Auntie's Awakening

Even now, she finds it hard to describe the six-year hold the pastor had on her, sometimes referring to it as her abuse, another time as rape, never as an affair or relationship. Anne knew that two of her sisters were under the same terrible spell at the same time. "Jonas and I call him 'The Beast,' " she says. "I would threaten to tell, but he would always say no one's going to believe you, that I couldn't live without him, that I needed him. I was clean for six months before I was able to tell Jonas."

The look in Jonas's eyes was unbearable, she recalls. "I'm really sorry, and I'm a very sorry person," she remembers telling him. And she hurried off to work after confessing. Jonas wasn't there when she got home, but eventually, she heard his little truck in the driveway. He came into the kitchen.

"We just stood there, side by side, not touching, and he said, 'Honey, I don't have a whole lot I want to talk about. I just want you to promise me one thing. . . . I want you to be happy. So promise me you won't leave me in the middle of the night with a note on the dresser. If you need to leave, we'll plan it together. I'll help you pack your bags, help you find a place to live, but you have to take the girls."

It was the last bit that broke through to her, Anne remembers, penetrating her own wall of self-loathing.

"I felt overcome by the fact that he thought I was a good enough mom to take the kids with me," she says, crying hard at the memory.

After she and Jonas complained to the church leadership, the Assemblies of God investigated, verified her account and dismissed the minister, according to George Wood, the church's general superintendent.

The Beiler girls are now grown and mothers themselves. One of them accompanied Anne to her counselor's office not long ago and revealed for the first time that she had been molested as a preteen by the same pastor in Texas. The Beilers immediately consulted a lawyer, intending to prosecute, Anne says, but their daughter finds the memories too painful to relive through the court system.

Publicly baring the scars in her own life felt frightening but somehow necessary, Anne found, and writing the memoir left her surprisingly exhilarated. "I struggled to forgive God, to forgive my husband for not being there for me," she says. "Forgiving the pastor is an ongoing maybe for me. But the hardest one to forgive is me, because I deserve all this bad guilt and shame. I realized if I want to be whole, I've got to forgive Anne Beiler."

Her sense of liberation led her to organize a grassroots support group for women, which she calls Seven Women, Seven Weeks, Seven Stories. Each week, for an hour, Anne gathers with six local women and one takes a turn just "telling her story." The others merely listen. Some are Amish, others not. Most, Anne says, speak of having been raped or sexually abused. When the cycle of stories is complete, they move on with their lives, and Anne gathers another group to absorb more sorrow.

The Beilers still live in Gap, on a lane shared by Jonas's hulking white Hummer and the horse and buggy of the Amish farmers next door. Construction has begun behind the converted office-barn on the Beilers' latest project, the future Family Center of Gap scheduled for completion this spring. Jonas has blueprints for an expanded counseling center, plus day care and elder care facilities, a library, church, gymnasium and cafe. Everything held close, everything contained.

He, too, speaks openly about his private pain. "Anne and I never broke up," he declares with unabashed pride. "I tell couples, 'Look, staying together is much bigger than you think.' I'm going to keep doing the right thing whether I feel like it or not. I felt like walking out on my marriage many times. I've thought about affairs. I've thought about suicide."

They celebrated 39 years of marriage this past autumn, and they speak happily of the retirement that will now allow them to hop on their Harleys and drive across country. There are grandkids to spoil, and a world to heal.

"It was never about the pretzels," Auntie Anne says at last.