What's in a name

Erik Erikson alerted us, now more than forty years ago, to what he called the dangers of 'destructive forms of conscientiousness.' imposing global preconceptions on the multitude of diverse personalities and motivations in a give group of children may be one of them.  Rushing ahead too much to fill up silences when children hesitate while trying to explain something about their lives to us may be another.  Children pause a lot when reaching for ideas.  They get distracted.  They meander - blissfully, it seems - through acres of magnificent irrelevance.  We think we know the way they are heading in the conversation, and we get impatient, like a traveler who wants to 'cut the travel time'.  We want to get there quicker.  
Jonathan Kozol, Ordinary Resurrections

Some phrases leap out at you.  Others stick with you.  In this case this phrase about blissful wandering has stayed in my brain for the decade since I read it.  It has also morphed in a predictable way.  Just as how in compline I always say 'that awake we may walk with Christ' (instead of watch), acres of irrelevance became acres of irreverence in my head.  I drew this image not long after I read that precious book.   And I kept it.  The book is about the children of Mott Haven, a desperate portion of the Bronx, it is about how and what we do and do not do for the children who are our responsibility, and the small Episcopal church that does extraordinary work in that neighborhood.  Kozol is deeply wise about children, and I strongly recommend this book to religious educators and parents and pastors.  Ordinary Resurrections is a reminder of the socio-economic forces that sacrifice our children more brutally than the fiction of 'The Hunger Games'.  

In a chapter about the visit of Fred Rogers to Mott Haven, Jonathan Kozol continues:
'Mr. Rogers told me once that he regrets the inclination of commercial television to replace some opportunities for silence in a child's life with universal noise.  At quite times, he said, "young children give us glimpses of some things that are eternal" - glimpses too, he said, "of what unites us all as human beings.  He also said that after forty years of work with children, he does not believe that being clever is the same as being wise.  These seem like observations that are easy to agree with and then, just as easily, dismiss.  I hope we won't dismiss them.