Issue 20
Christmas 2000
A Meditation on the Feast of the Holy Innocents
(celebrated on December 28)
Anyone who has loved a child reacts with great emotion to the idea of any child suffering. The innocence and beauty of a little child is the best argument I know for the goodness of creation.
That is why this story of the wicked king who slaughtered the little children touches us so. I know of a woman, now well into her retirement years, who never misses church on this day. She lost her six-year-old son over fifty years ago to diphtheria. I know of another man who lost his son, struck down in the prime of his young manhood by a drunken driver; he never misses, either. Both of these people have accepted their terrible losses, but both know that they will never be the same again. Something irreplaceable has been lost to the world in the death of a child. Something unnatural has occurred.
The slaughter of the innocents-the children of any era, not just first-century Palestine-calls us to embrace all living children and feel responsibility for their care. Their innocence, and the right they have to that innocence, forbids us to think of any child as someone else’s problem. Not just precious to their parents, they are precious to the human family.
The loss of even one is a slaughter.
Bishop Edmond Browning
Former Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, U.S.A.
President of Friends of Peace & Justice in the Holy Land