The Best of James Simpson: Child in the Midst

Monday July 3 2017

Life and Work's much-loved columnist, the Very Rev Dr James Simpson, has chosen some of his favourite pieces from over 10 years of meditations.

His first selection is his very first column in November 2006, which reflects on the impact of war on children.

A few years ago because of a clerical error, a child of two years of age was summoned to serve on a jury.

I wonder if that was a divinely inspired mistake for in one sense the child is the final jury before whom civilisation must be tried. The final test of any society is what it does to children, and allows to happen to children. Mark in his Gospel tells us that “Jesus took a child and set him in the midst.” When you do that, you immediately see the horror of war and terrorism.

During a memorable visit to London as Moderator in 1994, my wife and I visited a brave little girl from Yugoslavia in Great Ormond Street hospital. The year before she had been the focus of the world’s attention. As a result of a mortar attack which killed her mother, little Irma suffered severe spinal and head wounds. She was paralysed from the neck down and permanently attached to a complicated life support system. The pictures of Irma were broadcast across the world and printed on the front page of countless newspapers. What John Major called ‘Operation Irma’ came into being to bring critically ill children like Irma from Yugoslavia to Britain for medical treatment. Meeting and speaking with Irma, who died shortly after our visit, forcibly brought home to us the horror of man’s inhumanity to man.

For me the real horror of war and terrorism is seen in what it does to children like Irma. Whereas for centuries, even as late as the First World War, the vast majority who died in war were professional soldiers, in more recent times the vast majority who die are civilians. They die as a result of what is euphemistically called ‘collateral damage’. Many of us won’t quickly forget the tragic pictures from Iraq of orphaned babies and severely wounded children, or the pictures of dead children being dug out of the rubble in Qana, and carried away in black bags, or the sobbing picture of a Jewish child whose mother had been killed by a suicide bomber. Seeing grown-ups suffer is bad enough, but children shocked and scared, longing for their dead Mum’s embrace, that is different.

One of the first to speak out strongly against war was the Greek writer Euripides. In his drama, ‘The Trojan woman’ he depicted war, not in terms of a soldier armed to the teeth, bristling with courage and armour, but in terms of a woman with a dead baby in her arms. He thus reminded his contemporaries that war is not simply grown-ups slaying other grown-ups, but the maiming and destruction of the minds and bodies of countless children.

After the defeat of Napoleon, the Russian and Austrian armies sought vengeance. In one Italian village the women fled to the church for safety, but the soldiers followed and brutally slew them. One mother escaped by hiding her infant son in the church belfry. That infant was to become the brilliant composer Verdi. How much poorer the world would have been if that child had also been slaughtered, if he had not been able to enrich the world with his Rigoletto, Aida and La Traviata. When children become the jury by which terrorism and war are tried, they are seen to be the destructive and horrific things they really are. I wonder if in our day a future Verdi was among the children slaughtered in Iraq, or a future Einstein in the Lebanon-Palestine-Israeli conflict.

I have never forgotten watching on television, President Sadat of Egypt being welcomed in Jerusalem by the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir. Sadat had flown from Cairo for an historic meeting between Arab and Jewish leaders. Sadat’s first grandchild had been born the day before he left Cairo. In her words of welcome Golda Meir said to Sadat, ”I have been a grandmother for some years. Let me give you a gift for your new grandchild.” Sadat’s chin trembled as he accepted the gift. A lump rose in his throat. For a moment we glimpsed how much finer this world would be if only the leaders of the nations, Arab and Jew, Bosnian and Serb, Tutsi and Hutu, American and Iraqi, were to love their children and grandchildren more and hate their enemies less.

When we set a child in the midst we see not only the horror of war, but the horror of human greed and apathy. The historical records which describe the awful conditions under which many children had to work in the 19^th century in the factories and mines, make heart-rending reading. Children under nine often had to work 12 hours a day. Many members of Britain’s ruling classes saw nothing wrong in this. Today we look back and wonder how people could have been so blind and heartless. I cannot help thinking that a hundred years from now, our descendents may look back and wonder at how in the 21^st century one quarter of the world’s population could be so indifferent to the appalling needs of the other three quarters. Could a future Nelson Mandela have been among those who have died last year in Africa of starvation?

James A Simpson's books, written to raise funds for cystic fibrosis research, are published by Steve Savage and available in shops and online.