Sermon by the Most Reverend Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Wales given at a service to reaffirm the value of the child following publication of the Waterhouse Report at St Asaph Cathedral, 7pm, 24th May 2000.
The whole process of human growing-up is charged with risk, physical and psychological. We all know that the human young have a far longer period of sheer physical dependence on parents than other mammals. Indeed, you could say that one of the most absolutely distinctive marks of the human condition itself was the continuing presence of the human young over many years among their elders. The presence of children is one of the things that makes humans human. And that means in turn that the risks of growing up are a central part of what makes human beings human. What we are as adults is radically bound up with how we negotiate growing up, how we manage the huge risks and changes of childhood and puberty and young adulthood. The deepest hurts, the deepest deprivations human beings can suffer, the wounds that are hardest to heal, sometimes impossible to heal, are the injuries done to children. There are lessons about how to live in the world that may never be learned if they're not learned in childhood.
And no-one learns, no-one becomes able to cope with risk and change, if they do not experience a trustworthy environment. You can take risks if you know the environment as a whole is secure. You can experiment if you know there is a stable background to help you make sense of what you find and to save you from the worst dangers. What you discover in this way makes you able to take risks when there are no such clear assurances and safety nets - which is the burden and the dignity of being an adult. Without the trustworthy environment and the limits to risk when you're still deeply vulnerable, you may manage adult life, you may, with courage and support, fashion a way of coping with the adult world - but there will be a kind of lasting deficit in your sense of yourself, and trust in yourself. At worst, you may never become a real adult at all; and you may be trapped into repeating the processes that deprived you. You may become a person who can't cope with being trusted, a person who runs from responsibility - or a person who can deal with the hostile and unreliable world only by violence. Something in you has been crushed to death; you feel you can survive only by becoming yourself an agent of death, through physical and psychological violence.
It's summed up very effectively by one of our leading child psychotherapists,
Margot Waddell:
The capacity to bear loss, to risk change, to widen experience, to extend relationships, is based in the degree of containment and security which a baby and young child has experienced in the primary relationship {normally with the parent, especially the mother}, and which later function as resources to support and sustain the still fragile ego through new and challenging endeavours. That security stems from the availability of a containing presence which is itself able to bear and to learn from both good and bad experience... The internal experience of such a presence can then become the core of the developing self.
Part of what we are doing here today is mourning the fact that a whole network of agencies and individuals failed to create a trustworthy environment, and so inflicted on several generations of children wounds that, in the strict sense, can't be healed - though people learn, with varying success, to live with them. The Church's record in the care of children gives it no right to take the moral high ground here; we have as much cause to acknowledge collusion and guilt as any other community or institution, and we, like others have woken up only belatedly to the need to make our common life as wholly secure an environment as possible for children. And all our attempts to make reparation and to do all that can humanly be done to avoid such abuse in the future is haunted by the simple presence of those for whom the hurt has been done and can't be undone. It is so tempting to speak of forgiveness and healing and reconciliation; but nothing actually undoes the damage.
What's more, the fact that our society has been so slow to recognise crises around the care of children and so reluctant to listen to their voices tells us, uncomfortably, that we are not a very adult society; that we are not very interested in providing a 'containing presence' that assures the safety of children. And this in turn implies that we are all in some way affected by some element of that deprivation and woundedness that we see in dramatic form in the lives of abused children around us. Unless we confront our own wounds, we shall go on pretending that we are offering safety to our children when in truth we are unable to do so.
No, I'm not recommending techniques to get in touch with our inner child as the answer to our problems; but if we can't see that mourning for the tragedies of abuse is also mourning for a deprivation and injury that we are all involved in, we shall go on seeing the abuse of children as a scandal caused always by someone else's failure, by people of extreme and pathological compulsions. But we are not allowed to escape so easily. Why the institutional apathy (or worse), why the willingness to silence question and challenge? As always with some major social crime, what makes it possible is an unspoken, un-named assortment of fears and desires that act to reinforce evil. And when evil is exposed, we stand revealed as people who are less than adults, less than secure; unable to manage that basic distinctive human business of living responsibly alongside our children.
Later in this service we shall see the symbolic building of a 'safe house'. It stands for our willingness, reaffirmed here, to secure what we have failed to secure so far - and it should also be said that it reflects and celebrates all that has been done by carers of all kinds who are indeed secure and generous adults, who have faced and known their own wounds and made them serve the need of others. But if what has been said so far is true, we have on this occasion to ask how our whole life together as a society shows a level of emotional deprivation, an inability to become adult enough to care for our children. Do we have as a society the skills for building a lasting social home in which young people may discover how to 'risk change, to widen experience, to extend relationships?'
No human society ever makes a complete success of this; we should not give way too quickly to illusions about golden ages. There are always enough damaged people around to give another turn to the cycle of abuse. But we need to look at what it might be about us, now, in our cultural situation that might be stepping up the risk. We might think, for example, of the fact that we have become both deeply individualistic and deeply obsessed with results in the last twenty years. The slow job of shaping someone else's humanity, not just their skills and their profitability, is increasingly unwelcome. Our schools are more anxious and tired places, on the whole; our parenting is often fitted in between other obligations. National policy on childcare and family benefit lacks a coherent strategy (as the New Statesman pointed out last week in a powerful survey). In an environment where we are still feeling the effects of all the anxious fragmentation of the last quarter of the twentieth century, still struggling for quick results from our outlay, rapid soundbite solutions to complex human difficulties, it's perhaps not that surprising that we are failing to generate an environment that looks and feels trustworthy, and that the needs of our most vulnerable young people are constantly elbowed aside, at every level, because we don't want to face the consequences of our childish impatience.
There are solutions that might help. The Waterhouse Report spoke of a Children's Commissioner who would guarantee a proper and free access for the voices of complaint. And it may well be time for Westminster to follow the hints of the Assembly's practice and make children the explicit focus of a proper ministerial post that would being together issues about childcare, support for carers, training for carers, benefit and so on - a daunting task, but surely an increasingly urgent one.
However, there remains the deeper question. In the book of Proverbs, there is a memorable passage describing how 'Wisdom' builds a house (9.1ff.), setting up the pillars that support it, preparing food for all and inviting the 'simple' to step in and feast. later on in Proverbs (24.3-4), we read again that 'By wisdom a house is built,...by knowledge the rooms are filled with all precious and pleasant riches'. Wisdom, in the Old Testament, is a word of immense resonance: it stands not just for human shrewdness but for the harmony of God's mind, reflected in the world. To acquire wisdom is to see and hear this harmony and to act in accordance with it. It means seeing how the world is an interdependent whole, its elements slowly locking in together to show, as time passes, the glory and beauty of the mind of God worked out in every detail of the world. So the building of a house that will stand and will welcome all in need of insight and save them from the false simplicity of selfishness depends on the sense of belonging in a world made by God as a pattern of mutuality.
Think of this in relation to our concern today. The wisdom that will build a house safe for our children to live and grown in is a recognition that we are not a horde of competing egos in a neutral world of exploitable stuff. A secure environment for human growing up will be one in which we acknowledge what the whole environment really is - a pattern of life and exchange. Responsibility for our material setting, serious thought about the future of the world's ecosystems, is part of building a trustworthy environment - a world, as we so often say, safe for our children. - And it must be an environment that takes in also the human 'ecosystem', the values and contributions of people who are not going to be profitmakers - the old, the young, the disabled. Concerns about childcare can't be abstracted from these broader issues because the health of our human world is, ultimately, indivisible. And it won't be served or forwarded unless we can face the fears and hurts and resentments and desires that keep us less than adult.
Jesus of Nazareth was seen by his early followers, as he is seen today, in terms of Wisdom incarnate, the embodiment of God's mind in the world - because he both teaches about and makes possible by his acts and sufferings a life in accordance with this pattern of mutual valuing, serving and loving. So it's no accident that he told his friends to learn from the child - a very bizarre idea in the culture of his day. The child's trusting dependence, the child's welcoming of the world around in joy - these are the proper marks of adults who have heard the good news of God's love. But this has two consequences. It becomes all the more terrible to abuse the trust, to exploit the welcoming vulnerability of the child for your own purposes; better, says the Lord, to hang a millstone round your neck and jump in the sea. To hurt a child is to condemn yourself to spiritual death. And so, second, the implication is that the silencing of a child's voice and experience fractures a whole community's life; there is something that isn't being learned, some dimension of humanity that is missing. And to be committed to Jesus Christ simply is, among other things, to be committed to making the child's voice audible, learning from the person who is, in our world, sentimentalised yet so often dismissed or brutalised or straitjacketed.
The hurt child makes us all less human. The unsafe child makes us all less secure. The child whose life is frustrated and distorted by abuse and violence is a sign of a society refusing maturity. God give is the wisdom to build a house that will stand, a home in which selves may develop as God means them to. God save us from our childishness and set us free instead to learn from the child's wisdom. God help us listen to the child, for the sake of our very humanity.