Centering The Child

how children are the missing piece

The Missing Peace

I.
Peace
is
each
child’s
earned
thanks.
Ours

can

own
no
new
earth
‘cept
theirs.

II.
Only
those who
see the
children’s
value
know then

humans
owe them

futures
free from
wars and
conflict.
A debt
for worth.

III.
What is this
commitment,
children’s claim
for which we’re
in arrears?

We cannot
ignore
the tears. They

remind us
that tomorrow
different
will be then
so dismay
can’t prevail

IV.
Through their eyes we
can see anew
what time and strife
has corrupted,
interrupted,

what our species
literally
lost, excepting
words that they say,

innocently
sparking afresh
ideals sunken
beneath our own
cynicism.

V.
From when they are born
every child has
a gift to share, a
super-powered sign,

a trait so meet as
if to counteract
deleterious
isolation that
spoils a grand design.

Dependence looked down
upon by those who
have ability
turns around this broke
cold society.

VI.
A connectivity
stronger than four bars worth
breaks cyber-enslaved bonds,
bondage, captivity,

brings each one back to the
warm embracing ties of
essential family
reciprocatory,
understanding that the
most felt need now is “We”.

Without children’s jewel,
that complete helplessness,
we would spin off further
distanced from what’s needed most.

VII.
It’s a misunderstanding
born of pride, our own conceit,
that we are only giving
and the children but receive.

Each time that we help a child
in fact we assist ourselves,
exchange most definitely
eleemosynary
quintessentially profound,
not only responding to
needs but our own links retrieve,

leading to a life restored,
a gift unobtainable
but for crying innocence.

VIII.
So when we ignore their pleas or
allow them to suffer neglect,
a great injustice we forget.

For we could not bear to stay in
and would keep moving further out
unceasingly finding we are
individual isolates.
Nonrepresentativity,
each unique manifestations
of our own ability, but
not with sense once more to connect

And so we must circle back to
peace we are indebted to solve
for which they are the missing piece.

.

Setting the Child in the Midst

There is a certain danger in doing humanitarian work with children. It is a kind of savior complex, that I am the one coming in to save them. The standard narrative is of helpless victims who are in need, and compassionate aid workers who work tirelessly and at great sacrifice to bring them what they lack.

If not savior level, then surely what we are doing is great. It might not bring in a large paycheck or make the evening news but won’t it earn us significant rewards in the greater scheme of things? Is not what I am doing more worthy than the work of others?

When Jesus came upon His disciples they were arguing about something similar, who would be the greatest in the kingdom? Jesus did not give them the definitive answer. Rather he destabilizes the whole argument by placing a little child in the midst of the discussion. What is important though is not anything that the child says or does. It is what the child is.

Jesus says “Unless you turn and become like children you shall never enter the kingdom of heaven.”¹ There is something about a child that is essential and something about adults that needs to be changed. The key move that Jesus made is centering the child without whom we cannot enter the kingdom.

The Value of Children

The place we have to start is ontological. This is a question about being. What is a child? In some ways children make this question much easier, because they are stripped down versions of us. We can’t respond with the normal answers that focus on what we do for a living, or what we have accomplished, or any of the standard measurements of self-worth. A child comes into the world with none of that. They are incapable of doing anything. They are completely dependent on others for life itself.

At the core, children are essentially relational beings. Without love, care, attention from others they will die and cease to exist. They are loved, and that is their essential worth. The very first thing they learn to do is respond to that love, loving in return.

This is something that is far more profound than the obvious truism it seems to be. This is why Jesus centered the child and pronounced becoming like the child essential to entering the kingdom. It is because the kingdom of heaven is also relational. It is so because God is also primarily relational, Father, Son, and Spirit, defined wholly as love.

At the deepest level children become the purest form of what the early church fathers called the imago Dei.² When humans were created in the image of God, it means that we were created like God as relational beings, capable of being loved and loving in return. Children “earn” their place in the center by providing for us a sign of what the kingdom and God is all about.

An Epistemological Debt

The role of the child then is a sign of the kingdom of heaven, what God is like, and how we align ourselves to enter it. That Jesus needed to set the child in the midst of the disciples, a group of men who were doing their best to follow Him, learn from Him, and imitate Him, meant that they were failing. This unfortunately is not an isolated case. They keep failing consistently.

This wasn’t just the disciples either. Jesus’ interactions with the scribes and Pharisees, themselves devoted to keeping God’s law and living holy lives, show Him having to continually deconstruct their questions. They were concerned about things completely opposite from the kingdom of heaven and the God who was all about relationship.

Unfortunately, we are little better off today after two thousand years of church and theology. We still prioritize things like power, influence, accomplishments, knowledge, and prestige. We get caught up with doing things and forget about being there for those we care about.

When we do slow down for a moment and hold a child we are able to see something of which we need to be reminded. We catch a glimpse of the imago Dei, the kingdom of heaven, what is most valuable in our lives, what is worth it all. It is for this treasure given freely that we owe to them a serious debt.

The Debt of Peace

In the days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, I started planning trauma camps for children displaced within the country and living as refugees abroad. We held trainings in Poland for Ukrainians both living there and in Ukraine. One of the hard facts about war is that children are always the ones who are most affected. Even though they are not soldiers fighting on the front lines and have no political, ideological, religious, or economic dispute to settle, children’s lives are severely affected. The reason why this is true comes down to one thing. Children are still developing, so every impact of conflict is absorbed into them and becomes part of the person that they are becoming as an adult.

Displacement, loss of friends and family, the death of fathers and siblings in the violence all have severe traumatic effects. But these do not account for everything. In Ukraine now four years after the start of the war, there are children growing up in an environment where constant missile strikes and drone attacks have changed how they react. Instead of growing up with the illusion that the world is a safe place, they know all too well that it is not. This has consequences.

Largely, the world willfully ignores these consequences of war for children. They are treated as “collateral damage” when they are arguably suffering the primary damage in each conflict. Infrastructure, power plants, factories and weapon systems all can and will be rebuilt, but the safety and innocence essential for a child’s development is much harder to replace.

War then has a hidden spiritual dimension unrelated to its stated goals. If the primary damage in war is suffered by children distorting and damaging the imago Dei which they bear, then war is a spiritual battle intended to destroy relationship and community. It is an attack on the one’s whose role is to remind us of the kingdom, and who we must become like to enter it.

Our debt to children is to protect the safe environment they need to thrive and grow. This means we need to do all we can to avoid war and end war as soon as possible. The very idea of a ‘just war’ pales when compared to the massive scale of the burden borne by children.

Diagnostic

Once we realize the serious debt that we owe children to guard their development so that they can point us to the kingdom of God, we also come face to face with our utter failure to do so. We live in a world where millions of children suffer. Beyond the tragedy of war, there is poverty, abuse, exploitation, all having the largest effects on children.

Like the disciples and the Pharisees trying to enter the kingdom of heaven, we fail and fail again. The reason is because we have lost something. Through our own process of development from childhood to adult the pure imago Dei of dependence on others, relationships taking the center of our lives, has been tarnished. It has been wounded in the spiritual war attacking children.

The goal of adulthood becomes going from dependence to independence. We strive to not need anybody or anything that we cannot get for ourselves. We take pride in being self-sufficient. I used to think that a more mature view is that after our young adult stage of independence we move on to interdependence where we rely on each other. But this ignores the existence of the child or pushes them to the margins.

Interdependence is really just independence extended to a slightly larger circle of family and friends. Centering the child does something that brings more clarity. A needy child cries. It is high pitched, alarming, jarring, unignorable. The child serves as a diagnostic. If a child is crying it means something is wrong. The suffering of millions of children means that there is something wrong with us. Our systems, our societies, our governments, our theology — all are indicted by the cry of the child.

Helpless

We are failing to protect children. The technical term for this is neglect and it is a form of abuse. Even though the world has come a long way in recognizing and fighting against various types of child abuse. Even though the UN has defined the rights that every child should be entitled to. The cold facts are that there are more suffering children today than ever. So what is our problem?

Jesus explained the problem to His disciples. “Therefore whoever humbles himself as this little child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Whoever receives one little child like this in My name receives Me.”³ The primary problem we have is pride.

As adults we look down on children in their various stages of development as helpless. Infants are dependent, toddlers are weak, children are vulnerable, teens need guidance, young adults are still green. We consider ourselves above all that because now we are independent, strong, guarded, wise and experienced.

And yet even with all of these advantages we are failing.

Jesus says that the remedy to counteract pride and introduce humility is to receive the child. This is literally to hold the child, to welcome the child, to value the child. It is not the child that is helpless. It is us. They are not the ones who are failing, we are. They are doing exactly what their role is, to show us the kingdom, where relationship is everything.

As we have seen the child is doing epistemological work, they are allowing us to see things differently. They first allow us to see the kingdom of heaven by showing us a pure imago Dei that values relationship over everything. Secondly they serve as a diagnostic, sounding the alarm when things are going wrong (i.e. not valuing relationship). There is a third shift that children allow us to make. They are restorative.

Restoration

The third way that children help us see the world differently is by reminding us of the value of relationship, calling us back to it. They break into our isolation and pull us out to community and connections. Because they are essentially relational, everything that they do assumes relations. If we center children our lives cannot help but become relational.

A Ukrainian refugee in Poland named Anya volunteered at one of our trauma camps for children. Afterwards she said, “When you come at the beginning you are not sure how everything will go. But eventually the crew (her small group of five children she led through the camp) becomes your family. You are all walking this path together.”

“Together” and “Family” are relational words. This is the power of children, they reframe everything. Over hundreds of trauma camps, I have heard variations on this theme from many volunteers. Before the camp they are focused on their own problems. They are locals affected by the same crisis as the children, so they are worried about their jobs, their future, their own families. Through the children they move from the isolated struggle to handle life towards getting through it as community.

Perhaps the most mature approach is not to stop at interdependence but to circle back to dependence once again. Without the children to show us the kingdom, alert us to our deviations from it, and call us back into relationship, we are helpless to achieve it.

Peacemaking

Something about peace is so very hard for adults. In our independence, isolation, and inflated self-worth, it is extremely difficult to set aside our own interests and hear the grievances of others. Yet it must be done because we owe it to the children.

Will we continue to fail? Will we keep on ignoring the lessons of the 20th century and start new wars forever. If so forever will be very short. Or can we do something about it?

We held child trauma camps in Mindanao during and after the siege of Marawi. In 2017 a branch of ISIS took over the largest Muslim city in the Philippines sparking battles with the Philippine army over about half of the year. Most of the population of the city and surrounding areas fled for their lives through the jungle.

They ended up in evacuation camps in largely Christian areas where people viewed them with suspicion. As we started our trauma camps we were in turn held suspect by the Muslim imams as Christians though we were not doing any evangelical work. Our mission was strictly humanitarian.

After the first few camps we started to realize that some adjustments were necessary. One issue was the severity of the trauma was much worse than for disasters. In response we created a mindfulness module to help calm the children. Another issue was that most of the children were more comfortable using the local dialect of Maranao and not the Tagalog they learned in school. So we recruited Maranao young people from the area to serve as volunteers as well.

The result of these adjustments was a vast improvement in the effectiveness of the camps. The communities could see immediate progress in the children’s wellbeing and imams from the next towns were asking us to bring the program to their children as well.

However, there was another surprising development. As the Muslim volunteers worked alongside Christian volunteers serving children they became great friends. At the end of the camp they would be sharing cell-phone numbers and making plans to get together again. The suspicions and distrust built up over generations of violence was being dispelled.

The missing piece that prevents adults from making peace is the children. When children are placed in the midst of our arguments they change the whole dynamic. Through them we see the importance of relationship, connections, community and the poverty of life cut off from one another. Through them we are quickly alerted to problems that need to be addressed, ways in which we or our priorities are broken. Through them we are called back into relationship with one another.

If we would have peace we must set the child in the center and begin there.

Photo by Marius Muresan on Unsplash

1. Matthew 18:3

2. Tertullian Against Marcion

3. Matthew 18:5