Colt Gray a 14-year-old boy killed four people and injured nine more at Apalachee High School in Winder, Barrow County, Georgia, where he was a student. In his statement denouncing the tragedy and calling for effective gun control legislation President Biden stated that “This is not normal.” While I understand his sentiment, such actions by teenagers have become normalized.
According to the Washington Post, “more than 383,000 students have experienced gun violence at school since Columbine and there have been 417 school shootings since 1999.
Although Colt is still a child, he will be tried as an adult for the murders and injuries. This has almost become standard procedure in cases where children commit mass murders. No consideration is given to anything but the deed, the heinous act.
Included in the scripture from The Gospel of Mark are these words:
Then they reached Capharnahum. And when he was indoors he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the road?" 34 They said nothing, for on the road they had been disputing about which of them was the greatest. 35 So he sat down and called the twelve. "If anyone wants to be first," he said to them, "he must be last of all and the servant of all." 36 Then he took a little child, set it among them, and putting his arms round it said to them, 37 "Whoever receives one of these little ones in my name receives me, and whoever receives me receives not me but him who sent me." 38
Mark 9:33-37
I prefer the version in Matthew’s Gospel:
At that hour the disciples came and asked Jesus, “Who is greatest in the Realm of heaven?” So, he called a child and set it among them, and said, “I tell you truly, unless you turn and become like children, you will never get into the Realm of heaven at all. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Realm of heaven;
Matthew 18:1-4
We are to emulate the child and not vice versa.
Jesus points out the children are the embodiment of the Realm of God.
Jesus’ message was a radical indictment of what existed, of the structures, institutions, traditions. The question who is or would be greatest in this new reality that Jesus kept talking about is logical in the traditional way of thinking about life and societal hierarchy. Jesus needs them to think out of the box, for that is the only way the Realm will be understood and come alive. Therefore, he does not initially answer the question literally; but puts the question in a larger, more comprehensive, wholistic context. A brilliant teacher, he calls a child who is clearly in the vicinity. Note this because we often think that children should be separated from adult company. They should be seen only and not participate in adult musings. Maybe, Jesus was reminded of the time when he as a child became so engaged with religious leaders in the temple that he ignored the departing of his parents to their home. When they returned seeking him, they appeared perturbed. He responded that they have known he was well cared for exploring what was his calling, how his life was to embody the intentions of the creator God, the parent who sired him in spirit and in truth.
Jesus proclaims that unless you (disciples) turn and become like children, unless you move in another direction, rotate into an altered ecological reality, you will never get into the Realm of heaven. You can never be part of the future, which the Realm of heaven symbolizes. You will be entombed in the deadening past and present. What an indictment, judgment, and sentence—forever barred!
What is so special about children that we adults who certainly have experienced life for a longer length of time and should, therefore, be much wiser that we must surrender our managerial leadership and become like them? Aren’t we the ones who out of our fullness teach and mold children in the ways they should go? Don’t we as adults have the responsibility to groom children into becoming responsible adults? They are supposed to become like us, the best of us, not the other way around that we should become like them.
But Jesus says: Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Realm of heaven. Does Jesus mean innocence when he talks about humility? No! We cannot return to innocence if we ever were innocent. It is not about being meek and mild, with little or no self-esteem. No, that is not what he means by humility.
Why the question who is the greatest? Was it ego? Was it for wanting to be rewarded by the one they cherished so much? I think humility has to do with not being arrogant about oneself, one’s life, not trying to control it and the world. It’s about leaning into life, trusting it, exploring it, not manipulating it, not bottling it up, not containing it. AAA insurance has a commercial that speaks about outsmarting life. You cannot outsmart life. You shouldn’t even try. How can you outsmart God, the universe, the infinite? How can any temporal entity outsmart the Eternal?
Humility is about understanding our place in the universe, that we are not the controllers of the world. For Jesus in this case humility means accepting and readily engaging in a larger context of living of which you (we) are both actor and subject as is Colt. It means having the grace to participate not with arrogance or pride, not with feelings of superiority and completeness, but with an understanding of being an explorer, a seeker of life.
Children live in the abundance of life rather than in the limitations imposed by adult compromises with life.
The Realm for Dr. Howard Thurman unfolds intimacy with the unexplained but real, intimacy with the phenomena rather than the rationalization of the phenomena. The rational “rations” the experiences, incapable of conveying its fullness of impact. It cannot take in the whole – the Realm of heaven. Therefore, in the words of Thurman, it must be reduced to manageable units, words, dogmas, creeds (excuse me).
Consequently, you have a concept such as personal greatness or individualism which connotes a limited notion rather than the expansive reality of communal, universal, or cosmic interplay. The concept of one being the greatest in the Realm of God is contradictory to the Realm. Someone else would have to be the least. It would set up hierarchy. Narcissism is its end.
Children may not be theologians, that is not necessarily their way. What is more important is that they accept the phenomena that grace their lives, which open their imaginations.
Thurman’s experience of allurement and love with the universe hints at what Jesus meant by becoming a child. We may not be as profound as Dr. Thurman. Yet, we have all had experiences of unity and wonder with that which is beyond us, yet in us. You may remember a younger sibling playing house. The sibling pours imaginary tea into an imaginary teacup and serves it to its playmate, whether real or imaginary. And, they have fun enjoying each other’s company, their play time. The child can create an imaginary existence, life, or reality and live within it while living in the present or “real” world. The child creates a totally different Realm of living, based upon values and dreams of the child, and lives in that Realm while knowing that that is not the present world, yet a world of joy, acceptance, a world that is natural, not contrived.
Kahlil Gibran says of children:
You may house their bodies but not their souls, For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
This is the wonderment into which Colt was born. He, like all of us, was connected intimately to the cosmos and the great mystery of being alive.
What happened with/to Colt?
Was it not made clear to him that he was an integral part of the great flaring forth? Was he not told that stardust is in him? Did he not know that he was created in original blessedness as Dr. Matthew Fox would say. Was he not familiar with James Weldon Johnson’s great poem, The Creation that says:
Up from the bed of the river
God scooped the clay;
And by the bank of the river
He kneeled him down;
And there the great God Almighty
Who lit the sun and fixed it in the sky,
Who flung the stars to the most far corner of the night,
Who rounded the earth in the middle of his hand;
This great God,
Like a mammy bending over her baby,
Kneeled down in the dust
Toiling over a lump of clay
Till he shaped it in is his own image;
Then into it he blew the breath of life,
And man became a living soul.
Amen.
Amen.
God breathed into Colt the breath of life to speak to God’s loneliness. And Colt was declared good.
What happened in the socialization process that indicated to Colt that life was not good, that he was not good, that the contradictions of his life could not be overcome? What happened to that life only a few years from the child that Jesus sat in his midst and said if you want to enter the Realm of God become like this child?
Remember the disciples (Jesus’ students) had been talking about who would be the greatest in the new Realm, individualism at its height, arrogance at its height, narcissism at its height. Jesus was not talking about individualism within traditional society, but the need for a paradigm shift in their thinking. New wine does not last in old wine skins. It dissipates. We cannot build the community for the present and future on failed policies, structures, institutions, and systems of the past. Nor can be build it on failed relationships.
Society failed to provide Colt with alternative possibilities which would have provided the mental health resources needed and deep community that would have caressed him with the love he needed.
Dr. Howard Thurman wrote in The Growing Edge:
All around us worlds are dying and new worlds are being born; all around us life is dying and life is being born. . . The birth of a child — life’s most dramatic answer to death — this is the growing edge incarnate. Look well to the growing edge!
Let’s think of Colt’s birth in terms of the incarceration of the growing edge. What happened between that birth and September 4, 2024? How did our society fail him?
Whatever happened, embrace our children from birth and walk with them, listen to them when they articulate the stresses and strains in their lives. Serve as companions on the journey. Help them to find anchor, to be at home with themselves. Colt did not have to become the Colt that he became. How did we and our society fail him?
Recorded in Matthew 18:6 are the words:
But whoever is a hindrance to one of these little ones who believe in me, better for him to have a great mill-stone hung round his neck and be sunk in the deep sea.
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