About ten years ago, I enrolled in the Parent Educator program at the Echo Center in L.A., to learn to teach Compassionate Parenting, which is one way I have cared for other peoples’ children. Ruth Beaglehole was the founding director of Echo. Ruth’s passion for the thriving of other peoples’ children knows no bounds. She taught us that children “misbehave” when they don’t know how, or why, to do what we want them to do. She modeled for us the kind of empathy that connects, and heals deep wounds. She taught us that one caring adult in the life of a struggling child can make all the difference. You might have that power.
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Brea Congregational United Church of Christ
September 23, 2018
Power For
Mark 9:30-37 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it; 31for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.” 32But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.
33 Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the way?” 34But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest. 35He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” 36Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, 37“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
During World War Two, an unwitting experiment was performed on young children. German air raids were hitting London with bombs night after night; no neighborhood was safe. So huge numbers of children were removed from London; put on trains and sent to temporary nurseries or foster homes all around England to be safe from the bombs, and safe from living in daily fear. Some of those children had already become orphaned or homeless; most were sent away from their families in London just for their safety. But it turned out that they were not safe. Very young children who were evacuated were deeply traumatized. Children in group care rather than foster homes did the worst. They suffered from “failure to thrive,” developmental delays, and deep and lasting emotional disturbances. John Bowlby and other psychologists witnessed this suffering, and they developed the concept of attachment. Infants and toddlers require an “attachment figure,” a stable caregiver, for their healthy development. It’s usually their mother. If they lose that attachment figure, they grieve deeply. If they don’t get a reliable replacement, they are at risk of permanent emotional damage.
Similar findings came from orphanages, and from middle-class children who were hospitalized. In urban hospitals before the 1960’s, parent access to their own children was almost completely blocked. Hospitalized young children got “hospital syndrome.” Hospital syndrome looks like severe, disabling depression.
A couple of determined psychologists made heart-wrenching movies with the titles Grief: a Peril in Infancyand A Two-year old Goes to Hospital. Made on grainy black and white film, these were the cell phone videos of their day, challenging people to face a harsh reality they had been ignoring. A typical response comes from an elderly nurse: “This film brings back to me the first child I ever nursed in hospital. This child was a little boy. He grieved for his mother and it simply broke my heart. After that I never saw grief again until I saw this film.”[i]
Despite clear evidence, attachment theory was very controversial through the 1950’s and even 1960’s. Helping professionals didn’t want to admit that they were complicit in the suffering and even long-term damage of the children they were supposed to be helping by not giving them reliable caregivers. So they continued being complicit a while longer.
The discovery of attachment tells us something essential about our humanness. We need relationship like we need food and water. We need love and care, and we are deeply vulnerable to its loss.
The discovery of attachment also tells us something else about human nature. We can construct social systems, even with good intentions, that destroy needed relationships. We can be trained to turn a blind eye to suffering, pretty quickly and easily. The people who dismissed attachment were scientists, doctors and nurses, social workers and philanthropists. People in power, even with good intentions, can blind themselves to the suffering of the powerless, and delude themselves about the needs of those under their care. Who are the most vulnerable and powerless among us? Often they are children.
Twice in the Gospel of Mark Jesus hugs a child and says, in different ways, children are what he’s about. Children are what the Kingdom of God is about. What did Jesus know about children? He was the eldest of a large family. These are not his own children he’s hugging. We can safely assume he had no children of his own. They are probably not any of the twelve apostles’ children, though I suppose one of them may have been babysitting. They are other peoples’ children. Children have little power. They do have power to love and to call forth love. The gospel is about the power of love, which is the power of the upside-down Kingdom of God.
Mark wants us to understand that Jesus is powerful. But not powerful in the usual sense of having power over other people. Jesus has power forpeople. Power for healing people. Power for welcoming them to belong, power for forgiving them and giving them worth. Power for naming them children of God.
Children of God. Plug that into traditional ideas of power, and inheritance. God is the great King of kings in heaven, and what do you get? We are all royalty. Nice! Someday we’ll take our rightful place at the throne of God, in a palace crusted in gold and jewels, and apparently squabble over who gets to sit closest to the throne, as the disciples keep doing in the gospel of Mark. I’m pretty sure that’s not what Jesus had in mind.
Children of God. Plug that into Jesus’ understanding of power for, for welcoming and healing and hugging and restoring our worth and what do you get? The upside-down Kingdom of God, where the first are last, and the last are first. In other words, the powerful go out of their way to serve the powerless, to really care about them and if necessary to sacrifice for them, the way good parents will do for their own children. Jesus is our eldest brother, gathering in as many of his little brothers and sisters as he can into the family of God, into the deep reassurance of trusting that there is one attachment figure that Jesus calls Father, who will never be taken from us. Along the way some of us got attached to our big brother Jesus too. That’s OK.
In today’s child-hugging episode, Jesus says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”How is it that Jesus is the child, the vulnerable one, that God is the vulnerable one? Maybe because God longs for our love. Or because when we care for other peoples’ children, we participate in the kind of love that God has for us, beyond what is expected or required, but so life-giving. And for those of us who cannot leave behind ideas of power over, as it seemed the disciples could not, this verse is a declaration of worth. Every child has intrinsic value, because God is in that child.
This mystical identity of other peoples’ children with God leads to some very practical challenges for us as followers of Jesus. How will we honor and care for other people’s children? In Jesus’ day that might mean fostering children whose parents had died or were unable to care for them. Or at least taking time to pay attention to other peoples’ children and offer them a hug, a little play, a meal, a listening ear. We can still do this.
Teachers care for other peoples’ children. I am so grateful for the teachers my son had, and I am in awe of what they do. For all you teachers among us here, I thank you for what you do, and I thank God for calling you to do it. How can we non-teachers care for other peoples’ children? We can support adequate funding for teachers and schools. We can support teacher unions, so teachers have the resources they need to do their jobs long and well.
We can care for other peoples’ children when we support access to affordable health care daycare. Living wages and affordable housing and predictable work hours and family leave. We care for other peoples’ children when we honor their sexual and gender identity. We care for other peoples’ children when we have safe church policies. We care for other peoples’ children when we work to stop wars and to shelter immigrants and refugees and give them a path to citizenship. And promptly release child detainees to their families. Also preserve the planet for those childrens’ adulthood. Well, that’s a long list. We cannot do it all. But we can look for opportunities to advocate for other peoples’ children.
All children are sacred and beloved of God and so they are our collective responsibility as a society. We care for other peoples’ children when we tell people that our faith demands that we care.
About ten years ago, I enrolled in the Parent Educator program at the Echo Center in L.A., to learn to teach Compassionate Parenting, which is one way I have cared for other peoples’ children. Ruth Beaglehole was the founding director of Echo. Ruth’s passion for the thriving of other peoples’ children knows no bounds. She taught us that children “misbehave” when they don’t know how, or why, to do what we want them to do. She modeled for us the kind of empathy that connects, and heals deep wounds. She taught us that one caring adult in the life of a struggling child can make all the difference. You might have that power.
The Echo Center has a Saturday morning class. Caregivers of every stripe gathered in a big circle and shared their parenting challenges. Yuppies living in trendy Los Feliz and court referrals, who are there to get custody of their kids after a criminal offense, were side by side. One time I listened to a mom of a two-year-old boy. That made an impression. What impressed me more was that the mom had letters tattooed across her knuckles: F-U-C-*. But she obviously cared about her son, and she was trying to understand why he was having some big behavioral challenges recently. Ruth led her through a series of questions. They were not figuring it out. “Anything going on in the family right now?” Ruth asked finally. “Oh, well, his stepbrother died last week. He was thirteen.” You could have heard a pin drop in that room full of twenty-five people. And you could see the wheels turning in the heads of me and all the other yuppie parents about what other peoples’ kids had to face when they couldn’t live in safety. Grieving kids are often not well-behaved.
A few years later I went back to audit an advanced parenting class, and who did I meet but that same mom. I recognized her immediately. It was the tattooed knuckles. She was smiling and talking about how happy she was to have a stable home life now. And she was coaching other parents, and talking about enrolling in the parent educator program. She was healed enough herself to have the power to care for other peoples’ children.
Jesus said,“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” This can sound scary, but usually it just means: use our power for others instead of our own advancement, like parents use their power to care for their own children. When we care for other peoples’ children, we become part of a great circle of care that has no first and no last. Instead, that circle begins and ends in God, and it has great power. Power to heal every grief, power to see each one of us as precious children, infinitely loved and valued. Amen.
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