On the End Of The Line, and what we found there
Reflecting on what I wrote nearly a month ago – in another life, almost – I guess maybe calling pregnancy the End of something was really a bit dismal. And, a bit premature. Ten days afterwards, our baby decided that it was time to meet us, and after a sleepless night of contractions, an early-morning trip to hospital, and a long day in the birthing unit, Josiah Caleb was born at 4:26pm on Sunday, 11th October 2009.
As you can see, he is a boy. We didn’t know this until he came out, although a midwife at the hospital nearly gave it away. (“Having a girl, are you?”) Many, many people suspected that he was, in fact, a girl, and so I think I can be a little bit smug that I stuck up for the little guy. He spent the first week or so of his life asleep, but he now wakes up a bit and opens his eyes to look at the world. In these moments, he seems mostly serious and contemplative, perhaps preoccupied with some inner dilemma. Still, we are very occasionally rewarded with a faint smile, which is probably due to some intestinal functions, but is an echo of what I hope will develop into genuine smiling in a few weeks.
Things have been interesting since the birth. The sensations of life change pretty dramatically: we felt completely disconnected from the outside world, living almost exclusively within the labour suite, the maternity ward, a bedroom. Life turns on feeding Josiah, giving him some awake time, and then putting him to sleep, before waking him up again to feed – if you are a Battlestar Galactica person, then you’ll know what I mean when I say that it can feel like this episode. There are nappies to be changed (and cleaned, and soaked, and washed). There are groceries to be bought. There are dishes to clean and floors to vacuum. How will it all work out when I return to my job tomorrow? I think back to the days of pregnancy – even extreme, any-minute-now pregnancy – and realise that life before children seems much less complicated now. Was it? I can’t really remember.
So begins parenthood. It’s new and exciting and weird, and a bit smelly. But, it turns out that the End Of The Line wasn’t really an end, but rather the Beginning of Something Much, Much Better.
Stand by for action!
We knew that we wanted to have kids this year, but little did we know how many other people wanted kids this year, too. The announcement of our pregnancy was a great joy, and yet, it was one of many announcements from other friends, other people in our church community – and so, for us, the last eight months has felt like we have been standing in a slowly-advancing queue. You join the line and shuffle forwards every so often, forming friendships and enjoying comeraderie where you can get it with other people ahead or behind you.
In recent weeks days, it feels like the pregnancy queue has suddenly evaporated ahead of us and we are standing at the head of the line.
We now count down to the expected due date in days instead of months. We’ve successfully converted our spare room into a baby’s room, with all the expected paraphernalia (and some of the unexpected paraphernalia). Antenatal classes are completed and have given us a few shreds of courage with which to face the coming labour. At the last SRE lesson for the term, my Year 4 class were full of questions, not about Joshua and Caleb and Canaan, but about whether we are having a boy or a girl and what names we’ll choose. Lorien is no longer working and people are starting to say things like, “What? Haven’t you had the baby yet?” Yes, it does feel like the End Of The Line.
Until then
What do you do if a known, convicted paedophile moves into your area? How do you protect your family, your kids, when someone who has done gaol time is living down the street? The news has bubbled over with stories of late about Dennis Ferguson, who, having served over fourteen years for child sex offences, having been driven out of several towns in Queensland who did not want him living among them, has now landed in public housing in Ryde.
I’ve been asking people what they think should happen next – it’s the ideal issue to see how strongly people feel the need for justice – and the feedback is more or less variations on the theme of, ‘Put him somewhere else, somewhere where he can have no contact with children ever’, with the exception of a few people who say things like, ‘You’re assuming he has the right to live.’ But the obvious difficulty is, if you take the former position, where is an appropriate place for him to be housed? Will he be relocated from Ryde to another suburb where residents will complain? And will he then be relocated again, and again? At what point does depriving a person of adequate housing – even a person who is a paedophile – become a human rights problem?
Pragmatically, can the State effectively protect children by capriciously relocating Ferguson? Economically, can the State sustain the cost of compensating Ferguson (which he is entitled to, should they relocate him), or the cost of imprisoning him again? Judicially, is the public awareness of Ferguson’s whereabouts eventually going to lead to the public taking the law into its own hands?
In the interests of full disclosure (and, perhaps, to avoid lots of angry comments from people who think I am speaking in defence of Ferguson), I used to work in child protection and I have seen, first-hand, the physical, sexual, and psychological damage that paedophiles do to their victims. It’s vile. It’s horrible. The wounds take decades to heal. Perhaps they never fully heal. I know that the conviction rates for child sex offences in the criminal court are poor. I know the prognosis for rehabilitating paedophilic offenders is not favourable because of the extraordinarily high rate of recidivism. And, having scanned some of the news stories on Ferguson, it appears that the media have brought up a lot of circumstantial evidence suggesting that he continues to engage in employment and activities that bring him into contact with children. I feel the force of the community outrage. It is right to be outraged that a man could do such terrible things to another human being, especially children.
As someone who will be a father in less than six weeks, I think I would agree that the need to protect children outweighs the rights of the offender. But as a Christian, I also feel that I am in the business of extending grace and forgiveness to sinners – and, as Jesus knows most powerfully, grace and forgiveness are never cheap. God gives grace freely, yet He is also a God who is just and whose soul hates the wicked. He has chosen His Son, Jesus, the Firstborn from among the dead, to bring judgement down on the heads of the sinner at the end of time. That is when Ferguson will receive what he deserves for his defiance of God. But until then…what?