I recently wrote about the tragic death two weeks ago of 8-year old Christiana Glenn of Irvington, NJ after starvation and extreme neglect by her mother, Venette Olivde. I wondered if tragic deaths like hers (and there are way too many of them) signify a severe weakening of community in our nation, manifested in different ways in the poorer and better off areas. I argued that in both poor and affluent neighborhoods, the vast proliferation of electronic media (TV, radio, internet, smart phones, I-pods, I-pads, etc.) sends countless messages glorifying the rich and implicitly denigrating the poor, creating a burden of bad feelings and self-image on the part of anyone who hasn’t ‘made it big’. <\/p>\n
Furthermore, these devices allow each individual to find and live in his or her own virtual world of common belief, decreasing the sense of \u201creal community\u201d and social solidarity that once existed, especially in poor neighborhoods. Those factors obviously didn’t kill an 8 year old girl; but they may have weakened the social mechanisms that might have saved her, i.e. communal responsibility for children’s welfare.<\/p>\n
The Christiana Glenn case has another important aspect however, but one that still feeds back into the community situation. Christiana’s mother was a part of a 12 to 15 person \u201cmini-cult\u201d religion, led by a young self-appointed prophet calling himself Emanyel Rezireksyon Kris. This wasn’t your typical \u201cblack church\u201d thing with all the singing and fellowship. This group seems in search of spiritual intensity via solitude, chanting and monastic living. Members live ascetic, closed-off lives mostly confined to each other and Pastor Kris. They hold prayer services daily, chanting long into the night (not unlike Trappist monks with their psalmist chants; except that Trappists quit around 8pm and start again at 4am or so the next day). They also wear white robes, much like those worn by Trappists.<\/p>\n
This works just fine in many mainstream Christian monastic communities, such as the Trappists and Camaldolese (and maybe the Sufis and Jewish kaballah sects, and of course the Zen monasteries of the east). In most of these communities, members need to be single and without children (or without responsibility for children, anyway). But the question in Irvington is, what happens when you try to mix ascetic monasticism with children? The result is generally NOT GOOD. <\/p>\n
Here is a recent quote from an article about<\/a> Christiana Glenn and her mother on the nj.com web page. It is from a 2009 interview that child protection agency staff had with Christiana and her sister. <\/p>\n \u201cThere were no toys, the girl answered. Christiana\u2019s mother \u2014 ‘mommy sensei’, she called her \u2014 believed toys were idols.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n