Why do we hate innocence?

“You seem pretty innocent though.”

I spun on my heel and faced the speaker, the blood beating up in my throat, soapy water dripping over the toes of my work shoes.

He hadn’t meant any harm, really, but those five words had struck a nerve.

Guys have been telling me that since I was a teenager. Always in a disparaging tone of voice that makes it abundantly clear– this isn’t a compliment. Your innocence is an embarrassing flaw, one you should work to shed as fast as possible.

It’s strange to me that I still strike people as innocent. When I spend time in Amish Country (which in Ohio means Holmes County) or around people who grew up in seriously Christian homes, I feel like an uncouth barbarian.

Too innocent for the world, and too worldly for the innocent. So I don’t quite fit anywhere.

Still, I think there must be something in my appearance or voice or manner that gives the impression of innocence. This used to annoy me, but I’ve learned to embrace it as a gift.

Last summer (during my window washing era) it was a little golden light I carried with me into the dark places.

I remember going into a bar for the first time (not the nice kind of bar, the dismal kind) feeling like a lamb being led to slaughter.

“God, protect me,” I whispered under my breath, and He did.

It wasn’t too bad after all. I learned quickly that men who day drink in such places are either too deeply sunk in their own misery to notice anything, or else they are mainly occupied with the young female bartenders. Either way, the bars went off without incident, and with the added benefit that nobody cared if I left streaks on the glass. Bars have dark windows and you can’t see much inside.

The mechanics and dealerships were another story. The male employees were bored, restless and hungry for diversion. I suppose I was diverting; at least, I was a break in the routine. And I was captive in their territory for fifteen or twenty minutes, which created a deeply uncomfortable dynamic for me.

On this particular day, I was working my way through an auto shop lobby in the middle of a thunderstorm. There were so many windows, most of them blocked by stacks of tires and other heavy objects that had to be pushed aside, and so dusty they probably hadn’t been touched since Sherlock Holmes was in Baker Street. It was slow, dull, tedious going.

The young man loitering behind the counter was trying to engage me in banter, and I was parrying his comments as demurely as I could manage.

I was somewhat beholden to him because he had allowed me to skip the garage door windows– the most tedious part of the whole project.

“We don’t want you to get struck by lightning,” he’d explained casually.

It was a kindness he would not have shown me had I been a man, and I was grateful for it. I didn’t want to get struck by lightning either.

He had taken more interest in me than most clients, who generally acted like I was an imposition or a ghost. He’d compared me favorably to my male colleagues, whom he thought lacked social skills. He’d wanted to know how much they were paying me (“Not enough, I’ll bet,” he’d scoffed, and he was dead on).

I was a little touched by the sympathy, glad that someone had noticed me, had seen me as a woman even in my heavy utility belt and banged-up sneakers.

I was also in a rush to get out of there because he’d made several offhand references to my body which had left me feeling slightly defiled. Those remarks I had quietly deflected or ignored¹.

But his words about innocence pushed me over the edge.

Before I knew what I was doing, I had turned to meet his gaze directly for the first time. He was younger than me– late twenties, maybe. Coarse, but not uncomely. I did not see a ring. But then, he may have taken it off for work, the job was so dirty.

I could not tell that young man the truth.

I could not say that precious things are easy to throw away but hard to find again.

I could not say that the tender innocence of my girlish heart– a gift and an inheritance from my Creator– had been stolen from me by a culture that did not value it, while those who ought to have stood watch at the gate were busy with their own affairs.

I could not tell him that what was left of my innocence had been redeemed from the pawnbroker at a terrible cost, and not only to myself. Or how I had struggled and wept to put the broken pieces of my birthright back together.

I could not say that a society that will not protect its women and children is a society that hates us, and hates every good and gentle feeling in the human heart.

I could not say that to despise innocence is to despise all true joy and happiness– to wilfully blind the eyes of our souls so we cannot see God.

These things I could not tell him– it would not have been appropriate, and he would not have understood. So I just stood there glaring, searching my mind for the right words.

“Well,” I said, struggling to throttle the anger in my voice, “I think innocence is a choice.”

The words came out measured enough but my eyes were flashing, I could feel it. I can be very intense and that is not a good thing. I should learn to rein it in.

His eyes widened and he drew back as if he’d touched a live wire, which he had.

“Yes… I think you’re right,” he said in a far more serious tone than he had yet employed.

And the conversation ended there. He had overstepped and I had overreacted, and we both felt bad and probably unsure of where we’d gone wrong.

The mechanic and the window washer and between us all the detritus of a shipwrecked sexual culture.

As I followed him behind the counter and through a door into a filthy, yawning cavern of an auto shop, I reached under my shirt and pulled out the baptismal cross I’d been wearing against the skin. I set the cross against my stupid-looking collar where it would be visible to the half-dozen rough men working on the cars.

From then on, whenever I set foot in a bar, an auto shop or a dealership, I repeated this ritual. But I’m not sure if it helped, or if anyone even saw it.

Dating, Cursing and the Return of Innocence

When I was young, my mother was particular about my use of strong language and had a very low bar for what she considered “bad” words (I will leave the specific vocabulary to my readers’ imaginations).

So while I heard a lot of swearing, I was not permitted to emulate it.

I can still remember working my first job at a movie theater in high school and wanting so badly to impress my adult co-workers.

At first it was hard for me to get those ugly words out of my mouth. They caught in my throat, tangled around my teeth, and I blushed with an odd mixture of pride and shame. The grown people just laughed. Of course they weren’t impressed, but they encouraged me.

I looked and sounded so young at sixteen. And it was amusing for them to hear such language spoken in my childish voice. It’s amusing to watch a city burn, perhaps. But how much work does it take to build the city anew? After I broke through my natural restraint, it became a constant struggle to check my language by brute force.

There was a sort of subversive pleasure that came with tearing down the walls and defying the rules. But the pleasure was short-lived, and once the walls were gone they were very hard to rebuild. Isn’t that the whole story of the sexual revolution?

A few years later, I came across the term for some kind of intimate act I’d never heard of before.

The Internet wasn’t such a cesspool back in the early 2010s, but Urban Dictionary existed. I could easily have found the definition.

But instead, I found myself thinking, “I don’t need to know what that means”. It was a watershed moment for me; never before had I deliberately turned my eyes from the world to shield them. And that was the beginning of my journey back to innocence.

Now that I find myself in the awkward and bewildering world of Orthodox dating, I see that I am by no means the lone traveller on this path.

Single women are in short supply, and Orthodox converts– we’re almost all converts– tend to be idealistic. As a result, Orthodox women are often placed on a pedestal. It’s not a bad place to be, but a slightly confusing one. And since we’re just as much sinners as the men, we’re bound to fall or get knocked off at some point.

But still, I’ve been greatly touched by the example of men striving to reclaim their own innocence. Masculine innocence seems to take the form of a pure, chivalrous devotion to the feminine. It’s both beautiful and strange to be on the receiving end of that.

Just a few years ago, when I first came to St. Nicholas, I would get very embarrassed when men held doors for me or offered to carry things (such a normal part of parish culture here that no one thinks twice about it).

But over time, little by little, I taught myself to accept these acts of chivalry graciously and with appreciation.

I taught myself to step quietly to the side if I reach a door at the same time as a man, giving him the chance to open it for me rather than racing for the handle. (About 80% of men do hold the door in this situation, and not only at church.)

I taught myself to say “yes, thank you” instead of “I’ve got it” to an offer of help.

And I taught myself, not only to avoid harsh language, but to drop my eyes and turn my head when the conversation gets a little coarse.

Perhaps I am a fraud. Perhaps I am affecting modesty, pretending to be more innocent than I really am. Lord knows I’ve seen and heard things I’d rather forget.

And perhaps you are a fraud too, my dear brother sitting across the sticky coffee-shop table from me, fidgeting with the collar of your second-best shirt. (The best one, quite properly, being reserved for Sunday Liturgy.) Perhaps it is so. Most people who are single in their 30s have histories of some sort. Well, and what of it?

The world loves to play the accuser with us, baiting us to throw away our innocence and then claiming that it is gone and lost forever. But the saints would tell us otherwise. Many a fallen man or woman has seen their birthright restored by the hand of the only Sinless One.

So when you tell me that you’re trying to learn a new way of dating, that you want to do things right this time– I will believe you.

When you offer to open my car door and help me over the icy patches on the sidewalk– such a far cry from the unbridled contempt of women I saw growing up! – I will let you.

And when you catch yourself using mildly bad language and ask my pardon, I will not tell you that I’ve heard (and probably said) that word a thousand times before. I will take the apology if you wish to offer it, and treat it as a matter of course.

You will be a better man if you strive to be worthy of me, and I will be a better woman if I strive to be something worth striving for.

You were made to be a hero, as surely as I was made to be beautiful. And we were both made to be innocent and pure of heart. God knows we fall miserably short, but in an age when so many things have been lost or destroyed, is it not a miracle that we have not quite forgotten who we are?

For herein lies the wonderful part– the little dance, the play we are acting out, this is the real thing! Maybe it’s only half-true now, but one day it will be fully true because you and I, dear brother, will be fully real.

Never mind the brain rot and the depravity and the cynicism, that’s all chaff before the wind. It will be gone and forgotten in half an instant.

Kings and queens, knights and ladies, Guinevere waiting at the window for her lord’s return– that is reality! That is what we were made for, what we will become, once our innocence is returned to us and the eyes of our souls can see clearly again.

There is a nobility to the human spirit that cuts like a sunbeam through the demoralizing smog of the world. No matter how low we fall, we stubbornly refuse to break. The divine image that only we bear will not be wholly erased, nor the patterns of reality wholly lost.

For all his cunning and all his wiles and all his millenia of studying man, the devil always underestimates us. He cannot help it, because we don’t have an upper limit. “Good” for a human soul is glory to glory to glory forevermore!

And how much it must please our Creator, and how much confound the adversary, that we savages crawling on hands and knees amidst the ruins of our ancestral home should make some little effort to set our feet upon the flagstones and stand upright like men.

In a future post I’ll share some practical ways we can reclaim our innocence– take heart! It’s never too late!

Yours in Christ,

Elisabeth

1. By the way, is there some discreet and sophisticated way to let a man know he’s crossed a line? Is this something that women from Good Families know intuitively? The very fact of being sexually harassed makes me want to crawl out of my own skin, which makes it hard to respond rationally.