Peace & laughter:
McCarthy, Abigail
Of several minds: Abigail McCarthy PEACE & LAUGHTER ADVENT & 'THE DAY AFTER' TELEVISION MOGULS take little account of the liturgical seasons. Nor do we ourselves. At least, that seemed to be the...
...Letty Cottin Pogrebin, writer of books on children, is so disturbed by their present condition that she has written a book whose thesis is that we - or, at least, we, through our society - hate children...
...The nations will be in distress, bewildered by the roaring of the sea and its waves...
...He meant, we can believe, the kingdom on earth as well as that in heaven since that is what he taught us to pray...
...If the pollsters are right, however, the huge viewing audience of 100 million Americans were as little affected by what they saw in changing their minds or ordering their lives as they usually are by homilies on the Gospels quoted...
...It will go hard with women who are with child, or have children at the breast, in those days"-a point made rather heavily in the film...
...They would not live to grow up...
...Peace and laughter" in a city of hate and terror...
...Matthew's Gospel for the last Sunday speaks of the "abomination of desolation.' ' We are bidden to take refuge ' 'not going down to carry away anything from the house, if they are on the housetop...
...The muddle of his impressions swinging from the scarifying nightmarish visual effects to the universal child's fear of losing his family, made him at once endearing and a spokesperson for all children...
...We are so used to the pictures...
...It is easy to forget that it is a time of preparation for the second coming as well as the first...
...They knew that no one would survive nuclear war, they said...
...That little boy's fear and realization was almost the same as that of the Russian children we also saw on television not so long ago...
...They forgot, of course, to poll the children...
...We read daily about the battered children as child abuse becomes endemic in our own country., The usually dispassionate columnist David Broder was recently so upset by the hear-ings on hungry children and their mothers-increasing numbers suffering from anemia, underweight and under-height for their age-that he wrote bitterly, "A country that can choke down a fake nuclear war between ads for Gourmet Pop Corn and Dexatrim Appetite Control capsules cna swallow almost anything...
...One haunting picture of a child's reaction stays with me...
...Perhaps it is time for us to follow the advice of the liturgy-to refuse to let our hearts dry up with fear-to do what we can to solve the problems of those near us, the hungry, and the poor, and to ask like children for food, for peace and laughter...
...And they have so little of that in today's world...
...Then we have Advent...
...That was brought home to me recently by the message of a doughty little Episcopal nun from Belfast...
...Perhaps our hearts are really dried up by fear and all we can do is await what is to come...
...He hadn't realized it could be like that, he said falteringly and feeling for words-people burned to skeletons in a flash and "families lost from each other...
...At least, that seemed to be the message of viewing polls after Thornbirds was aired during Holy Week...
...Let the children tell us what is important and what to do...
...The Day After" wasn't very well done, but it really didn't have to be to make it very clear that at any moment now we are very close to bringing on the abomination of desolation by our own free acts...
...They were sure their country would not start one...
...But Luke makes that all too clear on the First Sunday...
...But this time they seem to have got it right by accident...
...Sister Anna carries with her a poem written by one of the children...
...Yet even without the nuclear threat hanging over them we have not given them a good world to live in...
...He wasn't a very appealing child-a small boy with a bulging forehead and horn-rimmed glasses, almost the mirror image of his "strong defense" father whose stance, as he staunchly assured the McNeil-Lehrer show audience, was unaffected by viewing the possible horror...
...Starving children on the edge of the Sahara...
...Sister Anna has been in this country trying to raise funds for Lagan College, a secondary school staffed by both Catholics and Protestants, where Catholic and Protestant children go happily to school together and learn not only their own tradition but enough of each other's to breed respect and understanding...
...Children do not ask too much...
...Peace and laughter and enough food...
...And perhaps they were saying what they had heard and had been taught-but one thing they knew...
...the very powers of heaven will rock...
...They wanted to live in peace with all children everywhere, they said...
...The coming we most associate with Advent is the coming of the Child-of the one who said that unless we become as little children we will not enter the kingdom...
...But the little boy's was...
...not going back to pick up a cloak, if they are in the fields...
...Wounded children on a stretcher in Lebanon...
...Propaganda, that's what our American little boy's father would have said...
...Only one line of it comes to me now-and it may not be entirely right but it echoes in my mind: "this is a place of peace and laughter...
...Peace and laughter-that is what children need to grow as they should grow...
...No one would survive...
...Malnourished and stunted children in the appeals for funds in magazines...
...ABIGAIL MCCARTHY...
...They were very serious blond children, grave and articulate...
...men's hearts will be dried up with fear, as they await the troubles that are overtaking the whole world...
...And "there will be distress then such as has not been since the beginning of the world, and can never be again...
...The Day After" was given to us for our contemplation during the week between the last Sunday after Pentecost and the First Sunday of Advent-a vivid commentary on the readings in the service of the Word...
Vol. 110 • December 1983 • No. 22
