Never maltreat a child

I heard a child speaking

I spoke to a child this morning, and I listened to what she had to say. She was staying with a couple, her guardians far away from home, the male was her relation (a distant uncle, perhaps) and the female, was the wife of her relation. She had to do chores around the house apart from being a hawker of goods in the streets around where she lived.

One day, she counted out change from the trading purse in the sight of her uncle and then put the purse away. Her uncle then pilfered the purse which left the child accused of theft. The wife had already been wicked to her ward and could not be convinced that the girl did nothing wrong.

Saving the child from brutality

The culprit however in trying to deflect blame from himself punished the child for hours even as the child insisted she did nothing wrong. Reprieve came with an intervention from the neighbours who concluded that if the girl had been pleading innocence for over 6 hours, it was unlikely she had done anything wrong. The sadism of her guardians was just unrelenting.

Many acts committed against the child sometimes left her within the breath of death, and after that punishment, she could not attend school for two weeks, that was the severity and barbarity of their actions, such people should have ended up in jail for the brutalisation and battering of a child.

When her guardians were transferred to another city, another relation refused to allow them to take their ward with them, there was every indication they would do worse to her. Her new guardians had a kinder man (another distant uncle) and a possibly tolerable but nasty wife, maybe, a case of just jumping from the fire into the frying pan. If you’ve been to hell, any other place will present a modicum of comfort.

Maltreatment displaces honour

There was nothing to honour or celebrate about the first set of guardians when they passed on, the evil they had done would live in the memory of this child and be told in stories to which I became the audience today.

Of the second set of guardians, she was so totally distraught when he was brought back to our village in a coffin, but she did not arrive on time for the internment. That his legs were tied together with a string in the coffin only spoke to who his wife was in character and much else.

If anything, you should never maltreat a child regardless of what you might want to achieve, to violate an innocent child is considered the most heinous thing to do, especially if you are responsible for them and they look to you for guardianship, protection, guidance, and if not love, at least a sense of care and consideration of their vulnerable humanity.

A child never forgets

That child is an octogenarian who has had a successful professional career, is retired and is still involved in her community, a mother and grandmother, apart from being a mother to many more she has schooled, taught, mentored, and guided.

The child remembers quite respectfully and fondly those who treated her well, but the recent death of a younger sibling of the first guardian’s wife triggered the memories of the manifest evil meted out to her.

They might well have been forgiven; the forgetting part is more difficult. Even when Jesus said we should forgive seventy times seven times, it would suggest you need to be able to count to know how much has been forgiven. 

It is not that these issues occupy our minds or our lives, but for stories to be told as they happened, the memory recreates the narrative that we must not forget how people treated us even if out of love we release them to attend to the consequences of their actions, by provenance, intervention, or some other means of fate or opportunity.

A child never forgets even if the child has children of children of children. Do not mistreat or maltreat a child.

Palm Sunday: Clean hands are of the conscience

Common service in the church

Probably something I have not taken due notice of before, on Sunday mornings, I will usually wake up to a live church service on BBC Radio 4, the ones from the Church of England, I am more attuned to. The time did Spring Forward to British Summer Time, though it was more like British Raining Time, this morning.

However, today, Palm Sunday, I recall that when the readings came up in church, it was like a déjà vu moment, I very remembered I had heard it before, recently too. At church, with the new normal of no congregational singing, a cantor doing most of the musical stuff in front of the congregation or in the choir, much of what we do is sitting down apart during the greeting and certain congregational recitations.

The gospel in song

The children without a Sunday School with preoccupied and distracted by toys, puzzles, or their colouring books. The gospel was first read to announce the triumphal entry of the Lord into Jerusalem on the ass of a colt the second gospel was of the Passion, the first 54 verses of 66, of the 27^th chapter in the Gospel according to St Matthew, sung by the cantor and a laudable feat at the best of times. [Bible Gateway: Matthew 27:1-54 (NRSVA)]

As I have been listening to books on Audible rather than reading them on Kindle, there was a sense of how the words we heard seems to take on life as you read the words being sung to our hearing. I could not help but see the level of human wickedness that greeted the desire for the chief priests of that day to get rid of Jesus Christ.

A window on religious wickedness

When Judas Iscariot realised what his betrayal of Jesus Christ would lead to, he went to return the 30 pieces of silver the chief priests and elders gave him for his dastardly deed and they indifferently said, “What is that to us?”, on picking up the money he threw down in the temple, they deliberated amongst themselves agreeing it was “the price of blood”, bought a piece of land with it, not for anything but the burial of strangers to whom they will have no duty, obligation, or responsibility and called it the field of blood.

They agitated the crowd to prefer a murderer and thief over Jesus Christ and even Pontius Pilate when he made to wash his hands off the matter, recognised that they were against Jesus out of envy. Just the thought that someone bringing succour, healing and peace to their people making them somewhat irrelevant as they could never rise to minister to those needs was their all-consuming passion to destroy Jesus, he had to be killed.

Culpable in every way

I could not entirely absolve Pontius Pilate, his wife warned him not to have anything to do with Jesus, he had the power and authority to set Jesus free, much as whatever the decision he took would determine the fate of Jesus Christ in that place.

Out of fear for his position and hoping to avoid an insurrection, all acts of self-preservation of status and person, he delivered Jesus to them and the ritual of crucifixion started with scourging and mockery, the act of capital punishment will also be carried out by those under his command, just as he decided to place a notice at the head of the cross declaring Jesus, the kind of the Jews.

It all made for sombre reflection; the Holy Week has begun. In these pandemic times, as we sanitise our hands to prevent disease and contamination, Pontius Pilate would never have been able to wash his hands clean of the matter that underpins the force of Christianity, the cross and the consequent resurrection of Jesus Christ. Clean hands are first of the conscience and the decisions we make long before symbolically washing them in a bowl of water would mean anything.