Hide and Seek

“I am frightened by the corrupted ways of this land—if only I could kill the killer”
--Alannis Morrissette, “All I Really Want”

“Then the king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiprah and Puah, ‘When you help the Hebrew women in childbirth and observe them on the delivery stool, if it is a boy, kill him…. Now a man of the house of Levi married a Levite woman, and she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. When she saw that he was a fine child, she hid him for three months. But when she could hide him no longer, she got a papyrus basket fro him and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in it and put it among the reeds along the banks of the Nile” (Exodus 1:15-16; 2:1-3).

“When they [the magi] had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. ‘Get up’, he said, ‘take the child and his mother and escape into Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the child to kill him’” (Matthew 2:13).

The summer days in Germany were long. The sun did not start going down until around ten. So we kids stayed out as long as we could. Our favorite game was hide and seek. The way we played it was a lot more fun than I had played it in the States. But one day, something strange struck me, something that has come back on me a few times since the boys were born.

I realized that in some way, Hide and Seek is a vicious game of survival training. Can you hide from the hunter? Can you find the prey? Answers to those questions mean life or death in many parts of human history. I remember thinking about the Holocaust and the terrible stories of people trying to hide, but being given away by a crying child. Or a mother who had to smother her child to save the lives of many. Then I got back to playing.

I know, I know, I have a dark streak in my personality, one that is at once fearful of violence and convinced that part of my task is to resist it and help others do the same. I suppose there was something of a call in my childhood thoughts about hide and seek.

Sometimes when I see John or Joe running across the field to the creek, I am tormented again by those childhood thoughts. How slow children are, how weak. And then, as a man, I now know that if people are weak, they are taken advantage of. It’s even legal to do so, because they are weak and can’t stand up for themselves. An instructive moment: I mentioned to a colleague that “activists” in the church community have missed the main justice issue in America: abortion. The reply was that if I asked the people in the community if abortion was the main issue, they wouldn’t agree. I replied “That’s because the people for whom it is an issue are dead.” The dead do not get to speak, and a fetus can only raise a hand in a startle-reflex. Why are we so scared of children? Moses and Jesus would have a hard time being born in our own day. There is nothing new under the sun, and the more things change, the more they say the same.

A few nights ago, we were playing hide and seek downstairs. Normally this is such a good game, and I don’t really think about my darker thoughts. I mean, one of us hides and the other two snuggle on the couch while we count. (When boys get older, they don’t snuggle with dad as much, so you have to sneak it in where you can). Thursday night Joe lamented that he doesn’t know how to hide very well. Dark clouds rise. Then, he was hiding in a good place, but two of his toes were sticking out. That was it. We went on playing, but I was twisting inside. Do I give him a crash course in hiding? There’s nothing sadder than desperation.

Of course it’s ridiculous, but then again it is not. Does anyone deny the existence of evil, its particular fondness for the weakest and most vulnerable? We sometimes think it is a limited thing, something that happens to the unfortunate few. We can feel bad when we hear about it, but it won’t touch us. Finally, evil exists in a million forms, and perhaps the most pernicious are not the physical manifestations, but rather the devilry of domination and control in relationships.

I met a man a few days ago who came to the church looking for some clothes. He was a drunk, and said, “I’ll be honest, I shit all over myself. I can’t go around stinking like this.” It was pretty bad, for sure. I mentioned that there was a deeper filth all over him that he had to let go of, too.

“I’d rather die,” he said.

“You’re going to,” I said. And then he told me that his dad gave him whiskey to shut him up when he was a baby and small child. He could not hide from that hunter.

p/g