Our Lord warned that if I cause a child to stumble, it would be better that a millstone were hung around my neck and I were cast into the sea. Better when? In the judgement, it would seem. Translated into the kind of punishment this might mean in the Great Judgement, it is a grave thing indeed to abuse a child. It is a sad product of our age that children are so often viewed as sexual objects, with an accelerated maturity so often associated with sexual maturity, and sexualized children regarded as “cute”. So often, a boy or girl is tantalized and teased by adults as to whether he or she has a boyfriend or girlfriend. The are encouraged to play together in such a way that this is the subtext of their interactions. A friend of my pointed out that it starts with young girls being dressed in “spankers” for “Easter”, evolves into painting their lips and shading their eyes like any harlot of Egypt, and moves through this kind of teasing, under which is always a suggestion if not the expectation or eager desire that they quickly find their sexual place. Inflicted more on girls than on boys, sometimes, our culture portrays the prime time girl of eight or ten or twelve as at once petulant, pouting, and precocious. This type of sexual abuse amounts to the fondling of the soul and the denigration of the body.
At the same time, children are frequently treated as “pre-people” in the name of physical discipline. Parents who understand “do not spare the rod” as a license to inflict a level of suffering that merely feels right, or as justification and a cover for exceeding what is patently wrong, do not actually regard children as full persons. And yet, it is precisely the teaching of Christ that they are, and are capable of receiving the fullness of salvation. Indeed, there are countless child saints and martyr saints that ever serve as witness to this fact. Far from being an anomaly, the child held up in the arms of Christ (“such is the Kingdom of Heaven”) is the model and our failure to regard children as full persons capable of receiving the fullness of grace is the anomaly. Disciplinary abuse coupled with sexual abuse, however indirect, indicates the inconsistency with which we view children as sexual in the way that adults are, and yet also as objects for our disciplinary mistreatment, as slaves of our passions.
The spiritual abuse of children, alternately consigning them to the hell of the world’s passions and the devil’s snares, leaving them to fend for themselves in the morass of supposed entertainment, games, and advertising, and the bankruptcy of educational offerings, atheistic and gnostic philosophies, depriving them from leadership and guidance, and then too shielding them from full participation in the liturgical, mysteriological, and sanctifying life of the Church and her pieties, is equally destructive and unjustified. After all, the Holy Scriptures command us to instruct our children in the ways of Our Lord, and to prevent them not to come unto him. Abandoning our children to the world’s agenda for them while also failing, whether by example or by leadership, to steer them to the ark of salvation is one and the same with murdering their souls, leaving them on the city wall to be eaten by predators. By wronging them or by failing to do right by them, we erect the very barriers, or occasions for stumbling, of which Christ warns us. Lord have mercy.
When we pray in the litanies of the Church, we must remember that we are praying for children as much as for adults. When we think of Christ, we must remember that, as the Fathers teach, He sanctified every stage of human life, himself Incarnate as an unborn child in the womb, an infant and a child, a young man, and a man of age. Any Orthodox Church and nearly any Orthodox home will have an icon of the Theotokos, never without Our Lord, reminding us of the sanctity of childhood. We must never feel more free to shove around our children, to abandon them to the world, to fail to exhort and instruct them, than we are adults. In fact, if we feel free at all to do these things to adults, then we have become abusers not only of children but of each other and, in either case, abusers of Christ. Speaking to us from the throne and height of heaven, from the windows (icons) of the Church, from the Holy Scriptures, and echoing down through the corridors of time, we are dead and blind and senseless unless we hear Him saying, For as much as ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto Me.