Impact Thinking for a People of Hope

Remarks by the Hon. Frederica S. Brenneman Annual Meeting of the Connecticut Conference of the United Church of Christ, New Canaan, Ct., 10/19/03

Six months ago, when Davida Foy Crabtree and Gordon Bates invited me to be the keynote speaker at this annual meeting, I thought that overwork had caused them to make a serious error of judgment. I thought of at least three good reasons why I was an unlikely choice for this signal honor in the life of the United Church of Christ in Connecticut:

First, I have been a practicing Christian for only 47 years (you can say "only" when you've passed the three-quarters-of-a-century mark). I was not baptized until I was nearly 34, a few weeks before the birth of our first child in 1960. Why didn't Davida and Gorden invite a birthright Congregationalist, someone with generations of Congregational and UCC forebears, raised and educated in the church from birth?

Second, I have been a judge specializing in child protection cases involving neglected and abused children for more than a third of a century. How could my very specialized experience in that court relate to your theme this year, "A People of Hope"?

And Third, I spent much of last year reading James Carroll's book, "Constantine's Sword", a study linking the tragedy at Calvary with the tragedy at Auschwitz, experiencing some pretty negative feelings about organized Christianity over the last seventeen hundred years. How could I relate the pain suffered, and caused, by Christians, in the name of Jesus Christ, to the hope that this conference has made its theme this year?

But they persisted. Your Hartford staff is nothing if not persistent. And Davida is persuasive as well as persistent. So I began to think a lot about possible connections between the the church--the body of Christ-being composed of people of hope and my own personal journeys, both in my faith and in my profession. And I think-I hope-that I have found the connections that Davida and Gordon must have sensed were there, long before I did.

First - My faith journey: I was raised with no exposure to any formal or informal religious practice and I had no experience with any faith community until we moved to northwestern Connecticut in 1956. There we found that, for non-Catholics, the only action in town (beside singing in the annual Goshen Players' musical production that kept us out of trouble from January to May each year) was in the Goshen Congregational Church. At that time, although Russell and I were lumped into what the natives called "The New York Crowd", meaning anyone not born and raised in Goshen, we were nonetheless immediately embraced by that welcoming church community as if we had been natives. In a small church in a town with 1500 people (and, at that time, l,500 cows) it was easy to learn the good and bad fortunes of every parishioner, and the immediate sympathetic response to both the good and bad fortunes from the members of that church was something I had never experienced before. For the first time in my life, I felt I was a member of a true community, with the glue holding us all together not a similarity of education or political preference or profession or hobbies, as with all the other groups in which I had participated before, but rather the common desire to discern the will of God, as revealed in Jesus Christ, and to carry out that will in our daily lives. That sounds like a rather grandiose purpose behind making mac-and-cheese casseroles for covered dish suppers, or singing in a choir accompanied by an organist who was almost as old as the organ. But the purpose was there; I could feel it-a true faith community to which we became more deeply committed each year.

When, shortly after we moved to Goshen, the church called a Yale seminarian as its minister, my life really changed. Even though everything the late Ray Phibbs preached and taught made complete sense to me, I still felt like an outsider because of my lack of Christian education and exposure to Church life. In March of 1960,a month before our first child was born, we knew we wanted to have him baptized in that church, to be enfolded into that loving Christian community from the moment of birth. But I did not feel it right for me to want him baptized when I never had been. I asked Ray what I had to do to join the Congregational church, and even asked with a naivete that embarrasses me to recall, if I should start by reading a biography of Jesus. I wanted to know if I had to believe in miracles, in the immaculate conception and the physical resurrection to become a Christian. His response was to tell me what was referred to at the Yale Divinity School at that time as "the Christ event". He asked if I believed that such a person had once lived, and thereafter cast his shadow on all the rest of human history. I did believe that, as well as in the practicing Christian community that we had found in that tiny church. Able to commit to a church with those beliefs as its cornerstone, I was baptized one night in the Goshen Congregational church with only Ray, my husband Russell, and eight-ninths of Matthew Brenneman in attendance.

We have moved three times in Connecticut since then: Goshen to Essex to Glastonbury and, eight years ago, to Westport. In each town, the church has become the focal point of our lives - our support group, our emotional anchor, a welcoming community of people trying to learn God's will for their lives as revealed in the teachings and examples of Jesus. Wherever we have lived, my church has become my refuge, the only place I can always count on where striving for peace and healing and justice and love take precedence over the striving for material things and the power to control both things and people so ascendent in our society today. And the culmination of my 47 year faith journey is having been invited to speak to you on this day, in this place, and among these like believers.

Second - The connection between the Church as the people of hope, and my work as a Juvenile Court Judge was a little harder for me to see. The Child Protection jurisdiction of the Superior Court, which has been my specialty since 1967, to a large extent involves members of our society who have the least to hope for: The poor, the mentally challenged, substance abusers, misfits in the community. How could my work with them suggest a basis for hope? But in preparing for today, I reviewed some speeches I have recently made to groups of lawyers and judges and social workers concerning when children should-and should not-be removed from their parents because of being abused or neglected. To my surprise, I found an amazing relationship between the message I intend to convey in those speeches and what I want to share with you today. I have been urging professionals in all aspects of child protection to make objective, informed predictions of the probable impact on individual children of leaving them home with inadequate parents, compared with the probable impact on them of abruptly placing them in foster care. Where the risk of harm from leaving them home outweighs the predictable psychological harm of placement, children must be removed to ensure their physical safety. But unfortunately, too often the focus is only on the first end of that scale with too little, if any, attention paid to the predicted harm from placement. After every tragic death of a child who has ever been referred to the state as neglected and the resulting ugly headlines and critical editorials, the noose tightens and state social workers are instructed that even a remote possibility of future neglect outweighs the parents' right to privacy in raising their child AND the child's right to be raised by his parents. "Better to be safe than sorry" is always the command to state social workers investigating suspected abuse after such deaths, but while "playing it safe" with no regard for the impact on the children being removed may go a long way to avoid those ugly headlines and editorials, it may also cause lifetime psychological damage to those children, harm which never makes it to the headlines and editorials.

Let me give you some examples from my work: Everyone agrees that being raised as a foster child is not an ideal way to grow up. For the past 25 years, legislation and policy in the field of child protection has been focused on ending "foster care drift", either by rehabilitating inadequate parents or by terminating their parental rights and freeing their children for permanency through adoption. To ensure that this policy is embodied in practice, even the U.S. Congress-usually so deferential to states' autonomy in these matters-has waded in, requiring actions to terminate parental rights to be filed whenever any child has been in foster care for 15 out of the past 22 months. But such policies, blindly applied, do not recognize differences in individual children depending upon their ages when removed from home, the nature of their bond with their parents, the availability of an appropriate adoptive home for each child legally severed from all ties with their biological parents. When I confront a termination petition on an older child who still loves and is bonded with a parent who is chronically inadequate due to mental incapacity or longstanding unaddressed drug problems, I always ask the agency, "What is your plan if termination is ordered?" If the child has failed in a succession of foster and institutional placements, is it realistic to think there is a family out there who will commit to his adoption? Will the child benefit or be harmed by severing all ties with his biological family? What if the child is comfortably settled in a foster home that, for whatever reason, is not willing to adopt him? Will he benefit from being removed to the home of strangers who are willing to adopt? Or take a baby born to a drug abusing mother. Standard practice is to remove the baby at birth and give the mother months, even years, to demonstrate sobriety before the baby is returned. Experts in this field suggest that this can be devastatingly destructive for the formation of parent-child bonding, that it would be preferable for the mother and infant to be placed, immediately after birth, in a residential placement that would ensure both the mother's treatment and the baby's safety. The practice of requiring the mother to demonstrate cooperation with such a program for a month or two or three before reuniting her with her infant can have permanent detrimental effect on the parent-child bond, but that is rarely considered. Or take the current thinking that children "similarly situated" to a sibling who has been neglected are potentially subject to harm and should be -can I say preemptively?-removed even before any neglect has occurred. This is routinely done, even required to be done by the highest levels of state administration, with little apparent regard for the impact of what is proposed on the particular child involved.

But what does "Impact Thinking" in child placement decisions have to do with living a Christian life as a People of Hope? Speaking for myself, I have come to the conclusion that all of us have an obligation as individuals, as church members and as citizens of the most powerful country on earth to make realistic and accurate predictions of the impact of any proposed action or policy on the people who will be affected by them. I emphasis "realistic" and "accurate" since predicted outcomes based on inaccurate or prevaricated or, as the British say, "sexed up" data will not give estimated impacts that can be relied upon.

Let me give you some examples: Conservatives in policy making positions in both state and national governments in the U.S. oppose abortions, a position that many of us here today may share. But look what happens when ideology outweighs impact thinking: Last year, when the U.S. withdrew its $34 million contribution to UN funded family planning programs all over the world because China's "one family, one child" policy may have included coercive abortion policies in that country, the result was an enormous increase in abortions world wide. Why? Because the principal work of the UN's population fund is advising families how to avoid unwanted conceptions. The loss of this large percentage of its global funding (something like 12%) is predicted to result in approximately two million unwanted pregnancies, 800,000 of which will result in abortions. Was the motivation of withholding this funding laudable? Maybe. But was the predicted impact considered? I am sure it was not.

Another example: In response to a terrorist attack on the US, we invade and occupy a country that had nothing to do with the terrorist attack. Were there other reasons to invade Iraq? Many have been given. But in terms of responding to the tragedy of 9/11, will the impact of our invasion of Iraq be to increase or decrease the risk of further acts of terrorism? 9/11 was not the work of a sovereign nation but of religious fanaticism among Moslem extremists in many different countries. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, while a nightmare for Iraqis, was a secular tyranny that did not tolerate religious fanaticism. Yet the newspapers today carry stories of religious extremists now infiltrating Iraq, carrying their messages of hatred, and the schools in which they are taught, with them. If religious fanaticism feeds on the perception that the strongest country in the world, the country that possesses most of the world's weapons of mass destruction, is imposing its will on Islam, how will the unprovoked, "preemptive" invasion of Iraq lessen the danger of future terrorism?

This audience, I am sure, does not need yet another reminder of what will be the fate of our planet, and its inhabitants both human and otherwise, if the shortsighted overuse of fossil fuels by the developed nations is not curbed. Ostriches with heads in the sand may think we can go on overheating and over cooling our homes and shops, go on driving elephantine gas-guzzling Hummers to soccer practice, go on ignoring the "dirty" sources of electricity generation, but our grandchildren and great grandchildren and great great grandchildren will be the ones who feel the impact of such behavior. And what will be the impact on developing nations if the most developed nation-the U.S.-declines to participate in the Kyoto Protocol and other international agreements on the limitation of greenhouse gases?

There are many examples much closer to home. The US is the only country in the First World that does not provide health care as one of the obligations of government, just as important to the welfare of its citizens as is national security or education or the maintenance of highways. Health care became linked to employment in the US (nowhere else) due to a fluke of history: Wage controls after World War II led to the offering of non-wage incentives to employees, one of which was group health insurance, some or all of the premium for which would be met by the employer. The result is that when employment is lost, health insurance is lost. I recently read that something like three million more American lost their health insurance last year, reflecting the continued growth in unemployment and bringing the total number of uninsured Americans to something like 43 million. When you don't have health insurance, you tend to avoid seeking medical advice until the symptoms become too burdensome. A recent study estimated something like 18,000 deaths last year were directly ascribable to delays in seeking medical care for conditions that would be remediable if treated at the outset. What is the actual impact of linking employment to health care? The answer is sadly obvious.

Education is one area that all agree is an obligation of government. But when standardized tests are required in all schools, and federal subsidies are reduced for schools which do not show sufficient "improvement" in these test results, the impact is that the schools with the lowest scores, usually reflecting the economic and social impoverishment of their students, will lose resources, rather than have them supplemented. I don't think it is necessary to remind this audience of the impact of growing up in America without an education. And what will be the effect if taxpayer money is used for vouchers to attend private schools instead of improving public schools? Private schools have intake discretion in selecting students. Who will be left behind? The most needy children in our society, the ones who lack strong advocates as well as abilities and motivations that would make them attractive to private schools. And doesn't the shadow that Jesus cast upon all of subsequent history include the need to accept and nurture the least of these, his children?

These are all examples of unpredicted and unfortunate results from the failure to think realistically of the impact of proposed actions. But impact thinking can sometimes lead to positive outcomes: One example of started in 1945, when, after four years of war with Germany and Japan, the U.S. did an amazing thing. It decided to spend billions of dollars not to exact revenge or retribution but to rebuild our former enemies into strong and prosperous nations. And what was the impact of the Marshall Plan, this unprecedented generosity of the unquestioned victor toward the unquestionably vanquished? Germany and Japan have become strong friends, allies and trading partners-the polar opposite to their former roles as our implacable enemies.

The Marshall Plan was like a miracle, the birth of which I partially witnessed. I went off to college in the middle of that war, and for three years, in every course, every semester, in economics and government and history classes, we were taught that we must never repeat the mistakes following the First World War of reducing our vanquished enemies to humiliated weaklings, thus laying the groundwork for the rage and passion for revenge that resulted in what became the Third Reich. We had learned the hard way what would be the impact of this course of action if repeated after 1945, and wisely changed course. The impact of the decisions we did make after World War II was a half century of peaceful relations with our former enemies. We did something else after that war, the impact of which changed our history for half a century. With the G.I. Bill and G.I. Loans, we ensured that hundreds of thousands of veterans could achieve an education and buy that first house, and in so doing enlarged and strengthened a middle class that could earn for itself the right to a better life.

The world is a very different place today than it was in the forties and fifties, but applying "impact thinking" to everything we do as individuals, as church members, as citizens of a country and inhabitants of Spaceship Earth, is just as essential now as it was then if we are to avoid making decisions guided by ideologies which disregard their realistically predictable consequences. Unlike in hierarchical religions, Protestant Christians have an ongoing obligation, as individuals, to discern the will of God in making decisions that determine their behavior in every sphere. The accuracy of that discernment should always be tested by determining realistically the impact of those decisions on others, and on God's created world. If I believe that it is inconsistent with God's will to permit abortions, but I embark on a course of action that will actually increase the number of abortions in the world, I am not carrying out the will of God. Impact thinking requires constant consciousness that we are all ministers to our world. Every one of our words and actions has an impact on other people, or on our fragile and beloved planet, or on both. We should let our words and actions be guided with this consciousness so that their impact is always consistent with God's plan for the world.

And third, how could I speak of hope from a faith symbolized by the cross which, from my reading of "Constantine's Sword", had become a sign inviting exclusion and persecution from the fourth century on. Constantine saw the cross, which had become the symbol of the new religion of Christians, as a sword of righteousness, and used that symbol to begin the exclusionist thinking-if you are not one of us, you are the enemy-that led tragically to Auschwitz. Small wonder that the author, James Carroll, a former Catholic priest, found the large cross erected by an order of Catholic nuns at the entrance to Auschwitz an affront to the six million Jews murdered by at least nominally Christian Europeans. Anti-semitism, in Carroll's study, was born in the shadow of the cross and thrived on its use as a symbol for degrading and persecuting those whose religion was not symbolized by the cross. In my view, that was a tragic misuse of a symbol that could be- should be-the ultimate symbol of tolerance and love and, yes, of hope for all the world. Think of what the cross must have meant to the followers of Jesus on the day of his crucifixion: The end of their hope for a conquering messiah. Yet what happened three days later, and is still happening all over the world, transformed the cross into the ultimate symbol of hope. At the time, only Jesus must have known how humanity would be impacted by his gospel of peace, healing and, above all, of love without exclusion. So far, just starting the third millennium since his death, we have only seen a portion of that potential impact. Just think of the kind of world we could have-can have-if we really try to model our lives on his teaching, if we heal instead of hate, feed food to the hungry instead of bullets to the guns, plant our swords in the ground and harvest ploughshares. As Christians we should see the world and our obligation as Christians, through the lens of these teachings: We see hungry people, and we feed them; we see the sick and heal them; we see the despoiling of God's creation for short-term human satisfactions, and we join together as a community of stewards to restore it. And we confront the fear and pain and death that are essential parts of being human, by joining together as a community of hope. In the touching opening of Elaine Pagel's book, "Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas", she writes of learning that her two year old son had a rare and invariably fatal lung disease. She found herself entering a church in mid-service and, in her words, thought:

"Here is a family that knows how to face death... here was a heterogeneous community that had gathered to sing, to celebrate, to acknowledge common needs, and to deal with what we cannot control or imagine. Yet the celebration in progress spoke of hope; perhaps that is what made the presence of death bearable."

All of us live in the certainty of death and the unknowability of what lies beyond death. Our gratitude to the creator that made each of us in the image of God--but wholly unique in our interpretation of that image--should be matched by our faith that whatever lies beyond will be as remarkable and as wonder-filled as our lives have been. During those lives we have all become acquainted with pain and disappointment, betrayal, failure and loss. But the cross tells us that nothing is ever beyond hope, that after pain comes healing; after disappointment fulfillment; after betrayal is fidelity, after failure victory, and after loss the regaining of hope. Constantine's sword should be buried, and in its place should be erected the ultimate symbol of hope: The cross of resurrection, of reconciliation, of tolerance and above all of love. And how to we engender hope in others? By living as Jesus lived his life and as he taught us: By feeding and healing, by making peace and loving God and all of God's creation..

It may be hard in times like these to hang on to such hope when all around us we see courses of action being taken by individuals and governments in apparent disregard of their likely impact. But when we talk of having faith, doesn't faith in the God revealed by Jesus Christ inevitably nurture the spark of hope that lies within each of us? It may not be rational. It certainly cannot be proven or demonstrated. But hope is the necessary consequence of having faith even if it cannot be described any more clearly than Emily Dickinson tried to do 150 years ago:

Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
and sings the tune without words
and never stops-at all.

Frederica S. Brenneman