Isaac’s In Danger Still

Trócaire’s Lenten campaign this year focuses our attention on the widespread practice in some countries of forced child labour.  Trócaire’s TV advertisement depicts an adult instructing a new worker about the harsh conditions of employment and refusing to accept any liability should things go wrong, of should anyone discover the employee’s conditions.  It is only when the camera switches from employer to employee that the lonely figure of a child confronts and confounds us.

Abraham is still forced to stretch out his hand against Isaac, the child he loves, in our world.  What appalling poverty it must take to force parents to subject their beloved children to forced labour in a plantation!  The plight of the Abrahams of our world, parents compelled to make their children into workers like themselves, surely arouses our deepest sympathy and sorrow.

Who are the Abrahams and the Isaacs of today?  Whole communities forced to part with their young people as these go in search of a livelihood elsewhere in countries more highly developed.  Local communities in our own cities forced, through neglect and deprivation for generations, to look on as their young people self-destruct through drug abuse, crime and violence.

Trócaire, mercy, God’s intervening angel, continues to call a halt to whatever would raise a hand to harm Isaac, beloved of God, in our world.  Trócaire, mercy, is the first instinct of each one of us, beloved of the God who “did not spare his own Son but gave him up to benefit us all.”  Trócaire, mercy, is the daily action of each one who responds to that selfless divine love, and begins to allow it to use us in our time and place to become and be God’s intervening angel wherever Abraham and Isaac are at risk today.

12th March, 2006
Fr. Eamon Devlin, C.M.