John Henry Twachtman's Mother and Child

at the DeYoung Museum

I think I may have figured out how it is that ultra-right conservative Christians, especially those serving in Congress, who continue not to be moved to compassion toward the plight of children living in poverty, have misunderstood altogether the Biblical advice, “suffer the children.”  The word suffer came into the English language from Anglo-Saxon influence, and it hung around in formal use though the Elizabethan period with a meaning quite different from the definition we commonly mean when we use the word today.  King James’ translators used the word to mean “allow” or “permit” in Matthew 19:14:  “Suffer little children and do not hinder them from coming to me…”  Anyone who can deliberately tamp down children into even more grievous poverty must think, clearly a strained exercise if they do, that their Jesus said it’s all right to make children suffer. 

Janine di Giovanni in this week’s Newsweek Magazine describes in frightening detail the effects of the war in Syria on the children of that country. She begins by asking “What is it like to be a child in Syria?”  She reports (Oxford Research Group, a London think tank) that of 110,000 killed by the end of August this year, 11,420 were children.  I would like to hear that our Congress has established a committee to gather and present to its entire legislative body a thoroughly developed report on the numbers of American children living in poverty. I want all politicians and all religious leaders and all educators and indeed all citizens in America to ask, “What is it like to be a child in America?”   I want to hear of a movement sweeping through American churches that all of them are united in determination to lift all children out of poverty. Of course, I don’t have to go on with this BLOG writing until it reaches a crescendo approaching rant.  

What I must do in this BLOG post instead of ranting is to hope all of us living in comfort and affluence will remember as we go into and through the Christmas season and see our beautiful, well nourished and beautifully costumed  children singing like angels that not all the children in our own country and in our world are well nourished and adequately clothed and in good health. Taking appropriate care of all the children in the world is a moral imperative. Ignoring the plight of suffering children is the grossest evil.