The Rod and the Staff
Corporal Punishment & Christianity
Psalms 23:4 NLT
Even when I walk through the darkest valley, I will not be afraid, for you are close beside me. Your rod and your staff protect and comfort me.
When I was a little boy, before computers fit in your pocket, before the government could see and hear everything you do and say, and casino owners ran the country like it was one, I had a deep-seated fear of “getting in trouble”, so I made it a point to do it until I wasn’t afraid of it anymore.
Can’t say I recommend this approach, but it’s worked out okay for me, I suppose.
Growing up in a fervently religious household, “getting in trouble” and receiving a severe & scary reprimand could’ve been precipitated by something as petty as repeating the wrong word I heard at school or in a movie, wanting the wrong kind of toy or book, or just being a child in general.
“Children are better seen and not heard” wasn’t something often said, but it was definitely the vibe.
Admittedly, more likely, knowing myself as well as I do, infuriating my parents by directly defying a request, or command, elicited a smack on my hand, or ass, either from their hands, a wooden spoon, or thin piece of plastic.
With the religious emphasis that was ever-present in our home, I quickly grew to associate any kind of reprimand with “sin”. If it made my caretakers upset with me, especially to the point of violence, it must be sinful.
TW: familial violence, blood, naughty words
Before I get into this next part, I’d like to highlight that since this event, my father and I have buried the proverbial hatchet and there’s no vitriol or “Gotcha!” for him in my telling this story. It’s just what happened.
Corporal punishment being used against me culminated in a particularly exciting episode in which, incidentally, I was rebelliously refusing to go to church.
My parents were separated — I was living with my mom full-time, but she was sick, so my dad was picking up my siblings and I to attend his church. I’d been thoroughly disillusioned by the Pharisaic doublespeak in the churches my family frequented, and at 16 years old, felt no obligation to attend church to maintain appearances. I’d thrown the nativity baby out with the bathwater; I didn’t believe any of it, I didn’t feel it was right for me to be participating even peripherally, so I locked myself in my bedroom. I dragged my dresser in front of the door and propped it under my doorknob. My dad was furious. The attempts at shouldering my door in started to rip the doorframe off the hinges, so he got a screwdriver, unscrewed the doorknob, and kicked the door in. My dresser toppled, and he entered — balled-up hands at the ready. He unclenched his fists at the last second and smacked me open-handed across the face.
“What the FUCK?!” I screamed in shock, never having been struck in my face by my father, never having swore in front of him. “You wanna fuckin’ do that again?” I mocked incredulously.
“Yeah, actually, I do!” he replied, and promptly delivered a second slap to my other cheek. (I don’t think this is what Jesus was talking about in Matthew 5:38)
Before I could get my fist to connect to his face, he had his hands around my wrists and pinned them to my futon. Leaning on me with all his weight, I couldn’t strike back, so I tilted my head back, and provided him with a Glasgow kiss that’d have made my bar-fightin’ Irish ancestors proud. Stunned, he headbutted me right back, but not from the right angle. The back-and-forth of our headbutts split his head open right above his eyebrow and gushed blood all over me. My shirt was soaked, as was my futon, but my noggin remained intact. Physically, at least.
My punishment for this ordeal was having to go with him to the emergency room, watch him get stitches, and hear him dismiss the incident as “a bit of horseplay gotten out of hand”. In hindsight, ultimately I’m thankful we didn’t get CPS involved.
Verses like the one at the opening of this piece were commonly used to justify the use of violence as punishment — my understanding of “the rod” and “the staff” was that they were both used to hit me; I never quite understood what was so protective or comforting about that. It wasn’t until a visit last October to an in-patient mental facility that I encountered a kindly chaplain who explained the greater context of this verse to me in such a way that I was truly able to appreciate it, and how misled I’d been.
The rod, he explained, would’ve been what the shepherd would use to defend his sheep against threats — wolves and other would-be predators to his flock. The staff, on the other hand, would’ve been used to guide the sheep by stirring up dust clouds in the dirt and causing the sheep to go another way. Neither would have been used to beat the shit out of the sheep, as it turns out. Believe it or not, doing this would actually have an adverse effect on the relationship of trust between the sheep and the shepherd.
As a single father of a toddler, I already have a decent understanding of the temptation to smack kids around out of anger when they misbehave, cop an attitude, or talk back. (Yes, she is already sassing her mother and I without much of a vocabulary, and her side-eye is brutal.) However, as difficult as it can be at times to respond with compassion and reasoning for why I do or say what I do or say as her parent, I believe it will help develop a more solid and withstanding adult relationship than most have with their parents.
As it turns out, in my experience, God is a far more patient and kinder Father than I could’ve ever hoped for. As a teenager, I was running my mouth a LOT, doing my damnedest to give the likes of Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris a run for their blasphemous money. Being an atheist and accidentally peering beyond the veil of reality which separates Life from Death is…ill-advised, to put it mildly. As I’ve detailed it at length before, and subsequently had 2nd thoughts about doing so, I’ll gloss over it here, but tripping into a cosmic wormhole, falling down to the depths of Tartarus, and clawing my way out was uhhh…
Unpleasant, to be as euphemistic as possible.
0/10, do not recommend.
I don’t know what the criteria God judges us by really boils down to.
Personally, I believe that judgment to be based on the light which we receive, what we do with it, and how we share it with others.
