ADVENT 2015
Dedicated to all the children of this
world who will be lost to us. Most especially, as we grow soul-weary of the
death of the innocents, to the memory of:
Tyshawn Lee – 9 years old. Chicago.
Dead by gang assassination. Laquan
McDonald – 17 years old. Chicago. Dead by Police.
At the beginning of Advent, December of 1971, a young black
boy, Charles Hale, disappeared in St. Louis, Missouri. Days went by as the
search for this child continued. After
more than a week (as I recollect the timing), his body was found in the ruins
of a deserted building on the Northside of the city. And “Advent” was electric in my mind. How did
“wise men” long ago go in search of a child who would be the deliverance from
sin and bondage, for the world; and we here and now are searching for yet
another young black child who was the promise of his family and became a light
snuffed out in a time of cold and darkness?
No, it was not a case of “How can God permit the death of a child?” that
pierced my mind. It was the pattern of death that had even then been beating a
rhythm of death in this world where children are made into objects, where they
suffer hunger, abuse, neglect, torture and violence. How much more before our
very minds are choked by the death of children? How do we live, in a world
where children, by the millions, seem born to be discarded while the adults
around them either suffer the chaos of war and poverty or use that suffering to
feed some self-justifying addiction to dominance and power?
It is not, nor has it ever been, God who permits the death
of children. The true revelation of Christmas was that God was the Child who was born homeless; who became a refugee from
state-sponsored holocaust; who grew to be labeled a criminal and a subversive,
and was branded a terrorist, tortured in the fortress of an occupying army and
publicly executed, in exchange for the life of a committed terrorist. And do we
learn? Have we learned? Are we capable of learning?
Deliver
Into Us
St. Louis, 1971. The
Search for Charles Hale
first in rain then snow
through the fire-
chewed ruins of the northside deserted
by
everything but cold rotting air
police and
city volunteers hunt for a missing
child
keeping
us informed to nothing definite the news reports
feed our strained hope with some slight
signs
each day
and each night the ageless silence
that is always with us scratches our minds
like a desert wind and we
like forgotten
nomads scattered in some dark
countryside crawl
close and cling to whatever light we
have
visited
with this the listening city stirs before it
sleeps
waiting restless without peace
distracted and caught in time
until this child
is found declared seen or delivered into us
(In, The Sun Whispers, Wait, Brown Turtle
Press, p. 70)
Not only Herod’s soldiers seek out the
infants to slaughter, performing the same purging of the innocent as that
performed by Pharaoh’s army in the time of Moses. Will we ever realize that all children are
“the Hebrew children” today? The Sudanese, Somalian, Ecuadorian, Mexican,
Lakota, Syrian, Iraqi, Libyan, Nigerian, Philippine, Puerto Rican children, and
their sisters and brothers found in alleys and trash bins and boxes and
basements and abandoned cars and ditches of the United States. They and all the others whose cries will
never be heard except by those who held them, are stronger than any host of
angels singing, “Peace on Earth to those of good will…”
That is the chorus that must be
attended to.
And it is not a song of peace. It is a
song of warning. “Visit war and death on
us”, they are whispering into our dream-state, “and those who survive the
slaughter will haunt your days and nights. Baptized in terror and suckled on
the poisons of power and greed and disdain, those who survive our death will
never be at peace – not until the world bows down in grief at the places where
we children lay.”
The ritual of birth must be reversed,
even as the poem about Charles Hale intuited: the spirits of these children
must find shelter in the manger we prepare in our hearts. Even – most especially – they must find a
place where they can be reverenced and caressed and anointed with the tears of
those who survive.
What gifts do we bring to the children
who cry to us?
Only our hearts. Our minds. Our souls.
Our strength. Our hearts. Our minds. Our determination to lift them up so that
the world can look upon those they have pierced and see them for who they truly
could have been.
We are bound to (carry) them.
