A Voice In RamahI believe another world is possible – one where agents of the state do not have the power to terrorize black children simply because they are black children.
A police officer who arrested a 6- and 8-year-old children at an Orlando charter school on Thursday is facing an internal investigation.
— Read on time.com/5683453/children-arrested-orlando-florida-school/
In speaking about the current administration’s interpretation of immigration and border control policies to mean that it is legal and appropriate to separate children from their parents, a woman said to me, “I don’t believe this. This is not who we are.”
I understood what she was saying, but I wholeheartedly disagreed. This is who America is. We have been “this” for the entire history of my ancestor’s presence in this country. American slave holders separated black children from parents and sold those children off in front of their parent’s eyes for over two centuries. That’s just an example of who American has been. Pay attention to the lived experienced of other marginalized people in this country. They have stories that affirm this is who America is and has been for centuries.
Just because “this” is who America has been does not mean that “this” is what America will always be. We don’t have to be this way. America can grow up.
While I appreciate the many right-wing, right leaning and other religious leaders who have condemned this interpretation of policy, for some of them – not all – their condemnations ring hollow. Some of them hailed the election that brought this president into office. They championed this administration’s dismantling of protections and safety nets programs for poor Americans. They were and are silent about this president’s global shenanigans.
Yet all of these issues are fundamentally connected. You can’t condemn hatred and violence in one place while you ignore it or condone it in another. You can’t say that separating children from their parents at the borders is “anti-family” while you close your eyes to the harassment experienced by children who speak against American gun policies. You can’t nuance child-harming policies because the real Jesus – the one whose family fled the massacre of children and escaped to Egypt because shoring up King Herod’s insecurities became domestic policy; the one who restored a son’s life to a widow; the one who warned of the consequences of thwarting the lives of children — that Jesus said so.
In a harkening back to the theologies that served to undergird the American institution of slavery, Attorney General Sessions has been quoting Paul. Quite frankly, ain’t nobody asked Paul nothing. I agree with Howard Thurman’s formerly enslaved grandmother who believed that Paul was not to be consulted on some matters of liberation. Listen to Jesus.
I’m heartened by the statements from religious leaders. I really am. It’s something. At least. More than statements – that the likes of AG Sessions is not reading — what is needed is for religious leaders to gather up the shards of lives scattered about in the wake of the tanks that came before this border evil. Put your bodies on the line. Educate your members. (If this is your conviction, put your canons where your mouth is.) Do something. Or – shut up with your version of useless “thoughts and prayers.”
Some Statements:
http://www.sbc.net/resolutions/search/results.asp?query=2018
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/franklin-graham-blasts-trump-border_us_5b223db7e4b09d7a3d7a7c16
U.S. Interfaith Leaders Urge Government to Keep Families Together:
http://www.ucc.org/news_u_s_interfaith_leaders_urge_government_to_keep_families_together_06072018
http://www.umc.org/who-we-are/faith-leaders-statement-on-family-separation
The history of America being America:
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
In the office of the doctor who performed the fertility treatments that resulted in the birth of eight babies to a mother who already had six were pictures of children — walls filled with pictures of children.
These pictures were referred to as “trophies.”
Children are not trophies. They are not accessories. Children are not to be “used”for the purpose of building one’s self esteem. It is foolhardy to bring children into the world so that we can “have someone who will love us unconditionally.”
I have heard this kind of thinking so often — from all kinds of women. Something else is going on in the mind of a person who believes, or whose experiences have led them to believe, that the only way they will get unconditional love is to give birth to someone they hope will give it them. That is an incredible indictment on society — and it is an indication of the deep wells of emptiness with which people are struggling (knowingly or unknowingly). I have heard this from young girls who believe that “this baby is going to love me, and I will finally have someone good to love.” I have heard this from adult women who believe “this baby is going to complete me.”
Children are more than self-esteem tools or companions. What an incredible burden for a child to carry! Mary Pender Greene, a brilliant psychotherapist, often provides free marriage and relationship workshops in our community. She has said often that people who are considering marriage must not go seeking for someone to “complete them.” It’s not the responsibility of a mate to make you a whole person. You are a whole person. When two people come together, it is not one half meets another one half. The ideal is that one whole person meets another whole person — and two whole people are joined together. Many marriages and relationships falter because people expect their mates to “complete” them. We can be wonderfully fulfilled by our relationships when we approach the development of those relationships as whole people — people with interests and passions…people who have done or are doing the necessary work to be emotionally healthy. We all need help to be emotionally healthy — and we should seek it when we need it!
If a marriage will falter because an adult mate is unable to make up for all of the emptiness that their mate feels — what do we expect will happen with children who cannot make up for all of the emptiness in their parent’s lives?
As a parent, I know that my children love me. But there are times when they don’t like me. I say “no” when they want me to say “yes.” I say “yes, you will” when they want me to say “no, you don’t have to.” Raising children is not about creating a group of people to surround and affirm me. Regardless of how they feel about me, my responsibility is to parent them with love. It is my adult responsibility to understand that I don’t parent them so that I can have someone to love me; I parent them because that is what they need. And I know that my parenting skills are weakest when I am slipping on my own commitments to myself.
Children are amazing, simple, easy, incredible, loving, gifted, funny and wonderful! They are also complex, exasperating, moody, selfish, childish, boorish, and stubborn! They should have the freedom to be all of that and to grow appropriately — and they can only if we don’t expect them to do something that not even another adult can do — be someone or something they were not intended to be, or perform a function that belongs to God only.
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
14So Abraham rose early in the morning, and took bread and a skin of water, and gave it to Hagar, putting it on her shoulder, along with the child, and sent her away. And she departed, and wandered about in the wilderness of Beer-sheba. 15When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where he is. 18Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. 20God was with the boy, and he grew up; he lived in the wilderness, and became an expert with the bow. 21He lived in the wilderness of Paran; and his mother got a wife for him from the land of Egypt.
Genesis 21: 14 – 21 (NRSV)
Abraham, Sarah….and Hagar.
The names and stories we are most familiar with are the ones surrounding the legendary Abraham and Sarah. Abraham was faithful. Sarah gave birth well into her advanced years. Both were hospitable to traveling strangers.
But Hagar has a story, too. Out of her story comes her son — Ishmael. This is the Ishmael who was abandoned by his faithful father, Abraham and forced to flee with his mother because of the complaints of Sarah.
There is so much to unpack in the intertwining of the lives of Abraham, Sarah and Hagar. I’ll leave that for another day because today, I’m thinking about Ishmael: boys who are just out there with the promise of death hovering so immanently over them that loved ones turn away. They can’t bear to stick around to witness “what the end will be.”
You can insert in this story the name of so many little boys and so many little girls — children who are caught up in the crazy drama of the lives of the adults around them. For the sake of our sanity and because of the truth of our faith, we know that God hears them.
The question here, however, is not about God — it is about us.
Do we hear?
Is there some cool refreshing “water” we can offer?
And, do we have the guts to transform the wildernesses into which the Ishmael’s of the world are thrust into beloved communities where no child is forced to walk alone, and where no child languishes under the bushes of a lonely tree?
This scripture haunts my sleep. I will return to it again and again, I suppose, until my ultimate questions are answered.
God was with Ishmael, the scripture says, and he became an expert with the bow. Granted, he needed a bow in the wilderness. Children still need “bows” today to fight for their survival. Their wilderness enemies are not Ishmael’s wild beasts, but the wild beasts of low aim, low expectations, poor health, educational disparities, institutional racism, poverty, hopelessness and adult hypocrisy.
How do we arm them with “bows” to fight these enemies?
And, how do we help them to see the difference between the kind of fighting that always produces victims — and the Isaiah 2:4 kind of fight: the fight for the justice that produces peace brought about by swords beaten into plowshares, spears turned into pruning hooks, and courage to put down the studies of war and pick up the hopeful work of peace and bridge-building?
God has heard, for sure.
God needs adults to stop stop pushing children under the trees of bureaucracy, apathy and lack of vision. God needs us to stop being so distant and emotionally removed.
We’ve got work to do — the work of arming our children with a different kind of bow because the wilderness of still ripe with beasts.
In the last few weeks, school children in Chicago held a rally to call attention to the fact that twenty (22) students have been killed in the past school year alone. They carried signs reading “Don’t shoot. I want to grow up.” Did you see that?
This week, CNN published a story detailing how thousands of children in the United States are being sexually abused in juvenile detention and prisons. Children in the United States….did you hear that?
Today, a child in your own neighborhood –within your own range of sight — will be hurting and afraid to tell someone. There will be no parents around. There will be no trusted adults standing in the gap between them and a major mistake. Will you turn your face away from that?
Above the din of mindless cable television reporting on stuff that just does not matter and well beyond the noise of all the things that serve to distract us from really loving one another, seeing one another — beyond all of that there are these voices that we cannot ignore.
Children cry out by gang-banging, getting suspended, running away, cursing out adults, stealing. They cry out by withdrawing. They cry out by hurting themselves.
“Hurt people hurt people.”
We all are crying out in so many ways. These cries are evident in the statistics that shout the pathologies that are killing our communities. We get so worked up about the statistics, but we are doing nothing more about them wringing our hands in despair, blaming each other, blaming children….and while we are doing all of that, yet another generation falls away from us.
Adults are waging wars all across the world and children are the collateral damage. We are warring and children are dying in Illinois, New Jersey, New York, Mississippi, Florida, California, Bosnia, Uganda, Kenya, Nigeria, Darfur, Palestine….and in our own neighborhoods. Even in our own families.
We are so busy warring, fighting and focused on our own adult navels that we don’t hear these voices.
I love the Dr. Seuss story, “Horton Hears a Who.” In this timeless and incredibly important little story, Horton teaches us that there are so many little souls who stand in danger every day because the big souls just don’t hear them, don’t see them, don’t recognize their person-hood. And as the big souls go on their merry way, living, sucking up life, warring with each other, the unseen and unheard suffer as collateral damage.
Today, take a moment to really listen to what is going on in this world. Open your eyes.
1. Tell the media that you don’t want anymore stories on mindless mess. No more stories about people’s sex lives. No more sensationalized accounts of adult obsessions. Demand to know what is going on in this world in the lives of children. The best way to judge a country is by how well it does by its children and its vulnerable populations. And no “the sky is falling reports” about how all young people are going to hell in a hand basket. They are not. Demand to know where young people are doing well. Demand to know the success stories.
2. Visit your local elected officials and ask them — “how are the children doing?” If their eyes are focused on children, then they will have to be creative about finding real solutions for housing, community violence, jobs creation, education, health…they will have to deal with the real issues of our lives. Tell them that you will be watching what they do to reduce the number of guns on our streets. And then, really watch them. For those who continue to do nothing, who cannot build bridges so that people come together to problem-solve, who cannot seem to focus on why they were elected — kick them out the next “go-round.”
3. Look around your church. Is it place of peace for children? Has your church learned how to advocate for funding for positive youth development programs in your community? Does your church speak out to support your local schools? Are young people welcomed? Is there a class offered on how to be a good parent?
4. Make your voice and your face known at the local police precinct. Enough said.
5. Talk to a young person. Really talk. Communication is a two way street, so when you have said what you want to say, close your mouth and listen. Listen to what children say and what they don’t say. And when they do share something with you, honor their courage and follow through on your word.
6. Educate yourself about the wars that are being fought all around the world. Figure out what the commonalities are. Open your eyes and see for yourself — in every case, we are losing a whole generation of children. In some places they are strapping bombs to their bodies. In other places, they are stepping on bombs as they play. Yet, still in other places, bombs are hurled at them as they sleep at night. The Chicago experience tells us that American youth obviously need a police escort just to go to school because our culture, in the words of Marian Wright Edelman has “a romance with guns.” But, mothers the world over know deeply that a bullet doesn’t love anybody. A bullet is no respecter of persons.
I don’t believe that adults just want to war and fight. Rather, I believe that adults just don’t know how to make peace anymore. We don’t know how to listen. Kurt Bestor wrote a most haunting song some years ago when he was in Yugoslavia. The Bosnians, Serbs and Croatians were killing each other, and beyond all of the violence Bestor searched the faces of children and saw terror. He saw children who just wanted to be children: to play across boundaries, to laugh…to grow up.
Listen: children still just want to be children. They just want to play across boundaries, to laugh and to grow up — in Yugoslavia, Newark, Darfur, New York, Afghanistan, Iraq, Your town, Your Family.
Is anybody searching their faces and listening but God?
The Prayers of the Children
by Kurt BestorCan you hear the prayer of the children
on bended knee, in the shadow of an unknown room?
Empty eyes with no more tears to cry
turning heavenward toward the light.Cryin‘ Jesus help me
to see the mornin‘ light of one more day,
but if I should die before I wake,
I pray my soul to take.Can you feel the hearts of the children
aching for home, for something of their very own.
Reaching hands with nothing to hold onto
but hope for a better day, a better day.Cryin‘ Jesus help me
to feel the love again in my own land,
but if unknown roads lead away from home,
give me loving arms, ‘way from harm.Can you hear the voice of the children
softly pleading for silence in their shattered world?
Angry guns preach a gospel full of hate,
blood of the innocent on their hands.Cryin‘ Jesus help me
to feel the sun again upon my face?
For when darkness clears, I know you’re near,
bringing peace again.Can you hear the prayer of the children?
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
When those to whom I belong forsake me,
then the Lord will take me up.
Psalm 27:10
I remember the day when I finally understood that I belonged to God.
It was the day when it was clear to me that I belonged to no one else. Not even myself.
To belong to God is an incredible responsibility. I tell my own children when they are expressing doubts about their abilities or when they are on the verge of inappropriate behavior — “Remember, you belong to this family.” It is enough to make us all think and straighten up — even if just for a moment.
When the children with whom you walk begin to doubt their abilities and their value, remind them that they belong to God. They will not get it at first, but hopefully, those words said often enough will become the tape playing in the back of their brains when they get older, when they face mountains…alone.
When they are discouraged.
When they look around and friends are few.
“I belong to God.”
When they have utterly failed at something – they still belong to God.
When they have experienced success…I belong to God.
Amen.
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
But God knows the way I take
When he has tried me
I shall come forth as gold.
Job 23
For all the things we think we can predict, this much is true. We cannot predict what God will do with a child.
Jesus was born of a young mother. From before his birth, questions swirled about regarding his parentage. Though Joseph married Mary, people still considered Jesus to be a bastard child, an illegitimate child. How can a human being be “illegitimate”? That’s another question for another day.
But the point is — because of his parentage, the circumstances surrounding his birth, etc., not much was expected of Jesus. Yet, 2000 plus years later, people are still committing his words to heart. People are still inspired by his humility. People still believe…
Just goes to show you what God can do with a child. Any child. Anybody anywhere.
God does know the way we take. God knows the pitfalls, the difficulties, the joys, the sorrows. And, God knows how those circumstance serve to shape our personalities, character and potential.
God does try us. Like a mother who places a ball just out of the reach of a toddler so that the toddler will step out and walk, God stretches us and calls us forth. Sometimes, we go forth through painful territory, but…
You shall come forth as gold. Being gold does not mean being shiny and passing for “bling.” Being gold means being valuable. You are incredibly valuable. Your value is not determined by the standards of the world, but by the hope of God.
For those of you who are walking with children, here’s a message to press into their hearts: muster up the strength to walk through adversity because your walk is not solitary; your walk is not in vain. With each difficult step forward you will learn to drop more of the world’s shiny, heavy, burdensome, useless bling and own the courage to accept the value you have in God’s eyes.
Press that into their hearts by showing them how much they are valued.
Fight for all children to live in healthy, violence free communities.
Fight for all children to have comprehensive health and mental health coverage.
Fight for all children to have good schools and quality after school programs.
Fight for all children to have strong, loving and supportive families.
Fight for the gold.
Amen
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
A friend sent a newspaper clipping to me last week and it utterly bowled me over. An 11 year old girl in the midwest has given birth to a baby. Apparently, she has been raped by her mother’s “boyfriend.” Family and friends knew of the abuse…and when the police did the DNA testing and determined who the father of the baby was, they did not have far to look: he was still in the mother’s house.
Incredible abandonment.
Incredible cruelty.
Incredible.
I have not yet been able to move from “My God, my God, why….” to “now that this has happened, here is what we shall do.” I’m working on that — but I’m not there yet.
My prayer is an old on…”Lord, I believe…help my unbelief.”
Anything I would write now would be driven by my doubts, my despair over what I read. My prayer is to be a help to people who will be called to walk with this little girl. Pray for those who must step into the gap for her — we all need to move through this moment but first — let’s just face the facts.
Incredible abandonment.
Incredible cruelty.
And it happens everyday to thousands of children in our own midst who often give up on the adults around them, give up on hoping that we will be adults and protect them from the edges.
We have given our children so many reasons to never trust us again. That they do is amazing and a gift from God.
Today — intentionally look into the faces of the children around you.
Look for the signs.
Look into their eyes.
Look at them.
And fix your face so that they will not be afraid to look at you, come to you, trust in you, tell you what’s going on.
My, God, my God….of course, God does know all about this. His own child hung on a cross screaming these exact same words.
The hope for this child, the hope for all of us is that we will come to know that these are not the last words. Despair does not have the last word. Because of what God’s child did on the cross, the last word has to be a word of word of triumph and hope.
Amen
Matthew 2:18:
A Voice In Ramah
http://avoiceinramah.blogspot.com
A Voice In Ramah