Cry, cry.

Jonnie Comet


Can you hear the mother cry;
Cry, cry, mother;
Baby on her back doth lie
With some man or another.
Baby take what mother give,
Calling it initiative;
‘Mamá, this is how I live;
‘Bye-bye, Mother.’

 

A sixmonth: sixteen; what’s amiss?
’Fore the mirror weeping;
No swimsuit will flatter this;
Nature’s way is keeping.
Rush from school to clinic free:
‘R-U-4-8-6 for me!’
Doctor says, ‘Too late, you see:
‘Midnight, come a-creeping.’

Oh! –all agony, no pride,
Heels in stirrups snaring;
Motherhood thus nullified
With medical paring.
Fair trade? –for but three weeks’ pain
To avoid the peers’ disdain,
And to wear swimsuits again
With the boys all staring?

 

Can you hear the baby coo?
Cry, cry, mother;
No; that joy’s denied, for you
Cast away that bother.
Now all babies’ bliss a knell
Not of heav’n, but closer Hell;
In your Purgatory dwell:
Fie, fie, ‘Mother’!

- 2002

* * *


l. 14 - RU-486 - in former days, a ‘morning-after’ contraceptive pill whose role as an inducer of abortion has been debated. The narrator’s request for it at this point shows her lack of sense about the issue

Last will.

From the Author, to his Children, should he go mad in Age.

Jonnie Comet


When I one day may cease to be my own,
But coming under some less thoughtful mind,
As Swift, once sad arrayed for friends to find
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying crone;
A Soul forgot, all Reason lost, or one
Scant Ghost of what he was, mem’ry resigned:
Regarding me but thus, Child, pray, be kind,
And my afflicted form discard alone.

For, whate’er my outward state, recall
That thy once minded father loved thee well,
Bear God no ill, for ‘tis but temp’ral hell:
Let not by eyes thy better heart enthrall.

  We are but dust: to dust let Bodies tend;
  And by thy Love thus skyward me commend.

- 4 April 2000

* * *

l. 3 - Swift  - Swift went raving mad and was exhibited babbling in his chair by his servants –JC
l. 4 - An old... dying  -  paraphrased from Shelley, ‘England in1819’

The textbook cure for student scoliosis.

Jonnie Comet 
13 April 1999

   Recently a large body of middle-school students was assigned an essay in which they would make a rational case for or against the institution of homework. An articulate majority grant that homework is somehow necessary, but a good percentage suggest that one of its major drawbacks is the undue weight of materials they must take home in order to complete the work. It seems at once amusing and alarming to see that for this group of 11- to 13-year-olds, the I word scoliosis is hardly ever misspelt, as though it has become a well-used staple of their schoolgoing vocabulary.  

  Despite their exaggerations, the students are correct in assuming their backpacks are too heavy. The medical profession will allow that anything approaching 15 or 20 percent of the carrier’s own weight is unacceptably heavy a burden for one whose spine is not yet grown to adult strength. This would suggest that a backpack regularly carried at 15 pounds– more common than educators would care to believe (several essay respondents had even weighed their backpacks before, just out of morbid curiosity) –is likely to injure a 13-year-old child permanently. I am sure few school districts want the moral responsibility, let alone the legal one, when, ten years hence, the proof of spinal damage and the cost of its lifelong treatment come back to cleverly implicate a school policy or particular instructor.

  We’ve all heard these things before. Unfortunately the advent of the hiker’s rucksack, or backpack, as a de rigueur accessory for the secondary-school student, has exacerbated the problem considerably. Yet one cannot deny, at least through the students’ eyes, the perceived utility of the backpack for carrying a large load of odious gear to and from a place they would rather not be sent.  The concept of homework cannot be eliminated either, for if the US is to best the academic standards now being set by other nations, American students will have to accept the fact of independent review and practice outside the classroom.

  In spite of the Internet and other forms of immediate, non-printed material, the bound book in some form will likely be around for a long time to come. In itself it is infinitely cheaper and easier to access, transport, exchange, annotate by hand, and reproduce in ready form than other forms of media. Electronic media may be coming down in cost, but let’s face it– not all literature will ever really warrant the electronic process needed to get its text onto ROM, and then require that some form of data transfer apparatus be provided for it and carried round for whenever a reader wants to read on the bus or the beach. Moreover, for the teacher of other than reading subjects, electronic text may not facilitate a means for the student to respond in the way a paper-based worksheet does, nor make students’ independent progress so readily accessible to the teacher monitoring it in the classroom.

  No; I would say that at least for a short duration yet, the paper-based textbook-and-response method of student input and output will stay a fundamental part of the secondary-school homework model. To deliver students from the burden of weighty tomes, the answer must lie not in changing to an entirely new type of study material but in the nature of textbooks themselves.

  One has only to consider the typical secondary-school assigned textbook to see the point. I once taught a 11th-year literature class for which the school prescribed a huge heavy book two inches thick with everything from Beowulf to the Romantics in it. I despised the book and so did the students. I don’t think their hatred stemmed from the matter within the book as much as the thought of having to lug it round all day, although it certainly became an easy excuse not to have brought it to class and, more than once, initiated a change of plan for the day by their sympathetic teacher. Somehow the literature started to seem less important when I had to torture the poor kids into bringing it along.

  After reading the middle-school essays, I devised a very logical, cost-effective, and efficient alternative to books such as these. It seems so obvious I can only wonder why it is not widely used, as the evidence suggests it is not. The idea is simple: change the textbook. Instead of providing one huge book with eight centuries of literature in it, why not provide eight books each covering a shorter period? The books would be done in a series, with study questions at the end of each reading from which the student could merely copy out to do his homework. Rather than a hard cover, each series book would have a quality soft cover, possibly laminated to endure half a dozen years of use.

  The implications for the classroom teacher are unobtrusive as to be barely existent. At the start of each new unit the last unit-book would be collected and the new unit-books distributed. Thus for each subject the student would be assigned to take home only a 3/8-inch-thick soft-cover book, which would contain all the texts and exercises necessary for the unit at hand in the classroom. Printed at 8-1/2 x 11 inches, prepunched, five or six could be carried by the student in a single 2-inch D-ring binder. Though bulky in itself, any one student’s collection in one easy-to-handle package would never approach the combined weight of five subjects’ textbooks all burdened with information not needed at present which burden the student almost daily.

  There would be equal benefits for all subjects, even art and PE. I realise the unit-book idea could tend to perpetuate discrete skill building and lesson planning, which have begun to go out of favour in some schools and mostly with good reason. But for the vast majority of real classroom situations, few lesson plans are so comprehensive that pages from diverse places in the same large textbook are required regularly. Holistic summary could be provided by a data review or concept analysis section included at the close of each unit-book, or in the odd occasion via photocopy– since it is only what the students have seen before anyway. Better would be more teacher-devised assignments such as open-ended essay analysis and synthesis responses, the kind of thing too often overlooked even when suggested in the teacher’s guide of a big comprehensive textbook.

  It would be sheer folly for any instructor to merely teach and review a unit in isolation anyway and surely a death-knell for this unit-book idea. But the unit-books are only intended to replace the physical format of the textbook, and not the text-based learning model. They do not preclude the requirement that students take their own notes or accept reading and writing assignments independent of the formal text in whatever form it appears. In my estimation it is only the laziest and most unworthy of teachers who follows the traditional textbook so blindly as to become one with its limitations.

  I fear that the greatest drawback to the unit-book idea may lie not with educators but with publishers and the school administrators who buy from them. Any new idea is bound to be perceived as comparatively expensive and hassle-prone at first. But a long run of many paperback books selling for five dollars each, each used by a student only over a five-week period each year, must prove thriftier than one-eighth that order of heavy hardcover books at $40 or more each whose shipping costs alone make them undesirable. In fact since the unit-books are needed only in stages, the wise school buyer will schedule them to arrive one unit per month, so as to spread cost outlay over a school year. Over a period of five years five subjects could be thus integrated into the unit-book plan, at which time the first one may need replacement of texts, and so a school would merely have to ensure that the right books in the right quantities arrive every month, ad infinitum. The ongoing supplier-customer rapport this establishes can only be good in the long haul.

  One benefit to the unit-book plan is the ease with which texts can be updated. If and when revisions become necessary, only the affected one of the unit-books has to be revised and re-released into the rest of the set. This must be more reasonable than selling off the ‘old’ stock to less-savvy schools who, when they realise they have just missed getting a newer edition, will feel cheated out of their money and a good chunk of it too.

  Another great potential is for the integration of subjects within a level of study. The publisher can produce subject unit texts and lessons which are discrete yet interrelated. With the student having five or six similar-looking, colour-coded unit-books in his binder, he can recognise the interdependency of his subjects unit by unit. When the same terms and concepts are being learned and applied, the reinforcement in all subjects across the board will be overtly positive. The student will correctly spell scoliosis now because he has seen it in his language-arts spelling list and studied its cultural and anatomical aspects in social-studies and science. If just one child never has to learn the word by personal experience, the unit-book concept will have paid its due.

  It has long been my belief that a book more easily carried is more likely to be often read. It might seem almost too much to ask, but it is entirely possible that with proper lesson planning, the unit-book concept may help students leave off their wholesale disdain of texts and begin to look forward to receiving a new one every five weeks.


* * *

The vilest deceit.

Jonnie Comet

17 March 1999


  In an ethical sense the vilest form of deceit is that of marital infidelity, for there can be no moral defence for it. One has only to count the cost in terms of the number of its victims hurt by the deceit to begin to see the point.  First in a case of marital infidelity, the spouse is hurt, naturally.  Then the children are, if there are any.  Then come the family of the spouse, and quite often the family of the deceiver as well– actually everyone who was present at the wedding will feel painfully let down.  Then there are all the people on the third party’s side as well.  Then of course there is God, to whom all promises were made in the first place.  I don’t know about everyone; but I was taught that wilfully breaking a promise to God is not good grounds for a ticket to Heaven.

  What other deceit can compare to this?  Perhaps even high treason is not as ethically unjustifiable.  I acknowledge that in some cases one man’s treason could lead to full-scale war; but at a certain point you’ve got to recognise that, seen in an ethical light, the motives for the deceit necessary for treason might be much more reasonable than they seem in name alone.  I mean, it is possible that treason against the current ideology of one’s own country could be said to be patriotic.  Under certain circumstances it could even be exquisitely noble.

  The IRA may serve as a prime example.  One argument can be that these people have betrayed the very ideals of their own belief system– ideally, who may kill in the name of ideological liberty? –let alone Christian unity?  The IRA have committed countless crimes– and sins– for their cause.  Yet as much as it pains me to admit anything virtuous about the IRA, I have to acknowledge that these people sincerely believe they are trying to achieve a noble end.  They have rationalised that their ends are more important than what they must do to achieve them.  And therefore the pain and suffering they cause must be viewed as unfortunate but temporary, because what they are trying to vindicate is a society; and to them that is far more valuable as a benefit than the loss of numerable human lives are as a cost.

  In that light then, what is the end of an adulterous affair, and how can it be ethically or ideologically justified?  My position is simply that it cannot be.  It is nothing but cowardly to sneak round behind a spouse’s back in the name of sexual fulfillment or emotional freedom or psychological therapy or some other feebly self-centred excuse, all the while endeavouring to convince yourself you are doing the right thing for yourself at last.  Any attempted defence of that is fraught with ethical hypocrisy.  No one person’s individual concept of temporal happiness can ever be considered such a priceless ideal that it should entail the breach of a trust given in front of God and so many witnesses, whilst incurring catastrophic pain and anxiety for so many other individuals, about whose feelings the person was supposed to care deeply, by the deceit.

  I will not now delve into the many reasons why an individual might think himself in a bad marriage, or how such an individual might seek remedies to the root problems of such a marriage short of absolving the entire union.  The individual who regards his own vows and beliefs as fundamental and priceless will keep them upon penalty of death; but this is a rare breed in such in today’s commercial, disposable society.  It must be accepted therefore that to the vast majority of modern people, marriages, and the feelings of the individuals concerned, are seen as cheap and replaceable so long as they can be readily got rid of, and hopefully for some material and personal gain into the bargain.

  Yet no matter how bad a marriage seems, there has always been a legitimate option to staying faithful to one, especially in these post-Vatican II times.  The first excuse proffered might be that a cruel, controlling, vindictive spouse may not be willing to ‘grant’ a divorce.  But that is bollocks.  If such were true then your whole legal insistence on divorce would only benefit from your adherence to a strong ethical stance which makes your adversary look worse.  The spouse may go out and get a good lawyer and intimidate you with the thought that the case will go in favour of the more expensive counsel.  I say, go out and get a better lawyer.  All it takes is money.  In the end the monetary cost is immaterial– it will reap dividends in the trust you earn whilst you are seen to be doing the morally right thing.

  The single worst thing you can do when you perceive yourself in a bad marriage is to begin your ‘new life’ whilst remaining de facto married to another.  To do so is to forfeit all substance and appearance of virtue.  No observer of your extramarital affair can ever comfortably condone it or look upon what you call a ‘plight’ with true compassion.  There is something profoundly disturbing about beholding a deliberate deceit against another which you would never want to suffer yourself.  This is part of the great hypocrisy of infidelity– that to free yourself from your ‘bad’ marriage, you must do to your spouse what would certainly have made you call it a bad marriage if your spouse had done the same to you.  You must hurt someone else in order to save yourself from pain.

  No belief system which can attempt to defend this can ever be said to be a true ‘society’.  The ideal of individual freedom cannot be without limits; and those limits must be in the best interests of society as a whole.  It is incumbent upon the whole concept of a society that no one person may have any right to anything when to exercise that right infringes upon the equivalent rights of other members of the same society.

  To believe otherwise is to defend hypocrisy– which, logically, cannot be defended.  A society based upon the unlimited freedoms of the individual is no more than a society of one.  Any collection of such individuals can lead to a kind of ethical anarchy, a dog-eat-dog world in which no-one can ever be safe from the whims of others.  Despite many individuals’ claims otherwise, the concept of limited personal freedom is at the heart of the official tenets of every so-called ‘free society’ in the world– or, at least, the ones that truly survive as such.

  For one who would consider closing a bad marriage, the only correct thing when confronted with the opportunity for an affair is to appeal to the third party’s patience.  Say, ‘Hold that thought, whilst I extricate myself from Situation Number One.’  Don’t even talk about an affair– not even once, in a public place, over coffee.  To court even the idea of breaking the marriage vows is to have already done so.

  Now I know that inherent in this is a risk of going through all the trouble to extricate yourself from a bad match only to find, once free, that your intended paramour is no longer interested– in which case you will feel that you have lost twice.  But in this risk is the nobility of fidelity, if not to your undesirable marriage partner, at least then to a standard of morality.  Desperately trying to play two games at the same time for fear of losing at one before you have got the other assured is cowardly and immature– after all, most teenagers get it wrong too.

  It takes great courage to stand up and say, ‘I believe this is bad, therefore I shall make getting out of it my first priority– but I will not transgress morality to do it.’  In such one-on-one personal matters the ends cannot be made to justify the means, for, ethically speaking, the means themselves are the ends.  Your method of pursuing your own happiness will ultimately be your own happiness, and vice versa.  You may yet incur the sadness of others by seeking a divorce; but at least those left to suffer behind you will not have had the heartbreak of finding you a traitor to their trust as well.

  It is a truth universally accepted that there can be no promise of goodness without risk of suffering.  Anyone who tells you differently is selling something– and I submit that, in the long run, when viewed rationally, the cost you do not recognise now will prove morally too expensive before long; for, in the end, no-one trusts a traitor.

* * *

Farewell to the garden.

Jonnie Comet
20 May 1998


  My old school has died. I was by there today and stopped to look at it.  The grass has grown tall and the yard is littered with trash, not thrown there carelessly, only blown there by the weather and never taken up by the maintenance men.  There used to be dozens of maintenance men, every day, driving round in tall 4-wheel-drive Ford pickup trucks in dark red or dark green with ugly black wheels and tall skinny tyres.  The trucks all had manual shift– everyone drove manual shift back then. We used to see them creep by the windows when the guys were doing work in the yard, with the narrow lettering ‘Willingboro Township Public Schools’ stencilled proudly on the doors.  The guys wore work suits with their names on them and worked quietly– I do not remember ever hearing any of them yell out loud or swear during school hours.  They were hard-working men and reverent of the tasks they were performing.  They knew, as even we did, that they were doing them for us.

  We, the schoolchildren, were the pride of the whole township.  We came to the new development when it was still an experiment, and we proved the founding fathers (seems so strange calling men in their 30s and 40s ‘founding fathers’!) were right.  Our class in particular was the very elite, the creme de la creme of the entire district.  By the time we would graduate high school, there would be an even 1000 of us in all, having attended 13 elementary schools and two junior-high schools through 30-plus students per class and split sessions and intra-district busing and some of the most unconventional and even fanciful educational programmes the state had ever seen. By and large we excelled where educators expected only better-than-average; we were sought by university recruiters all over the country and were accepted wherever we chose.  We broke the mould and made a new one, and our aggregate achievement and attitude spoiled the teachers rotten forever.  As students in the township we were never to be rivalled.

  I walked up to the windows of the kindergarten wing, in the corridor on the way to the multipurpose room– there were only two kindergarten rooms, because in the days when this school was built mothers were home and there could be half-day sessions.  I was in K-2, in the afternoon class, because I was older and would not need a nap.  The last class of children painted flowers and grass on the inside of the windows, and little construction-paper clouds and suns dangle above them.  Inside, everything remains as I remember– the little ceramic water-fountain, the blue tile of the toilet, the grey marble of the wash-up sink, the light switches so close to the teacher’s closet door.  Above the three snaking rows of flimsy fluorescent lights, I measured the room by counting ceiling tiles– imagine a kindergarten classroom 26 by 40 feet!  It was immense– a whole world behind that polished birch door. In that world we learned common courtesy (there was such a thing then), and how to write our telephone numbers and addresses.  We heard stories and built with blocks and did not look under the girls’ dresses (little girls all wore dresses then).  The teacher kissed us goodbye when we left, and we knew it was not to be polite, but because we were loved.

  The floor looks original– brown and gold asphalt tile, incredibly well kept.  The room is set with half a dozen round or hexagonal tables and little chairs, as if pretending to ready for a class, but there are no other furnishings in the room now.  The tables are original– 37 years old at least! –faux white-ash Formica laminate over birch plywood, very heavy, with metallic pale-green steel legs, very Space Age, very stylish and state-of-the-art for institutional furniture in 1962.  In those days the idea of school as an ‘institution’ was still palatable.  It was the best example of an institution, where children were cherished and minds were moulded for the greater good of all society.  This is not to say that we were brainwashed– on the contrary.  We were nurtured.  Our mothers stayed home in their housedresses and shared coffee at ten and watched The Edge of Night at noon, and hung washing out back and hoovered the carpet and waxed the floors, and when we came home our bedrooms were tidied and our windows were open to the crisp October air and the house smelled fresh and clean and new, like it really was, the house and township and whole experience of what we were doing.  We had jelly sandwiches and changed into our play clothes and ran outside to do whatever it was all the other kids on the block were doing, since there were so many of them, Walt and Mike and Barry and Neil (or Ricky) and Elizabeth and Naomi and Paul and Robert and William and Brent and Cybil and Marcie and Jeff and Bobby and Gary and Bryan and Wayne and the entire extended neighbourhood.  We had more in common than we had differences; we had all moved in at the same time and wore the same kinds of clothes and spoke the same slang and watched the same TV programmes, and our fathers had all been in the same war.  Our fathers came home, one-by-one, from jobs in Philadelphia which could support their families in the lifestyle of their dreams, and one by one the kids of the neighbourhood would cry with joyous voice, ‘Daddy’s home!’ –and then every game would be split up till tomorrow, because there would be hugs or presents or news to share, and then dinner, then homework, then baths, and then another day of the same thing, all autumn and on through the winter and into the spring.

  When summer vacation came we fled the hallowed halls of our school, never appreciating that our own children would not know such comfort or sense of purpose.  We pretended to hate school, but inside perhaps we all knew that it was crucial to our well-being, and we all attended all the time.  We did homework and read the book and studied for tests.  When the teacher told us to sit, we sat.  We did not talk back.  Those who did were severely ostracised.  I can remember the horrid feeling of staying after school for some minor misinterpretation of the class rules (for none of us was ever truly bad), and sitting there alone in a quiet room with all the chairs put up on the desks, their metallic light-green legs surrounding me like some foreboding institutionalised forest, while the teacher worked quietly at the teacher’s desk, grading homework or quizzes and pretending not to notice how awful I felt, even as the tears of knowing I had somehow transgressed the boundaries of what was expected of me by the school and the teacher and my peers and my mother (worst of all!) streamed out of my eyes.  We all knew that there were expectations for us to meet, and we knew that meet them we surely must.  Dissent was unthinkable.  One day in fourth grade about twelve of us– almost half the class– decided en masse that we would rather play dodge-ball than report to choir practice, so when Mrs Joyce insisted we go, we rebelled by announcing we had all quit the choir. She gave us some very stern words of disapproval and made the defiant dozen sit silently in our seats, writing a three-paragraph essay on something like why things like choir are important, and none of us played dodge-ball that day– or failed to report to choir practice next week.  Thirty-five years hence, a teacher would have been hauled in front of a Board hearing for infringing upon our rights, and the ACLU would never have let go of it.

  The changes in educational philosophy have been dramatic, but they are not to blame for the closing of the old school.  With a mindset of centralisation and falling population, or falling school attendance, the township committee have obviously elected to let it die.  This is the new renewal theory: demolition by attrition.  J Cresswell Stuart Elementary School (named for the orchard grower whose lands made up most of the early development) is the oldest one in the township, needs plenty of maintenance and is now surrounded by shopping centres and too much traffic.  It has become redundant; and Willingboro has fiscal problems.  They need revenue desperately, and liabilities must be neutralised at any cost.

  Even so, however unsentimental, no councillor can ever happily sign an order to demolish a perfectly viable school.  It may not even matter if the accountants swear that removal of insulation or whatever will cost more than the building is worth as a community asset.  There is something profoundly disheartening about terminating a school building.  It represents the passing of something that can never measured in cash value nor superseded by something ‘new and improved’.  It is akin to the removal of a gravestone or the replacement of a wedding ring.  A school building is only so much brick and steel to one who never attended there.  But, to those who did, it is the very memorial in material form to what those experiences therein have wrought.

  As I peered in between the painted flowers on the windows, I noticed the clock is an hour off. It was never changed for daylight savings time.  It occurred to me that it will probably never be changed again.  No, I thought.  This place will never be brought up to the times.  Too much has changed already, and that time is gone forever.  The clock is a symbol of the school; it is slightly behind the time to which we have come now.  There is such a thing as progress, and such a thing as being stupidly uninterested in the values of the past.  Something transpired in this room long ago that can never be recaptured, if only because the people who could now effect it never went to school here. It is not part of their past, and so, as with too many Americans, the experience of someone else is irrelevant to them.  They are blind to anything but what they know personally.  They did not grow up in our class, where we learned to notice the world, inspect the world, understand the world– the whole world, as far as Telstar and Cape Canaveral and Vistadome and Chromacolor could help us see.  If we were a homogeneous community, at least we were an educated and enlightened one.  Our parents chose this township and this school for us because they knew better.  They chose for us a life better than the lives they might have known, a township where their values could remain secure while the prospects for their children could be broadened.  Their houses were not ‘investment property’ for them– they were our homes.  We went to school because we were raised to believe school was important, not because it was a place for childminders to deposit us on the way to work.  We belonged in school– there was simply never a question about that.  Our school was our garden, where we were fed and cared for and nurtured, and, when necessary, pruned back a little; and we always knew, though we never consciously acknowledged it, that one day we would no longer be physically part of the garden, but that the garden would always still be there, bearing at least some small reminder of having known our presence there, just as we would forever bear the fruits of having been there too.

  The yellow and green paint of the flowers painted on the windows has faded, having baked in the sun over a year now. I wondered if the children who painted them ever come back from wherever they are going to first grade now to see their handiwork, and what they think of its still being here, with no new children to see it and appreciate it. Then I worried about what will become of their painted garden into which they had put so much happy effort and which they had been so delighted to see every day. It was a difficult thought to consider for me, but I decided that someday, when the workmen come to dismantle the building, I hope they just accidentally break the glass and then have to get it out of the way without another thought. Who, who had ever been a kindergarten child, could bring himself to shatter those windows?

* * *

Funeral for a friend.

Elegiac essay on the passing of Rachel’s goldfish, 20 May 1996.

Jonnie Comet

20 May 1996


(Note: this was written about Rachel's first goldfish; as of this reprinting the effervescent and multitalented Galileo, now over 8 months old, is alive and well --JC; October 2012)

  ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life,’saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though were dead, yet shall he live.

  With these words we Christians commend the souls of our beloved to their Maker.  In all change we understand there is loss, yet also hope. Sadly, the child who loses a cherished pet to the way of Nature is often only consoled by the rapid acquisition of a new one, and a profound opportunity for a lesson about the necessity of earthly death is forestalled, perhaps lost for good.

  No-one should ever give a pet to a young child without sober thought on the inevitable parting of the pet from this world while the child is still young enough to be catastrophically affected by it.  The love of a small child for a pet, for a friend, for a parent or sibling, is naturally complete and perfect.  Children know no bounds in expressing that love; it is a power within them stronger than they can understand or control.  Indeed it is the purest example of the love of God, the love that passes all understanding.

  The Church, as a man-made organisation, may have been dead wrong for many years in declaring that children were born in sin and needed sacraments administered by fellow human beings to come to know Jesus Christ. I submit that the reverse of what was thought for centuries is more likely true, that children are born perfect, and learn sin through interaction with people of weak or nonexistent faith.  Remember that Jesus did say, ‘Whosoever will not receive the kingdom of God as a little child, will surely not enter therein.’  The faith of a small child is perfect acceptance.  The small child takes for granted everything in evidence around him, because he has within him the most godly love of all, which comforts him that God is at work in the world and that he need not fear or question its nature.

  Therefore, when given a pet, the young child will naturally accept it as a gift from God, even without realising it, and take it for granted as with every other gift from God.  And so he should.  What the child cannot foresee is that most pets will not outlive his childhood.  Even before grandparents and other elder relatives to whom the child may be specially attached, the pet passes on, and herein lies the important opportunity which should not be neglected.

  It may seem trivial to some, but to observe with some solemnity the passing of a pet is of great value to the Christian child. A funeral ceremony is not to reassure us of the beloved’s mortality, but to reassure us of our own immortality. God has already determined that the beloved, be they of whatever species, will rest with Him in their proper place.  The soul of the pet is immaterial: it does not matter; it is not matter.  The pet was brought into the world, and made a pet, that we should know God’s love for us through our relationship with the pet. (See John 1, 3-9.)  The pet was, as the child secretly suspects, a gift from God just for him.  The child learns that to the Creator from whom all things come, all things must one day return. Earthly corruption dies, and shall be committed to the garden of life.  Symbols such as flowers are sacrificed upon the bier to represent the transient beauty of all living things and to remind us of the promise of renewal.  A marker is placed as a visible memorial in the absence of the departed friend.  The child may commemorate the event by drawing pictures or writing notes or selecting favourite photographs, no differently than the ancients did in enclosing earthly necessities in the tombs of their deceased, and for precisely the same reasons.  The reminders are to comfort those who remain, not those who are departed.

  The child may weep; Jesus wept.  No display of grief is bad theology.  It is the outpouring of an irrepressible love which feels, for the moment, that it has no object.  The sense of loss may seem inconsolable.  What the child will soon learn, as will all who mourn, is that God provides in all our want.  The next object that the child will choose to love will benefit from a wiser, maturer love, as the child grows to accept all things, even those he thought were his own, as proprietary only to God.

  The child who is not encouraged to grasp this fully will lose the ability to love in that pure, perfect manner by the time earthly materials begin to become important, as they inevitably do for us all.  The wise child will be the one who sees all things as gifts from God, here only for His purposes and under His conditions.  God’s world is a safe, secure place, not dictated by some fierce dichotomy of loss and gain but by a gently flowing cycle of change and rebirth.  The pet, after all, is not gone; it lives in our hearts forever, as it should.  There is no gain, only the generosity of God; no loss, only movement towards God.  This is what God has ordained, and He has seen that it is good.  As it is written, ‘Whatever IS is right.’

  Amen.

* * * 

epigram  - I am the Resurrection... shall he live  --BCP, 1928; ‘The Burial of the Dead’
p. 3  - Whosoever will not...therein  - Mark 10.13 
p. 7  - Whatever IS is right  - Pope, Essay on Man; e. 1, l. 294