Etienne was a young European volunteer who worked in a camp for refugees in Kenya. He considered himself as agnostic or atheistic. He wasn’t interested in church or prayer. Being generous and keen on helping poor people, he went to Kenya to work in a large camp for refugees from other African countries.
His work included distributing food to the refugees. One day, after giving food to a large number of adults and children, he realized that very little food was left. Hungry people still waited in a line for food. He started giving out less and less, so that everyone would get at least a little. Finally, all he had was just one banana. Just then, a little girl appeared with her younger brother, asking for food. Etienne felt helpless. How to feed two hungry kids with just one banana? The girl was holding her little brother by the hand. She stretched her other hand towards Etienne.
Etienne did the only thing he could do. He gave the banana to the girl.
What she did then shook him deeply and changed him. She pealed the banana and fed her younger brother with that. When the tiny kid had finished eating the banana, she licked the inside of the banana skin, smiled, and left.
Etienne was shaken. “That day, I started believing in God,” he later said. He had never seen such generosity and self-sacrifice. A hungry little girl giving the banana to her tiny brother and going away happy, though evidently hungry.
Children are not simply blank sheets of paper on which adults write whatever they decide. No. Children have a mind and heart of their own. They are neither blank nor helpless. They do depend on adults for whole host of things, of course. But there is much we all can learn from them.
Ruby: Calm, Dignified, Heroic
Look at the following case quoted by Professor Robert Coles of Harvard University, who did the most quoted studies on children, including a whole book on the spirituality of children.
During the days of the racial integration of schools in the US, there was violent opposition from some Whites against the admission of Black (African-American) children in schools where only White children were admitted earlier. The US government made a law—influenced the by movement for racial justice led by Martin Luther King, Jr.—by which schools had to admit children of all races. Some White parents (those of European ancestry) protested vehemently and at times violently. Police had to accompany the African-American children to school for their protection. White parents stood on both sides of the road and shouted insults and threats at the Black children. See how Ruby, one of these kids, reacted. This is what her (white) teacher wrote about Ruby:
“I watch her walking with those federal marshals, and you can’t help but hear what the people say to her. They’re ready to kill her. They call her the worst names imaginable. I never wanted ‘integration,’ but I couldn’t say those things to any child, no matter what her race. She smiles at them—and they’re saying they are going to kill her. There must be 40 or 50 grown men and women out on those streets every morning and every afternoon, sometimes more. One of the marshals said to me the other day: ‘That girl, she’s got guts; she’s got more courage than I’ve ever seen anyone have.’ And he told me he’d been in the war; he was in the army that landed in Normandy in 1944. He told me Ruby didn’t even seem afraid—and she sure remembered how scared they all were sailing to France. I agree with him; she doesn’t seem afraid. There was a time, at the beginning, that I thought she wasn’t too bright, you know, and so that was why she could be so brave on the street. But she’s a bright child, and she learns well. She knows what’s happening, and she knows that they could kill her. They look as mean as can be. But she keeps coming here, and she told me the other day that she feels sorry for all of them, and she’s praying for them. Can you imagine that!”
Coles not only wrote about children; he listened to children. In this case, he went to meet Ruby, and wanted to find out how she found such strength. When asked by Coles whether she did not feel frightened, this is what Ruby told him, “I do what my granny says; I keep praying,” Coles did not reduce this to a mechanism of defense, as his training would tempt him to do. He is honest enough to make this unusual confession: “My kind, trained in psychoanalytic psychiatry, has a far easier time probing psycho-pathology than appreciating the sources of strength and vitality and resiliency in the ordinary lives of people, never mind in the lives of our various heroes.”
Heroic children were by no means the only kind Coles studies. He went into classrooms, asked children about God, religion, morality and other central issues and listened to the moving conversations among children and with him. His famous book, The Spiritual Life of Children, carries the text of many such conversations, as well as the drawings done by children to represent religious themes.
Fr Joe Mannath SDB
To read the entire article, click Subscribe
