By Gretchen Keiser

The child wasn’t there, but his name, Curtis Walker, was on people’s lips even before the mayor started to speak.

Looking out at the 1,200 seated Saturday morning in the Peachtree Plaza ballroom, Mayor Maynard Jackson said it was “reassuring” to see so many gathered for the annual breakfast of Atlanta’s Christian Council.

“Sometimes,” he said, “one knows, but needs to be reminded, that the faith is strong.”

Coming right after the headlines in the morning paper, saying the body of Curtis Walker, 13, had been found, the comments didn’t need to be explained. But, Mayor Jackson, and the two keynote speakers at the breakfast, Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum and the Reverend Andrew Young, grappled with the side that isn’t much publicized: what the eyes of faith might see in the numbing count of children killed in Atlanta.

“I know what our plan is here in Atlanta…I know that our plan is to find whomever’s responsible and to pray we will be allowed to forgive,” the mayor said. “I do not know what God’s plan is for Atlanta…”

But he voiced his speculation that “maybe Atlanta is being tested in this time of awful, awful tragedy in order to make us see what is going on in the streets of our city.”

What is going on in Atlanta, and in every American city, is “the phenomenon called street children,” he said, who are born of a people “crushed by poverty.” Out trying to earn money, these children “find themselves sadly, tragically vulnerable,” he said.

The mayor also asked whether the “true unity” of Atlanta’s religious community wasn’t being tested. “When the tragedy subsides are we going to keep the faith and stay together?”

In a dialogue on “reconciliation,” Rabbi Tanenbaum and Reverend Young alternated at the microphone, and the audience chuckled briefly when the talk of unity dissolved for a moment into the question of who was to speak first. The tone quickly turned somber again.

“When life is threatened…it sets aside the Sabbath Day itself,” said Rabbi Tanenbaum, explaining his decision to address the breakfast on the Jewish Sabbath.

“Our rabbis declare that our children are our messiahs for tomorrow…that is why when they are struck down, the tragedy is beyond consolation. It is as if our future is snuffed out before our very eyes,” he said. Rabbi Tanenbaum, who is the national interreligous affairs director of the American Jewish Committee and a leader in national interreligious movements for justice, decried a broad decay in moral law worldwide. “We will live in a fool’s paradise if we do not acknowledge that there is a dehumanization at loose in the world, a savagery…” he said.

In the face of this “condition of moral anarchy” stand those who believe that “every human life is created in the sacred image of God…every human being created…is of infinite worth and infinite preciousness.”

“We testify to that by our lives,” Rabbi Tanenbaum said. “We need now to join hands together as never before…so the divine presence will be heard in how we live not just in what we say.”

Reverend Young said, in the continuing dialogue, that he felt “there may be more power in our churches than there is in the police” as residents seek an end to the killing of children. Rabbi Tanenbaum had said earlier that “there is evil in the world and it must be confronted”; Reverend Young added that “our call is somehow to reach out” to the one who is killing in order to stop the killing.

“I would hope that we in our churches would pray for the murderer or murderers for they too are loved by God,” Reverend Young said.

In an interview later, Reverend Young said that he did not disagree with Rabbi Tanenbaum’s prayer that the police be enabled to find whomever is responsible. But, he said, “there’s an added Christian dimension of praying for the one that’s lost – that is, the murderer.”

“I would hope we can begin to help people to understand that,” he said. “We should not become totally alienated from him simply because he is so alienated from us.”