"God's love concretely universal in expressed partiality, preference for humanly unworthy, despicable." (Gustavo Gutierrez) Still willing, through us, to bless every being on Earth? "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure." (Marianne Williamson)
Sarah, untold, overhearing, she is to bear son -- and she laughs! "After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?" (Surely we are not born with suspicion of pleasure?) We all laugh! "Is anything too wonderful for the LORD?" Checking our bets: What if IT is -- and we laughed?!! (Nor with suspicion of laughter?)
"Passion fully human and divine spark, leaping in face of cynicism, burning with commitment, neither God nor humankind finished." (Carter Heyward)
Like father, like son, God help us. Patriarchal compelling of wives, delegating of housemaids, surrogates bearing sons, hostaged homage to System's Economy.
Compulsion compounding, offering of spouses for self-protection from threatening kings, pretending them to be our sisters, inviting kings' ways with them, unvalued to or by us unless, until producing inheritable future -- dogmatically procreative! No sooner miraculous birthing of heirs, ruthlessly running off housemaids and sons, than System compelling again, submitting to wager whole faith-families' futures -- Like father, like son, God help us.
Jesus now making up, fleshing out "fictive families," among whom children, at least, for short time at least, respected, revered -- "In new family of Jesus, only children, no patriarchs! 'Call no one your father on Earth, for you have but one father!' Never transcend need for kinship . . . But failure to transcend patriarchal kinship system making democracy impossible -- As families are structured, so is the state!" (Walter Wink)
What mother attending to any such altar? No matter how holy, how unflaggingly patriarchal, patriotic, how emptily ego-inflating? When do we even start mouthing, "well-being," "best interest" of child? Questioning "teleological suspensions of ethical," no matter impotence of the suspended?
Suspecting, subverting self-sanctified ends? Unjustifiers of any mean means, obsessing on "manly duty," reducing divine direction to manner of murder --
How long do we bludgeon the children with ubiquitous violence of obedience?
"On the woodpile Isaac's body waits, as women wait, fever trilling under his skin. He will remember the blade's white silence, a lifetime under his father's eyes." (Chana Bloch)
"Never know what resistance or willingness Bathsheba offered to King's demand." (Joyce Hollyday) Nor any other such ordered assignation, dancing with death, battlefields everywhere, enemies fresh everyday -- daughter to one man, wife to another, lover to third -- whose story alone comes to matter?
Mission accomplished? Exploding on war's own spite-filled petard? Nothing but grief, scared children and brave soldiers, brave children and scared soldiers, leaders and minions of leaders, betraying, sending in places they will not go. What happens to hopes of children born into such lives at such wars?
Loaves and fishes, in hands to be trusted, scarcity shared to abundance, children as mimicking Jesus, inexpertly undifferentiating your gift from mine; while we perfect Phillip's penurious panic, "Don't you know how broke we are, for God's sake?" Exactly, says Jesus, attuning own brokenness, as any small child revealing, unless needs of body are met, no rest for the rest of us!
Children instinctively personal and political, part and whole: Anything good for me good for you, anything my need and right to need and right to of all -- asking we ask, of children at war, Would I want my kid in this damnable peril? Terror above and below? If not, who would? Whatever's bad for my kids is bad for their kids, too; someone with hand out approaching me on the street -- would I like to trade places? What we do for any we do for all. Jesus thrice sitting us down together, lowering, or raising, all to one earthen table, one eye-level.
Hopi Tribal Wisdom: All sit in circle centered on Children's Fire, where grandmother, grandfather sit, for process discerning community will, every proposal for change, last word grandparents', alone with power to veto -- Does this proposal help or hurt the Children's Fire? If it would hurt the children, any children, why in the world, on the Earth, in God's name, would we do it?
Children so body-bound, so unmistaking abtraction for justice due all of us in our bodies.
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