Parables for Cool Squares

The Lord is like my probation officer.

He will help me.

He tries to help me make it every day.

He makes me play it cool.

So begins the 23rd Psalm, as revised by an eleven-year-old delinquent boy at the Erie County Detention Home in Buffalo. Another young lawbreaker has produced a modern equivalent of Jesus' parable about the one sheep out of 100 that went astray; in his version a used-car-lot owner goes looking for the "heap" that someone "snitched."

Both efforts to paraphrase the Bible in reform-school jargon were inspired by the Rev. Carl F. Burke, 45, the detention home's Protestant chaplain, who believes that the language of the Gospel is puzzling and irrelevant to children from urban slums. Burke formed this opinion at a summer camp for delinquents, when he tried to explain to a boy from a broken home that God was like a father. "Oh, yeah?" the boy answered. "If he's anything like my old man, I hate him."

One barrier to communication, Burke discovered, is the Bible's bucolic imagery. "Some of the boys have never seen sheep and don't know what a shepherd is," he says. "Biblical allusions to them make no sense." Even the most beautiful phrases can have unhappy connotations. The boys usually laughed when Burke spoke about lilies of the field that neither toil nor spin; for them, a lily is a homosexual.

To help his boys discover the real meaning of the Gospel message, Burke has encouraged them to rephrase it in their own terms. The Good Samaritan thus became the "cool square" who helped a mugged victim after a "hood" and a "squeak" (not so cool as a hood) had passed him by. "You don't have to be a 'square' to show love and to be sorry for someone and to help a guy," the parable ends. "But get with it, man--this is what God wants you to do." In the Christmas story, Jesus is born not in Bethlehem but in Buffalo, during a convention when every hotel room is taken. His stable is a hot-dog stand in Delaware Park.

Burke has effectively used many of the delinquents' versions of the Gospel in his own detention-home services. The greatest value of the project, he thinks, is that it helps the youths find a way of expressing their genuine but inchoate and undeveloped religious faith.

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