Thinking about Jesse and the Children

"Yesus Memberkati Anak-anak," Artist: Komang Wahu,Indonesia

Tuesday I attended the Illinois Faith-Based Emergency Preparedness Initiative sponsored by the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH) and the Broadcast Minster’s Alliance of Chicago, Inc. Speakers of note were the Rev. Jesse Jackson and Carl C. Bell, MD, Dir. Of the Institute for Juvenile Research and Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Public Health at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Rev. Jackson caught my attention my final year at college his Operation PUSH was encouraging reading and studying among inner city youth as a step towards changing their lives. My four years at Converse College in Spartanburg SC had so changed the direction of my life that all I could think when I read about what he was doing was, “yes, of course, open their minds and they might be able to change their lives!” Later, in seminary, I had a chance to work more closely with Rev. Jackson’s vision when I worked for Harold Washington’s mayoral challenge to the Daley Machine out of PUSH headquarters. Mostly, I registered voters and must have done a fairly good job of it as I had my own right to vote challenged three times—for voter registrations to be legal the person doing the registering must be a legally registered voter. With each challenge, I had to present myself at the Board of Election Commissioners with attorneys supplied by the campaign and proof of my legal residence so that the voters I registered would be legally registered. I also pole watched for Mayor Washington on Election Day.

Rev. Jackson caught my attention yesterday when he talked about the normalization of trauma in the lives of our children. He told a chilling story of a drive by shooting at a school across the street from the PUSH headquarters. The children all dove for cover and then went back to playing like nothing happened. The threat to their young lives all too familiar an occurrence. I got to thinking about the children from our local high school who have died at their own hands lately. I do not think that the normalization of trauma in the lives of our children is an experience limited to children who suffer at the threat of urban gang and drug violence.

Children who live in highly affluent areas like ours are victims of normalized violence as well. It is harder to recognize and easier to minimize but it exists none the less. Many of our children dive for cover from emotional violence just as deftly as those who dive from bullets and they too then go on about the normal business of their childhoods.

The thing that makes me so very sad is that we ignore the children of color in the city because they are children of color of the urban poor and we ignore the children of privilege in affluent suburbs because they are affluent children of the privileged. We ignore our traumatized, hurting children all the while extolling our cultural commitment to family which seems often timed to me to skirt the boarders of idolatry. As we ignore our children they seek their own solace. They seek solace in gangs, sex, drugs, alcohol, violence, and they seek it in taking their own lives.

Jesus asks us to let them come to him and not to hinder them (Luke 18:15-17). Yet, in our ignorance we do. In ignoring the culture of trauma in which they are forced to somehow, daily, make normal regular threats against their physical and emotional wellbeing, we hinder them, daily, from encounter at the points of their deepest needs with the welcoming safety of Jesus’ healing embrace of their weary and hurting souls.

Please, Jesus, do not let us hinder your children from drawing near to you. Open our eyes, and hearts and minds to the needs of the gentle, tender, hurting souls we are trusted to keep in your name. Amen.