Jan Carlsson-Bull March 22, 1998
Matreshka is the name given to Russian
nesting dolls. These are the dolls, made traditionally of wood and hand-painted,
that rest one inside the other. Within the outer doll reside as many as
12 dolls, each of diminishing proportions. The tiniest is the baby and often
no larger than a seedling. In China, where nesting dolls go back to the
early 19th century, the innermost form was commonly crafted as a tiny bird's
egg or a bud. As one unlayers the matreshka, this egg, bud, or baby is the
most wondrous discovery.
Each of us identifying as an adult is a nested creation. Like the matreshka
we carry within us layered selves--I as an egg, I as a newborn, I as a child,
as an adolescent, as an adult. At the very center of our being we cradle
the most fragile life form we have been....indeed, the most fragile person
we still are.
On our journey between birth and death, we have a vested interest in cherishing
and protecting each of our growing selves. Our very fragility is the seed
of our capacity to grow, to learn, to explore, to be loved, and to love.
It is the source of our power to be. The British writer Doris Lessing has
said that we grow into our faces. If this is so, we grow into the child
we harbor. The safety of that passage rests on a larger understanding of
just how central this child-self is to our ultimate well-being. The safety
of our passage together is rooted in an understanding of just how central
children are to our individual and collective well-being in the world we
inhabit.
The narrative of the Gospel according to Matthew is instructive. Jesus was
conversing in the region of Judaea with the many who had followed him there,
intrigued by his teachings. After heady discourse on the do's and don'ts
of marriage and divorce, some among the crowd tried to bring children to
him so that he could lay his hands on them and bless them. "The disciples
rebuked them, but Jesus said to them, `Let the children come to me; do not
try to stop them; for the kingdom of Heaven belongs to such as these.' And
he laid his hands on the children, and went his way.'" (Matthew 19:13-14,
The New English Bible) The kingdom of Heaven--interpreted as a vision of
what life positively transformed might be like--takes children seriously.
Kids count. Fragility matters. Childlike openness to all that is, childlike
trust in what lies ahead, are valued.
William Ellery Channing, whose presence at the pulpit inspired the formation
of All Souls in the infancy of the 19th century and whose voice echoes through
the years of our shared history, claimed that "There is no office higher
than that of a teacher of youth, for there is nothing on earth so precious
as the mind, soul, [and] character of the child." When we dedicate
children in this religious community, we are reminded that the promise of
every new life is the hope of this creature's fulfillment. Parents and congregation
alike are asked to celebrate that hope with a promise. We promise our children
that "to the best of our ability we will nurture and instruct this
child in the way of right living both for herself and for humankind."
We promise to act as a community to cultivate in this new life a love of
self and a love for others. Through this covenant, we all become parents.
We all become accountable.
"Children at risk" has become a household phrase and grist for
key-note speeches, panels, and serious discussion at professional conferences.
The images conjured up by children at risk are commonly those of poor kids,
often children of color, children who inhabit the most neglected parts of
our cities, children who are third world citizens of third world sectors
of a nation that boasts a thriving economy, a bull market.
Why not consider every person under the age of 18 as an at-risk child...not
to blur the issues with reductionism leading to social paralysis but to
frame them with a heightened consciousness of what is. I daresay that many
of the children who have been dedicated in our congregation have been close
to an edge defined by such at-risk specifics as substance abuse, eating
disorders, depression, and the bewilderment that accompanies family discord
and divorce. I know my children have. But "our children" as we
conventionally consider "our children" have commonly--though not
exclusively-- benefited from psychotherapy, rehab clinics, top-flight hospitals
and an accessible cadre of adults ready to intervene on their behalf. We
struggle to keep the promise made at their fortunate entry into the world.
So many of our children live in the shadow of hopes and promises. Many of
us from this church boarded buses to Washington, DC in June of 1996 to Stand
for Children, along with a few hundred thousand of our neighbors from across
the country. The well-being of all our children was threatened by welfare
legislation that has effectively pulled the plug on life support systems
when there was every hope, every scholarly researched indication, every
historical confirmation, that children and their families benefiting from
these life support systems would survive and thrive. The lives of 1.2 million
children have been directly and disastrously impacted by that legislation.
Every day in our country that considers gun control a controversial issue,
16 children are killed by firearms....every day. Every day in our country
that can afford the prospect of war but cannot keep domestic peace, 316
children are arrested for violent crimes. Every day in our country whose
most vocal citizens flinch at the idea of national health insurance, close
to 1,800 children are born without any health insurance. Every day in our
country that presumes opportunity for all while scuttling affirmative action
that reverses a track record of opportunity for the few, over 2,500 babies
are born into poverty. (Stand for Children, 1996)
Every day that we permit this to happen we consign the children we raise
and nurture, the children whose names we know, to the risk of reaping the
legacy of our neglect and the risk of growing up with the illusion that
the benefits they enjoy are rewards they have earned. Our Unitarian Universalist
affirmation of justice, equity and compassion in human relations crashes
willfully into the iceberg, and those on the lower decks don't have a beggar's
chance.
Geoffrey Canada heads the Rheedlen Centers for Children and Families in
Harlem, where he teaches martial arts to children as an approach to discipline
and non-violence. In his first book, Fist Stick Knife Gun, he recounts
heading up 108th Street one evening after class, with his students in tow.
It is a street only 28 blocks to the north, where more than ten youngsters
lost their lives to gunfire in a single year.
"I called one of the youngest students
over to me. He is only five and comes to class with his older brother. I
see that his jacket is open and I stoop down to zip it up."
The jacket is old and beat-up, probably
belonged to his brother last year. The zipper is broken. He believes I can
fix it. Why not? After watching me in class he believe that I can do anything....I
notice his nose is running and take out the package of tissues that I keep
in my pocket for just this purpose and wipe his nose. He doesn't object
like most five-year-olds. He loves the care and concern. As I watch him
cross the street with his brothers and friends, holding his jacket closed
with his hand, the spell is broken for me. No more magic. Just little five-year-olds
in raggedy jackets that won't close, trying to stay warm on a cold night....
This community, like many across this country, is not safe for children
and they usually walk home at night filled with fear and apprehension. But
when I walk with them after class they are carefree, like children ought
to be....When [they] see me standing on the corner watching them walk into
their buildings they believe what children used to believe, that there are
adults who can protect them.
Lest we once again lapse into the habit of resting assured that this is
not our neighborhood. Lest we once again place this five-year-old back on
the shelf with all the rest of "those kids," Canada's further
words ring in our ears:
"....the impact and fear of violence
has overrun the boundaries of our ghettos and has both its hands firmly
around the neck of our whole country. And while you may not yet have been
visited by the specter of death and fear of this new national cancer, just
give it time. Sooner or later, unless we act, you will. We all will."
Whether it is gun control, health care, quality education, or community-based
programs for children and families, we can make a difference. Through the
Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, we invest funds in the Rheedlen
Center, on behalf of our children. Though the Service Committee's Promise
the Children agenda, conceived and catalyzed by the member of our congregation
who spoke this morning's opening words, we can invest personal and collective
time in this national advocacy initiative on behalf of poor children.
When I was about 10 years old, I made a promise to myself. It was a summer
day, and I was feeling both carefree and vulnerable, acutely aware of being
a child. I will never forget what it feels like to be a child. This
was my promise to myself. It emerged as a precious epiphany from somewhere
deep inside of me, maybe from that innermost layer of my own metreshka.
This promise to myself takes on expanded meaning if I consider my accountability
to children beyond the remembered child that I am, beyond the children of
my own household or my own neighborhood. The promise we voice, as we dedicate
our children in this luminous sanctuary, takes on expanded meaning if we
consider our accountability to children beyond those we call our own. Behind
the statistics of children whose lives are marked by the injustice of a
not even close to level playing field are children with names just as dear
and faces just as lovable as any child we know and cherish. Marian Wright
Edelman, President of the Children's Defense Fund, brings it home:
"We were mesmerized," she reminds
us, "by the 1987 death of Lisa Steinberg, a child whose adoption was
never completed or abuse detected by our overburdened, inadequate child
welfare system. We cheered when Jessica McClure was rescued from an open
well shaft in the yard of an unregulated family day care center run by a
relative, a danger she should not have come close to in the first place.
But when eight-month-old Shamal Jackson died in New York City from low birthweight,
poor nutrition, and viral infection--from poverty and homelessness--we didn't
hear much about him."
"....Imagine you or your spouse being
pregnant," she continues, "and not being able to get enough to
eat or see a doctor or know that you have a hospital for delivery. Imagine
your child hungry or injured, and you cannot pay for food or find health
care. Imagine losing your job and having no income, having your unemployment
compensation run out... having no place to sleep with your children....Imagine
having to stand in a soup line at a church...."--on East 80th Street
between Lexington and Third on Monday evenings or Friday at noon as the
beneficiaries of our own soup kitchens, standing there "after you've
worked all your life, or having to sleep in a shelter with strangers and
get up and out early each morning, find some place to go with your children,
and not know if you can sleep there again that night."
Imagine being Shamal's parents. What would you have wanted for your child?
What behavior would you have ached for on the part of parents of privilege?
What story would you have told anyone willing to listen? What services would
you have gladly accepted, even if they were demeaning? And what might you
have believed you had a right to expect from your government, from people
with the power, to make a difference on behalf of your Shamal?
Springtime is a seasonal newborn, a time of hope and confidence that the
earth will continue to bloom and ripen and that each seedling will enjoy
the opportunity to stretch to its own rhythms and exalt in its singular
resplendence
"See a blossom in your mind's eye,"
we spoke together earlier.
"Allow it to fill the interior of your imagination....
Marvel that this creation, while utterly fragile--yet undaunted, boldly
buds forth turning resolutely toward the sun."
Will we promise our children....all our
children....the prospect of full blooming, the anticipation of living long
and well in the miracle of the all-embracing cycle of life? Will we acknowledge
and affirm the innermost form of our metreshka....the tiny bud, the trusting
infant....understanding that the prospects of this fragile entity, our innermost
self, is inextricably linked throughout our lives with the well-being of
the whole garden?
How will our promises be kept alive for our children and our children's
children? Will we serve and proclaim and advocate and mobilize around the
connections between the runny-nosed five-year-old in his raggedy jacket
and the five-year-old in the down parka, the connections between the once
possible Shamal and the child whose pediatrician's phone number is attached
to a refrigerator stocked with ample fuel for sustenance and growth? Will
we honor the covenant of our congregational parenthood on behalf of the
children in our wider neighborhood? Service, mobilization, advocacy, passion,
and opportunities yet to be imagined are tools that are ours to take into
the garden. Seeds are sprouting. Buds are shooting forth. With a springtime
like this, they need all the help they can get.
Carpe verem. Carpe diem. Amen. Copyright AllSouls 1998