wanted the church members who reached out to me asking for help, asking me to help them save their church from a tyrant, to get what they so desperately wanted. I can only hope that the new leaders of the church will break the cycle and choose to do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. 

There’s a tidiness to a melting witch or a smashed coyote. A simple cause and effect justice is intoxicating (why else do we keep telling these stories?). But at the risk of stating the obvious, personal villain arcs aren’t so simple. I’m not interested in an eye-for-an-eye life. I’m not asking for my enemies to be smashed by anvils. It doesn’t really solve anything. After all, another coyote always takes his place.