Suffer not the little children

One of the Bible’s scriptural phrases I grew up with, depicted in the blue-eyed hair-groomed flowing robe-bedecked Palestinian Jesus’ words was, “Suffer not the little children to come unto me, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” 

The kingdom of heaven refers to the wholeness of life, aka “holiness,” the original meaning of a widely misused term since utilized to refer to a hokey-pokey other world in another existence.  But history or exegesis is not our discourse this day. 

I spent a whole Saturday not too long ago with three young kids, a 9-year old boy, a 6-year old girl, and a young boy just over 3 years. It was a wonder-filled day with the energy and wide-eyed enthusiasm of the young through the woods at a farm on the verdant leeward side of Mt. Tapuchao. 

We gathered star apples with me climbing a tree (not a smart move), reached forripening guavas still hard but before the birds pecked on them, and gathered naranghita (oranges) whose tartness equals that of my girlfriend any day, and that is a lemonade of tart!

We ended up with coconuts, our host splitting the ones that already germinated, devouring the bulbous white stuff where the coco water used to be.  We gutted the young ones for their tender flesh and the old ones for their flavorsome juice that soaked some of the mature coco meat flavor into the tasteful fluid.

We gathered the exposed taro roots growing under the trees even as the father and an uncle of the children bush-cut the growth on the slope, to clear the fully planted field of healthy red taro of competing grass, and coming down the slope full of leaves that looked like rhubarbs from purple taro leaves ready for the pot.

By late afternoon on the way down from the hills to the CK shore, the youngest one took just a minute before falling asleep on someone’s lap on the passenger side of the truck’s cab while the rest of us men folks endured the bumpy ride on the back of the pick-up. Lucky we did not get any rain even as it intermittently showered up the hills but skipped the plain and the sunny shore. We came down dry, and not surprisingly, well tanned, with a bunch of happy kids. 

Sunday the following day proved a little different in my neighborhood.  The acoustics on my apartment complex loudly amplifies couples’ tiffs if they do not keep their voices down. A young kid in the apartment across my unit wailed for two hours.  Concerned that one of the neighbors might call 911, I went over to locate the vocal outcry in case he needed help while left behind to the care of indifferent elder siblings as employed Mom and Pop attended to their tasks. 

But there was an adult voice interjecting on the tot’s demands, so I left them to themselves. I did not mind the intrusive but prolonged vocalization exercise nor the parenting style of who I presumed to be the mother (could be a grandma or the maid) just letting a child “tear-out,” but laws of the land do make sure that a child is not abused, and the loud shrieks were a bit too close for comfort on this side of the law! 

A girl in my previous SVES sixth grade class, daughter to good friends who I had known since the girl graduated from the crib, liked to talk to the person behind her in class while I was giving work instructions upfront. One day, I walked over to her desk with an uncle-like gesture to pat her head. She loudly turned around and shouted: “Don’t you dare touch me!”  

I learned my lesson on the state of public display of affection and/or reprobation that day! I was rather shocked by the transformation of one who was once a cuddle on our lap. It may have been all right earlier, or elsewhere, but not in America circa 2007.

In my neighborhood where a child vocalized for two hours, the tot’s wail finally subsided. He might have reached his limits, or finally got his way on mother’s attention. I did not notice any 911 uniformed emergency personnel but I made a note to remind the office to alert the occupants of the sensitive acoustics of the buildings, and to remind tenants to act properly, if only for the sake of avoiding the neighbors’ pry on private matters. 

Today’s pop psychology echoes the Zoroastrian conflict between good and evil. Meant to be therapeutic, it focuses on condemning aberrant behaviors (evil), adhering to diagnoses of what could go wrong (cautionary scares), proceeding from fear and trepidation to avoid it, rather than bravely launching into a lively exercise of willful freedom to innovate and to create what others had not done before! “Abnormal psychology,” we call it. Normal does not get the limelight; the abnormal does. 

Christianity never started with the value of the person, it is said. Rather, we started from the “unworthiness of the sinner” and that starting point set the stage for the glorification of human shame in Christian theology. I genuflect to that. 

 Children are born winners and free at the starting gate but we condemn them to be “worthless until saved”.  A regrettable choice, but the voice of sanity says it well: “suffer not the little children … for theirs is the kingdom of heaven!”