“CHILD ABUSE”

 

 

A post-homiletical discourse delivered by the Rev. Dr. James R. Beebe

Rector, St. Patrick’s Church, Incline Village, Nevada, January 31, 2010

 

 

“Cheyenne Ground, Cessna November 8056 Lima, taxi.  VFR to Fort Wayne.”

 

“Roger, 56 Lima, taxi Runway 30.  Winds 360, 25, gusting 30.  Altimeter 29.85”

 

“56 Lima.”

 

     Ahead, the sky looks black, as if it were competing with the dawn on that spring day 13 years ago.  A thunderstorm approaches the airport from the northwest, creating static in little Jessica’s cell phone.  As the Cessna 177B bumps along the taxiway, the sky opens and begins to spill a mixture of sleet and water.

 

“Mom, do you hear the rain?”

 

     Joe, the instructor, taxis out to the approach end of the runway and noses into the wind.  He busies himself with the checklist:  the flight controls are moving freely, despite the ominous glare of water, mixed with ice.  Well, it’s mostly water, he guesses.  DG – caged and set.  Left magneto checks.  Right mag good, too.  Flaps, 30.  Carb heat on, rpm drop.  Good.  Switching to tower freq.

 

“OK, Jessica, she’s yours.”

 

“Cheyenne Tower,” says the squeaky little voice, “56 Lima ready for takeoff.”

 

“Roger, 56 Lima, Winds 010 at 25, occasional gust 30, cleared for takeoff.  Be advised, PIREP indicates low wind shear northwest of the field.  Visiblity in the northwest quadrant less than a mile.  Have a good one….”

 

     56 Lima taxis onto the runway, runs up, and releases brakes.  The overloaded Cessna lumbers down the centerline, aileron into the wind.  The noses sluices back and forth in the heavy crosswind and the little girl pushes the rudder pedals quickly back and forth to try to keep up.  It’s hard, you know, with those clunky leg extenders, but what are you going to do when you’re only 4-feet 2 and weigh 55 pounds?

 

     The airspeed builds, but painfully and slowly.  After all, field elevation is almost 6,200 feet above sea level, reducing engine performance by a good half.  Back and forth, back and forth across the centerline.  There’s 30 knots, now 40, now 45.  At 50 knots she pulls back on the yoke and the nose rotates up.

 

     Too far!  Push it over!  Don’t let your wing dip like that!  65 knots.  Flying speed.  Almost.  They’re in ground effect – flying, but not really.  70 knots – climb speed.  Still, doesn’t feel right.  Why is thing so sluggish?  Something’s wrong….Got to get it back on the ground….Then, defying this single cardinal rule that every experienced pilot knows – continue straight ahead and land wherever you can – 56 Lima begins a slow, looping 180-degree turn back to the runway.

 

     Tom Johnson, former pilot and a claims adjuster for State Farm, peers through the rain-slicked windshield of his car.  He can tell that 56 Lima is struggling – and losing the Newtonian battle.  He watches in horror as the craft shudders, stalls, and noses straight down into the ground.  Little Jessica is seven years old.

 

     Exploitation is nothing new.  In fact, were it not God Himself who was doing the talking, one might suppose that the calling of the young boy Jeremiah to a task that will ruin every relationship he would ever have would qualify.  God tells him that he’s been singled out for a task.  Jeremiah replies that he’s too young, just a boy.  Don’t worry, says God, I’ll supply you with what to say.  And I’ll be with you all the way.

 

     Jeremiah’s task?  To tell his friends, the people of Judah, that God is going to punish them for their iniquities by sending the Babylonians to destroy them.  Specifically, Jeremiah was supposed to tell his countrymen to surrender and not resist the invaders.  That’s like telling the American public that al Quaeda is God’s instrument and that we should surrender to them.  Not very popular, to be sure.

 

     But every time I read this passage I think of child abuse.  It’s been a topic on the news, with “Balloon Boy.”  Personally, I’m not outraged by the father wanting to be the center of media attention so much as a disturbing piece of video taken while he was chasing tornadoes…with his wife and three small children.

 

     Just before that crash 13 years ago, Jessica’s dad said, “This started off as a father-daughter adventure, and it’s gotten wonderfully out of hand.  I think I finally got my job description in order as a parent.  I used to think being a parent meant teaching things.  Now I feel my job is to help them learn by exposing them to new experience.”

 

     Well, it was his idea, after all.  It was he who wanted his daughter to break the Guiness Book of Records as the youngest pilot ever to fly across the continent.  It was his baby, in more ways than one.  So he became Jessica’s press agent instead of her father, hyping the trip on TV, radio, and newspaper.  It was another sad case of trying to live life vicariously through one’s children, leeching onto someone else’s life to try to find the meaning that most definitely is missing in one’s own.  “In a brutal light,” hissed once particularly incensed writer, “it comes just short of amounting to child sacrifice.”

 

     Listening to Jessica’s mom is likewise enlightening.  Immersed in an eclectic mix of 19^th century New England transcendentalism, ‘60’s counterculture and New Age nonsense, she described herself as “an artist and spiritual director.”  Too bad “mother” wasn’t included.  She believed that “experience” is the best tutor, so none of her three children went to school.  She didn’t even bother filing a home-schooling plan with local authorities.

 

     No one in the house plays with toys.  Instead, the children do chores and fix things so that, in the end, they will achieve what mom calls, “mastery.”  In Falmouth she received the news of the crash.  Recalling her conversation on the phone with her daughter, she reported, “She just was so PRESENT with the beauty of the rain.  I would want all my children to die in a state of joy.”

 

     David Feldman, a developmental psychologist, talked about the dangers which pushy parents create.  “Most children really want to make their parents happy and will go to enormous effort to that purpose, even beyond their own best interest,” he says.  Little Jessica, for example, may truly have loved to fly, but her parents were taking the idea of following a child’s lead seriously.  “But a child is a child and CAN’T lead!”

 

     Jesus used a word in his parables to describe what’s going on here.  The Greek word is adikia, which means “unrighteousness.”  He used it to describe the dishonest manager.  He used it to describe the unjust judge.  And he used it to describe scheming workers.  In every case he was describing something which, on the outside, looks perfectly normal, but which, once in the seat of authority, wreaks havoc.

 

     Adikia dresses in the guise of a good shepherd, then slips over the wall of the sheep corral and destroys the sheep.  The most egregious example I’m aware of was the mother who subjected her daughter to over 200 major operations to elicit sympathy for being a “suffering mother:

 

 

‘Oh, you poor thing!  It must be SO difficult to bear with a child with SO many health problems!”   In the parlance they call it, “Munchausen’s Syndrome by Proxy.”  In the New Testament they just called it adikia.  “Unrighteousness.”

 

Same thing.

 

     I hear a lot about the “irrelevance” of the church, of religion, even of Jesus himself.  I see clergy, struggling to “make the Gospel relevant” to the world.  But that’s not it – not even close.  Instead of “making the Gospel relevant” to the world, our task is to explain to folks that the world itself is intelligible except through the lens of the Gospel.

 

“So long, 56 Lima….Have a good one. And forgive us, hon.”