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Art, children, Immigrants, Immigration, June, Life, Offred, parents, refugee, refugees, separation, The Handmaid's Tale
This post contains spoilers for The Handmaid’s Tale, season 2, episode 10.
I can’t imagine a more apropos episode of The Handmaid’s Tale for today.
Earlier today, I saw the following Instagram from Elizabeth Moss:
I had a feeling I knew where this episode was going…
After some very brutal scenes earlier in the episode that needs a trigger warning, the last 1/3 of the show presents us with a familiar storyline. June/Offred is granted the opportunity to visit her daughter Hannah and spend a few rare moments with her child. As we see earlier in the series, the child was kidnapped from her parents and June was forced into sexual and surrogate slavery.
The conversation is heartbreaking. As their visit continues, the child asks her (former) mother why she didn’t try hard enough to look for her. She hides behind the Martha as she is so unfamiliar with the woman that gave birth to her and raised her for the early years of her life. Hannah screams out for her mother as people pry the child out of the mother’s arms at the end of their short visit. The two do not know whether or not they will see each other again.
So this is just another dystopian series, right?
Or is this too real?
What we see in this episode and hear on the news are eerily similar: children being ripped from the arms and lives of their parents.
(As they filmed the episode, I highly doubt they knew this episode would be airing this week of all weeks.)
Like what is going on today, the party who very much wants to push a pro-family platform destroys families that cross their path. Children are ripped from the lives of their parents, undoubtedly crying themselves to sleep as they abide in a world of uncertainty.
Some people believe it’s part of God’s plan or divine intervention that such horrific moves are made. They want us to follow they demands of the government instead of God’s ethics. And yet, as they continue to believe they are the good guys, our world becomes like Canada in The Handmaid’s Tale: seeing a humanitarian crisis unfold.
Like some posts I’ve seen online this week, leaders in the Bible who separated children from their parents were not the “good guys.” Rather, they were Pharaoh and Herod. They were notorious not only for taking children away but killing them as well.
I don’t think any “Good Christian” wants to identify with the two of them. But here our Jesus-professing leaders are- following in their footsteps.
Dystopia is a breath away from us right now, America. When children and parents are ripped apart from one another, and the children are kept in cages, not allowed to be picked by adults, and may never see their parents again, the distopian nightmare is real.
You may read this and say the refugees have broken the law. But they came here because their living conditions were so unstable and dangerous. And we turn our backs on them. We’ve been told over and over in Scripture that we are to care for the orphan, widow, and alien/stranger, and we ignore the many Biblical texts that give us this mandate. No matter what the law says or what the powers-that-be want the law to look like, Jesus was (1) a refugee and (2) a law breaker as he healed on the sabbath. Our powers-that-be wish to forget this.
I encourage each of you to watch the last 1/3 of the episode. Hear the screams between mother and child. Watch the tears swelling in their eyes. This is not fiction. This is not dystopia. This is America in 2018.
God of sunrises, new years and next chapters,
