“THE FRAIL WEB OF UNDERSTANDING”
“Our only hope lies in the frail web of understanding of one person for the pain of another.”
—JOHN DOS PASSOS, AMERICAN NOVELIST
On the evening of March 16, 2012, Dr. Robert W. Block, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, handed a plaque to Rita Swan—the President’s Certificate for Outstanding Service. Block announced that Swan was being recognized for “personal dedication to the health, safety, and wellbeing of children.” “Thanks so much for this wonderful award,” said Rita. “It will always be on a wall in our home.”
It wasn’t the first time the Academy had bestowed its most prestigious award. Every year for decades, the president would stand in front of a national audience of pediatricians and hand it out. Usually the award was given to doctors. But Swan wasn’t a doctor. She was a mother who had held her child in her arms while he died of meningitis—a treatable illness she had refused to treat. Day after day, while her son suffered high fevers and seizures before eventually slipping into a coma, Rita Swan prayed—prayed until the bacteria that were infecting his brain and spinal cord overwhelmed him—prayed even though the antibiotics that would have saved his life were only a car ride away.
During her twenty-minute acceptance speech, Swan talked mostly about her efforts to stop other parents from doing what she had done; efforts that had consumed her for more than three decades; efforts that had caused her to spend many sleepless nights knowing that medical neglect in the name of God was still happening. And that it was still being allowed to happen. Knowing that no matter how much she did, it would never be enough—that it would never bring back her son. “You never reach a point of acceptance,” said Rita. “You never get past the guilt.”
AN ANALOGY TO RITA SWAN’S story can be found in M. Night Shymalan’s 2004 movie The Village—the story of an insular community united by fear. Brought together by the murder of loved ones, several Philadelphians decide to create a nineteenth-century farming community in rural Pennsylvania. Solace, they believe, could be found by retreating into the past. To isolate the community from a world they fear, the elders create mythical monsters that are supposedly hiding in the woods: referred to as “The Things Of Which We Do Not Speak.” The monsters won’t bother the villagers as long as the villagers don’t enter the woods. As a consequence, no one enters or leaves the village. Then something happens that the elders hadn’t anticipated: a young man is stabbed. When an infection develops, the only way to save him is with antibiotics. Unfortunately, the community has been created to mimic the late 1800s, a time before antibiotics. Knowing the monsters are a hoax, the elders allow one of the residents, a young woman, to travel through the woods and get the antibiotics they need. They pick her because she’s blind—hoping that when she returns, she won’t have realized the wealth of lifesaving technologies on the other side.
Religions that ask their followers to act against love, compassion, and reason use a similar tactic. Rita Swan was afraid to oppose her church and see a doctor because her church believed that doctors want “to dethrone God” and are therefore evil. If she had sought out modern medicine, she would have been forced to confront that evil and, worse, the anger of God. But Rita Swan wasn’t blind. When she crossed the woods and entered the Wayne State University Medical Library—and understood how she could have treated her son’s illness—there was no going back, even if it meant ostracism from a community she had known all her life, even if it meant challenging her notion of God. Swan’s break with her church came when she realized that no God would ask a parent to let a child die in His name.
“I believe that the Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath,” said Swan. “That’s what Jesus says. So I think religion has to work. It has to bless people. And if it doesn’t, if it causes pain, if it justifies cruelty, then it’s something I don’t want any part of. I think we have to be explicit in rejecting things that are cruel and unjust whether they’re religious or not. Religion has to serve the good of humanity.”
Not the other way around.
“IF MAN IS CREATED in the likeness of God,” writes Erich Fromm in Escape From Freedom, “he is the bearer of infinite qualities.” Fromm argues that organized religions act most egregiously, most destructively, and most inhumanely when they ignore the beauty of Genesis 1:27: So God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. In other words, people should see in themselves the rich and infinite powers of love and reason that God has bestowed upon them. This is exactly what Rita Swan did when she ventured through the woods of her fears and walked into a medical library. And what she continues to do by fighting for the rights of children every day. In the end, Rita Swan didn’t need to be motivated by fear of God’s reprisal or God’s reward for her virtue; she was motivated to do the right thing because it was the right thing to do. It was in that way that she has best served God.