Growing down

When our children were very young, both of their sets of grandparents lived 400 miles away, in opposite directions.  Thus, Mary and I took many long car trips to visit the grandparents. 

Our strategy was to pack the care the night before, get up before dawn, try to put the kids in the car without waking them up, and hope that they’d sleep all the way there!  Of course, it never worked.  Most times, before we’ve barely left the street, you know what we heard from the back seat.  “Are we there yet?”  Who teaches them that?  We’d ignore them, but then it would only escalate, “Look, there’s a McDonald’s, can we get something to eat.  Oh, and are we there yet?”  And again.  And again.

In frustration, I’d turn around and tell them, “Grow up.”  It’s what we want our children to do, to grow up and be like us – learned, responsible, upstanding adults.

Today, we hear Jesus praising his Father for revealing the kingdom, not to the learned and the wise, but to the childlike.  (Mt 11: 25)   Mark reports Jesus telling us that unless we are like the children, the kingdom of heaven cannot be ours.  (Mk 10:15)  Here I am telling my children to grow up, to act like an adult, and Jesus is telling me to grow down, and be like the child.

What Jesus knows is that children have an amazing capacity for faith, for the understanding that there is great mystery in the world, and powerful forces that are much beyond their understanding.  The sun comes up in the morning and they see God at work.  A garden is in full bloom with all the colors of the rainbow and they see God at work.  A bedewed spider’s web sparkles in the sunlight, and they see God at work.  Simple things, yes, but to a child, they are visions of God.

And then they go to school.  They learn lots of things, just as we did.  Soon they learn so much, they think – as we often do – there are no mysteries, for they know it all.  And if we can’t explain it and understand it, then it can’t be true.

Then there is Jesus – a man who was born like us, who looked like us, ate like us, laughed when he saw something funny, cried when he saw something sad, bled when you cut him, and died when he was put on the cross – and one of the first things we teach them is this man is God.  They seem to grasp it quite easily.  But oftentimes, it is not so easy for us, educated as we may be, those of us who pride ourselves on our understanding of all things.  This just doesn’t make sense.  Perhaps we try to rationalize it all, make it more palatable to our sense of logic.

We forget that St. Augustine, who reminds us that if we know anything completely, understand it thoroughly, it cannot be God.  We cannot wrap our finite minds around the infinite God.  If we have allowed our pride in learning to lead us astray, we must grow down to accept the ineffable mystery of God.

And so Jesus tells us the we must grow down, be like a child, hold fast to the faith and a sense of mystery that when we see Jesus, we see God, when we know Jesus, we know God – certainly not all there is to know – but we know God.

Today, we celebrate the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a title given to the Blessed Mother in her role as the patron saint of the Carmelites.  The Carmelites are an ancient religious order who began as a group of hermits living on the slopes of Mount Carmel in the Holy Land.

 

A century or so ago, a young French girl became a Carmelite nun.  She was a true child at heart, and in her short life – she was only 24 years old when she died – and in her writings, she has inspired millions of people to retain the simplicity of a child’s faith.  Today, we pray with St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the Little Flower, that despite our great learning, we remain humble and childlike in our openness to the mystery of God; that we might follow his Son and enter the kingdom of heaven.