Tracing Joy

In April this year, a little boy called Dominick was brutally beaten for 4 days by his drug addicted mother’s boyfriend. His mother did nothing. Poor beggar probably terrified herself and her brain circuits destroyed by drugs. Neighbours heard the screams over four literally bloody days, but no one called the police. They didn’t want to get involved. Listen up people, sometimes you have to get involved. Your comfort versus a child’s life! His grandfather has managed to get more stringent laws against child abuse before the Michigan Legislature. Please, around the world, let your voice be heard for Dominick. As Avaaz and GetUp have proved, grassroots protest on a global and national scale can have an enormous impact. Use your democratic rights. Make your opinions known. Our choices, but children’s lives.

Only joy here is that action is now being taken. Help that joy grow and bear fruit. Please?

A recent read (by an author I confess I have forgotten) and the new Tilda Swinton film I Am Love (according to Eureka Street Reviewer) raise the question do love and personal happiness justify causing the lives of your family to become a train wreck? In the book, a bored wife’s falling in love with the local schoolteacher leads her first into an affair with him, before leaving her family (a doting but mundane husband, two teenage children and a littlie). She justifies it by saying her new man makes her happy, even thought she had chosen her husband on more pragmatic and selfish grounds. I haven’t seen the Swinton film, which reviewers rave about, but the theme underlines a choice that is potentially far more stark in our individualistic age.  Does our happiness justify making others unhappy? How does betrayal of a spouse impact on children? What happens when the lesson children learn is that you can’t trust your mother and/or father to keep their promises to each other. Certainly it raises the fear that if they can’t be faithful to the one they have promised to love above all others, how can they be faithful to you, the child.

This is the crux of it for me. Without minimising the pain to the betrayed partner, the death of trust in a child is a parlous event and huge responsibility. It maybe that the child, as an adult, will come to recognize the complexity of character, values, strength and brokenness that lie within each of us and understand and forgive the transgression. That may partially heal the emotional rift between parent and child but it doesn’t undo the damage to a vulnerable child and the choices that led them into.

Needless to say, I am not talking about domestic and sexual violence and a person who walks away from that. I am talking about people who are unhappy in themselves or with the choices they have made, and who seek personal happiness and fulfillment at the expense of the most vulnerable. I suspect the joy in that is corrupted from the start by the pain, alienation and even tragedy it causes for others.

This morning I was praying rather sleepily on my balcony, having gone through a rather bad few days that included a serious allergy reaction to chemicals and a computer meltdown. I was praying once again that God would write straight with the crooked lines of me to serve the sacred heart of the cosmos when the Spirit whispered in my soul that I didn’t have to do anything for God or anyone else I suppose (adding words to God’s) but be me. That didn’t seem nearly enough so the Spirit suggested I imagine I could sculpt a bird from clay. And then I could pick up my little bird, breathe life into her and make her flesh and blood. Wouldn’t I be overjoyed just to see her fly? Wouldn’t I be enthralled and enchanted to see her weave a nest with only beak and claws? Wouldn’t her beauty and grace as she flew through the sky delight me? And yet she is just being herself, being a bird. No wonder she sings for joy.