And they brought unto him also infants, that he would touch them: but when his disciples saw it, they rebuked them.
But Jesus called them unto him, and said, Suffer little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God.
Something to recall about this passage: as Luke recounts it, it happens immediately after Jesus tells us the parable of the pharisee and the tax collector. The pharisee thinks he’s God’s gift to, well, God. He’s about a skip and a hop from praying to himself. Yet, as Christ teaches, “every one that exalteth himself shall be abased; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted.” Those words are still hanging in the air as the babies make their appearance.
Today, we think of babies as big bundles of ego, since they have only their needs in mind – their hunger, their wet diapers, their missed naps. Yet the truth, Christ insists, is the precise opposite. Babies are as far from ego as it gets: they have no sense of self, are incapable of self-righteousness, and rely entirely on others. You or I may feel entitled to a good dinner after a hard day’s work, or to thanks for a good deed – or, like the pharisee, to salvation for all our impeccable works. Yet there isn’t a baby on earth who thinks she’s earned her milk; when they cry, it’s because they’re hungry, not because they feel their efforts have gone unrewarded. Nothing comes more naturally to them than that nipple in their hungry mouths, and there isn’t a hint of self-exaltation in the ensuing gulps. That mother’s milk is to them a gift freely given, undeserved yet life-sustaining – just as, Jesus tells us, God’s grace should be to us poor sinners. A baby could not survive a day on its own, and she knows it – as does, all too well, any parent holding an infant who refuses to be put down. We cannot survive a day on our own either, though few of us realize it, and we would all do well to make our cries for God’s presence louder and more persistent. The parable that begins this chapter of Luke, the one that immediately precedes the pharisee’s tale, is the story of the persistent widow. Think then of a baby’s cries not as proof of its ego, but of its selflessly persistent faith, just like that widow’s, “crying day and night unto” the Lord.
What does all this have to do with Walker Percy? Last week, I showed how prescient The Thanatos Syndrome was when it came to Percy’s plot about the medical establishment drugging us into soulless conformity. This week, I would like to address a far more uncomfortable prediction in his novel.
I will try to be as PG as possible in what follows. Percy’s villains, in addition to drugging the water, run a child abuse ring.
The book came out in the late 80s. I read it in the 2000s. The elite-doctors-exploiting-children subplot seemed lurid, ridiculous, misplaced. That was a few years before we realized it was in fact ripped from the headlines! Before we all found out about Epstein Island, before the nationwide spread of Drag Queen Story Hour, before the American Academy of Pediatrics’ full throated support of childhood genital mutilation, before the babysitter rule. Rereading the book today, instead of recoiling in disgust at the unnecessarily sensational plotting, I think: how did Percy know??
The answer, I believe, is found in the scriptures above, and in the Bible more generally – in God’s repeated, remarkable declarations of love for the smallest among us. We take love for babies for granted now, because we live in a civilization the Bible built (well, in the ruins of that civilization, at least). Yet God’s emphasis on the divine importance of children was a revolutionary thought in the pre-Biblical world. Today, we gasp at God’s command for Abraham to kill Isaac, yet such child sacrifice was entirely commonplace among the false gods of the day (and much later days, too, ask the conquistadors about that). What would have stunned Abraham’s contemporaries was the end of the story – that God saves Isaac! The episode is intended to illustrate that there’s a new boss in town, and He doesn’t go in for baby-killing.
Percy’s villains do not recognize that boss’s authority. They’re not atheists, not exactly – they, like the pharisee, believe in themselves, after all.
When doctors forget the one true God, when they try to play god themselves, the old false gods return with a vengeance – the ones that the Book of Genesis rebuked so long ago, the ones the conquistadors encountered, the child-sacrificing gods. Without Jesus protecting our babies, calling on us to bring our infants to Him, those little children will no longer be suffered, but will suffer terribly. Sitting through Drag Queen Story Hour at the local library will be the fate of the luckier ones… for the rest, return to Sparta, or the Aztecs, or to Percy. Or drop by your local Planned Parenthood.
If there is one unforgettable takeaway from the book, it is Percy’s reiteration of his fellow legendary Southern Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor’s insight: apparent virtues, like tenderness or compassion, when divorced from the divine source of all virtue, inevitably lead to the death camps – or to Epstein Island. “Love is love,” after all, even for adults and their prepubescent paramours. Dostoevsky wrote that without God, everything is permitted. He was right, but only halfway so. As the children in Percy’s tale, and far too many real children today, could tell you, without God, everything – in the worst sense of that word – is mandatory.
Your last two posts brought back wonderful memories of my first year in university. My creative writing teacher allowed us to read a paragraph or two from a novel of our choosing. I chose one of Percy Walker's, as his prose was so raw, and I felt liberated when I read those swear words...It was the first time in my life where I felt I had control over my life...I was a black sheep born into a very authoritarian family! That class opened my mind, and I think it probably saved my life as I learned how to think critically in that wonderful class with that very open minded professor. The last three years have opened my mind even more. Sad, that the universities no longer seem to be a sanctuary of free thought, and debate. I feel sorrow for my young adult children. I have that book you talk about
from Mr. Walker's in my bookcase....time for a reread I think. Love the passages about God and children...they are my joy, and my life's work so far. I am of the same thought...all children are the epitome of God.
Wow, loved the second paragraph, with the insights about the selflessness of baby's crying. Reminds me of Chesterton's thinking in Orthodoxy. Last lines of your post are chilling. Great article!