ORDINATION GOLDEN JUBILEE

 Morning Star College, 19^th. March 2012
GOLDEN JUBILEE MASS

Introduction                      

Fr. Rector, Fathers, and my dear Seminarians, we are happy to be celebrating again, under the patronage of our dear friend, St. Joseph, the priesthood of our transcendent Lord Jesus Christ who, in his mercy, allows us to share in his mediatorship between the Father and humanity; a mediatorship that is sacramental, social and political, since we are zealous for that kingdom that Jesus came to establish. Permit to recall my dear classmates who have died since our ordination:        Frs. Stephen Fernandes, Paul Alumootil, Pat Rosario, Chacko Elavumparambil, Peter Thurairatnam, William Pattibandla, Thomas Kotharithil, Thomas Maruthoor and John Rozario and A. Anthony.“PRIESTS FOREVER IN JESUS”

Confident of God’s mercy, and thirsting for the joy that only he can give, we confess ourselves to him and to one another:                                                            “I confess.....

THE HOMILY:  Dear friends, I am delighted to celebrate the Eucharist under the patronage of St. Joseph. For two reasons I am glad about our dear Saint. The first: after two years in Loreto Primary I received my school/college education in St. Joseph’s College, where there were 90% Catholics, 10% Hindus, Muslim and Parsis, and 100% discipline. My teachers were Irish, British, Americans and Anglo-Indians. The Hindi master was the only “dhoti-wallah.”  The 2^nd. reason I am glad about St. Joseph the Worker is that I was a group leader in the Young Christian Workers Movement during the two years I was apprenticed to a British engineering firm, where I became skilled at the Cincinnati grinding machine. I cannot tell you what a great grace it was to rub shoulders with the working class and to be sustained by the Young Christian Workers. For me there was no minor seminary those days, no regency and no propaedeutic.        I was ordained aged 27, and considered a late vocation. To date, I have celebrated 18,250 Masses.

Turning to St. Joseph. St. Luke reveals that Joseph was a man of honour, and,    I would to add, a man of silence. Silence betokens recognition of the presence of mystery, a quality we need to cultivate in this era of cell phone radiation and break dances. I believe that Joseph went into a frenetic break dance when he learned of Mary’s condition, but went into contemplative repose on being assured of the Holy Spirit’s intervention. My theology tells me that the perplexity of Joseph was to serve as witness to the virginal conception of the Saviour. That’s how God works. He makes our confusion serve as witness to comfort; our silence witness to salvation; and our helplessness to Halleluiah.

I have two more points

-         my valedictory, and

-         the prayer to St. Joseph the Worker

 FAREWELL

It’s known as a Valedictory. A valedictory is a farewell discourse by a senior member, usually on the occasion of a final leave taking. You may be departing from a particular locale of Morning Star College, but in reality we are witnessing your entry into the mission of Jesus Christ, the One who was sent. Your life is not going to end; it’s about to begin.

Our life is always beginning as long as it shares in that mystery of newness, promised by Jesus who said, “Behold, I make all things new,” the freshness of the Paschal Mystery, the mystery that celebrates the mission that is always new, that never tires of starting again.

To dispose ourselves to divine renewal we must offer God a contrite spirit, the single love of a heart that is pure. We ask God’s pardon and of each other for the three to seven years marked by defections from grace, unfaithfulness to the basic pattern of prayer and study, and the works of charity.

We do not pray for easy lives,

We pray to be stronger men.

We do not pray for tasks equal to our powers,

We pray for powers equal to our tasks.

“Our paths drift widely apart; the Vineyard has so many plots in its vast acreage, and generally we do not have much of a chance of meeting once we take our flight from the Dear Old Home. But our Hearts and Minds are always keeping track of one another’s Trails and Trials, and we try to do with love and prayer what we are not able to do in other ways.” (Fr. Joe Rodrigues, Pune, 1957)

This beautiful prayer was composed by Blessed Pope John XXIII (1958-63). It places all workers under the patronage of St. Joseph the Worker, and asks for his intercession so that we may regard our work as a means of growing in holiness.

A Prayer for Workers                                              O glorious Joseph! Who concealed your incomparable and regal dignity of custodian of Jesus and of the Virgin Mary under the humble appearance of a craftsman and provided for them with your work, protect with loving power your sons, especially entrusted to you.                                                You know their anxieties and sufferings, because you yourself experienced them at the side of Jesus and of His Mother. Do not allow them, oppressed by so many worries, to forget the purpose for which they were created by God. Do not allow the seeds of distrust to take hold of their immortal souls. Remind all the workers that in the fields, in factories, in mines, and in scientific laboratories, they are not working, rejoicing, or suffering alone, but at their side is Jesus, with Mary, His Mother and ours, to sustain them, to dry the sweat of their brow, giving value to their toil. Teach them to turn work into a very high instrument of sanctification as you did.

Amen.

SACRED HEART OF JESUS - 2

The Sacred Heart of Jesus 

The Sacred Heart of Jesus is the tangible human symbol of the love of God for us. Jesus loves us with his human heart; love was the heart of his mission and redemption. Jesus loves every human person without exception, his heart extending love, mercy and compassion to everyone.

Jesus is inserted into humanity in order to build upon the human image of God’s self-giving – the image that was inserted into all men and women. Jesus thus complies with what is most deeply human and divine within us as the driving force of our creaturehood. In this way Jesus confirms and reinforces what we already know and do from natural thinking, and then goes on to enrich that insight by revealing the all pervading design of divine life and love. The Sacred Heart of Jesus ushers the evolving human species to a new level of existence and moral activity. The Heart of Jesus enhances the solidarity of the human race as individually and collectively created in the image of God and, as such, destined to share fully in the inner richness of the divine life of the Holy Trinity. The Sacred Heart of Jesus achieves the intent of God’s creation in the Incarnate Son and in us. Jesus Christ and Self-Sacrificing Love.      

In the midst of human life God reaches out to us in the person of Jesus Christ. In Jesus God and man gives themselves fully. This is the supreme norm of the moral life. Jesus’ person, words and actions are our guide. He is the standard by which our intents are judged. By recalling his words, parables, life and death, we are conformed to do what we discern about Jesus’ own attitude towards others, and his intentions which were shaped by his trust in God. His heart was set on his Father and his Kingdom. We must keep in mind that Jesus is one of us, knowing our pains and joys and also revealing our deepest possibilities. Jesus Christ fulfils what we recognise within us as true human personhood.

            Jesus Christ did not exhaust the several potentialities of human nature, taken discretely. This would have been impossible in one historical lifetime. For instance, he was not a great painter or a philosopher or a statesman or a great husband, though we must admit that he was a teacher par excellence, combining in that activity a great amount of true art and poetry.  Jesus concentrated in himself all the power and energy that human nature is capable of for activating any of the avocations that a man may choose, and he concentrated it to a degree that no man could muster, a degree so high as to make it fit to be used by God for something very great – the salvation of the world! This power was the power of his self-giving love at the service of the Word. Thus, in preference to all other possibilities, Jesus chose the essential and most distinctively human potentiality of all, the one that has the most radical claim on all men: self-surrendering love.

            Jesus was a man who tested life and was tested by it in turn, searching out life’s meaning by listening carefully to what makes life really valuable; and he lived and died trusting that life and death are not bad jokes. So also our discipleship is not without moral problems. Since we are wounded by sin, our capacity for commitment is limited. Yet the value of discipleship is that it inspires a vision that provides a context for moral analysis and choice. Imitating Christ is not a piece of mimicry, but a challenge to live out our human adventure as authentically as he did.

“...in Christ the very revolutionary ‘newness’ of the Gospel is completely revealed...the love that even now makes us live in the eternity of God” (Pope Benedict XVI).

A Prayer to the Sacred Heart

Hail! O Sacred Heart of Jesus, living and quickening source of eternal life, infinite treasure of the Divinity, and burning furnace of divine love. Thou art my refuge and my sanctuary, O my amiable Savior. Consume my heart with that burning fire with which Thine is ever inflamed. Pour down on my soul those graces which flow from Thy love, and let my heart be so united with Thine, that our wills may be one, and mine in all things, be conformed to Thine. May Thy divine will be equally the standard and rule of all my desires and of all my actions. Amen.

SACRED HEART OF JESUS - 1

SACRED HEART OF JESUS

         

          Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus began with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, the Visitation Sister in a convent in France. There is an interesting story about her. Margaret Mary was having visions of the Sacred Heart between 1673 and 1675; but her community of nuns was also sorely besetting her because some of them thought her deluded and arrogant. She won herself no friends when after a vision in 1677 she announced to the convent that Christ had asked her to be willing to suffer in order to expiate the shortcomings of her Sisters! But Jesus told her that he would send her a friend who would support her and help spread devotion to the Sacred Heart. Soon after, a certain Jesuit, Claude de la Columbiere, arrived as a confessor. She was quite upset when he steadfastly refused to acknowledge her visions as genuine, though he questioned her ceaselessly about them. Finally, he devised a way to find out if these were really visions of God. The next time Jesus appeared she was to ask him a question and relay the answer immediately to Claude Columbiere. The question was one that only God would know the answer to: what were Claude Columbiere’s worst sins? Margaret Mary obeyed. After another vision Claude was impatient to question her on Jesus’ response. When he asked her if she put the question to God, she replied she had. “Well”, he prodded, “did he tell you my worst sins?” She looked at him strangely and replied, “The Sacred Heart said, ‘Tell him I can’t remember. I always forget.’” In that instant, Claude de la Columbiere knew that she was indeed seeing and listening to Jesus. He became her ardent friend, admirer, and a constant source of hope to her as well as the first to speak publicly on devotion to the Sacred Heart.

MEDICINE AND FAITH         Shortly after Jesus expired, a soldier pierced his side with a lance, and there came out blood and water (John 19,34).When the heart is punctured the liquid will flow out with whatever blood remained in the heart. That is the medical dimension. On the faith dimension the flowing of the blood and water from Jesus’ side stands for the out-pouring of the Holy Spirit.

          Here is where the doctor and the believer can come together. Medicine and faith need not quarrel. For instance, the doctor and the priest have much in common. Both are concerned with people, with their well-being.  The person should enjoy not only physical but also mental and spiritual health.

The doctor and the priest have come across many people who are bewildered and haunted by the ceaseless problem of pain, suffering and death. Anguish in the heart, fear of dying, inner emptiness, loneliness  - sometimes as the symptoms of sickness; quite often as the very cause of illness. They are found in secular society, that is, a society from which God has been cast off as unnecessary and unhelpful. The famous psychologist, Dr. Carl G. Jung, said about his mentally ill patients: “Every one of them fell ill because they had lost what the living religions have given their followers, and only those were healed who regained their religious outlook.”

While it is true that love proves itself in the acts of justice and charity, nothing prevents a person from developing a deeply personal one to one relationship with Jesus.

One need not begin this relationship by being anxious to purify oneself by penances and confession. These could be tools of self-torture if used prematurely. Penitential acts could more placidly evolve from love. It is better, then, first to forgive oneself, be kind and gentle to oneself by proper self-care. Finally, the person seeking a genuine relationship with Jesus must want to spend more time with him  -  “wasting time with God”  -  not out of self-interest, but simply being happy to remain in his presence.

HOLY CHILDHOOD POEM

HOLY CHILDHOOD POEM

PRAYER: Chao Tzu-Chen, 1931.  This is a children’s hymn set to a Chinese tune. (Translated from the Chinese by Michael Counsell in 1997).

Jesus loves both great and small,

Children, though, especially;

Jesus called them one and all;

“Let the children come to me.”

Children in his circling arm

Gather, happy at his knee,

And he holds them free from harm;

“Let the children come to me.”

Jesus’ loving heart is kind,

Blessing our humility;

Grown-ups need a childlike mind;

“Let the children come to me.”

All of us need simple faith,

Trusting with simplicity,

Then he’ll welcome us at death;

“Let my children come to me.”

HOLY CHILDHOOD SUNDAY - 3

HOLY CHILDHOOD SUNDAY – 3

It was with shocked sadness that, like the rest of the readers of The Herald, I learned of the horrific murder of those children in Delhi district, victims of adult lust and immorality. When, the next day, I made my late evening visit to the chapel, I prayed the Lord earnestly for their repose, the reward that they had won in the cause of right, for they died defending the precious values of honour and human life. And when after I had prayed for them, I found myself praying to them, asking them to intercede for me that, like them, I might be strong in faith and appreciative of human values. For to my mind they are saints of the church of God, on a par with Saints Agnes, Lucy, Cecilia, Pancratius, the forty young martyrs of Uganda, who defended their bodily honour to the death, resisting the obscene advances of the African king. To me the newspaper reports of the deaths of  those children in Delhi were the infallible proclamation of their sainthood. I need no more proof. We love and honour them and pray them to intercede on our behalf.

They were students of a village school, but in their martyrdom they became our teachers.

Young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red ?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now ?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head ?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying ? Where’s her mummy and daddy ?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying ?”

. And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine-year-old persist in the ninety-year-old! In welcoming children (“let the children come to me”) and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood; and his warnings about scandalising the little ones included protecting that beautiful child within us from being reduced to an ugly urchin. The controversy over adult vs. infant baptism was resolved in advance by Jesus’ word to the old night visitor, Nicodemus, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms! Children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable of being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. Childhood’s meaning in society is represented in rituals, namely, “bar mitzvah”, cubs and scouts/guides with their distinctive roles and practices. Through these transitional rituals a society guarantees the integrity of this period called childhood.

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper to them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. In today’s terms, they will do a Harry Potter.

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

What happened to them by a few deadly strokes of a murderer’s axe is happening to millions more of their kind in an extended way. I refer to the living death of child labour and prostitution, the blank emptiness produced by divorce and separation, the slow disintegration of the moral personality in a consumerist and hedonistic culture that the late Holy Father had called “the culture of death.”

UNICEF celebrates 60 years of its existence. UNICEF is an emergency fund for children. Is there an emergency? With one child in three going hungry to bed there’s always an emergency.

All this tells is why we need Christmas, so that the child for whom there is no room in the world’s inn may instead occupy our hearts, leaving no space there for evil. Childhood is the invention of Christianity  from the moment Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me”, whereas formerly children had no status. . The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them.

Thoughts of the future somehow become interwoven with the idea of innocence. Now, for the first time an infant becomes a symbolic figure  -  and his mother together with him:  Mother and Child. And all fell prostrate before him, becoming as innocent as babes themselves. Here we have a Child who is a constant reminder that in God the child is never extinct.

We are teachers and, by God’s mercy, co-workers of the Lord. May we never lose the prophetic vision of the perfectly secure child and the picture of the little ones reposing in the arms of  Jesus.

And now, since today is Holy Childhood Sunday, our hearts go out to poor and neglected children, and as we do our part to help them materially let us also help them spiritually by this prayer:

PRAYER:       God our Father, be near to our children growing up in the peril and confusion of these times. Guard them from the forces of evil at work in our society, and lead them in the paths of goodness and truth; and enable their parents and us as teachers to give them at all times the security of our love, and the help of our example and prayers, through Jesus Christ our Lord.   Amen.

                                                                                      HOLY CHILDHOOD SUNDAY   -  2                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

The Limpid Years. In his old age, the English composer, Sir Edward Elgar, looked back to his childhood and wrote up some of the musical sketches that he had jotted down at that time. He called his new work “The Wand of Youth”, a sad and nostalgic piece, the opus of a man for whom childhood was “long ago and far away,” a time of innocence, a better time. We’ve all been there. Sir Edward Elgar was near to what Jesus meant when he saw childhood as a time of innocence and wonder; that some of the things that adults take for granted are, when seen through children’s eyes, signs and illustrations of the creative love of God: “All things bright and beautiful...the good Lord made them all.” Their sense of wonder sees life as something new, a gift untainted by sin and familiarity. The Christian mystic, Thomas Trahern, described this marvellously by picturing a newly born child reflecting in wonderment on its entry into this world. Children easily have a sense of God and his presence in the world that adults too easily lose. In each one’s own way, the little ones reproduce the stories of obedience to God’s call. For example, the story of the boy Samuel. “Now the boy Samuel was ministering to the Lord in the presence of Eli.” That story shows us how the open wonderment of childhood needs the experience of age to interpret the marvellous and unexpected. Samuel heard the word of God, but only knew it for what it was after Eli explained what he must do if he heard it again. Children have the capacity for great faith and forgiveness. Many thousands of people, including children, died in the concentration camp in Ravensbrook during World War II. Near to the body of a child a prayer was found. “O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will, but also those of ill-will; but do not remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we have borne, thanks to this suffering: our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this. And when they come to judgement, let all the fruits which we have borne be their forgiveness.”

Heroes without Power

Children have an entirely healthy desire to turn the world around. and this desire is an echo of the Good News of Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, the young Harry Potter rejects totally all worldly power and success -  yet another echo of Jesus’ option to join the sinners in the Jordan, followed by his rejection of religious and political power in the desert, and finally his refusal to use force at Gethsemane. Jesus himself said that his kingdom was not of this world, but the children would be at home in it. Every child not only wants to turn the world upside down, but to save it; and that is why children identify with Harry, with Robin Hood, with Huck Finn in his saving of the slave, Jim, and with George Lucas’ creation, Luke Skywalker. The final scene of the first of the Star War movies gives us an insight to every boy’s desire for recognition as hero and saviour. Child heroes are the sweet objects of our admiration as they ride the high elephant every Republic Day in our country.

Imaginative Redemption

 Somehow for Christian education to touch the boy/girl at the deepest level, our practical theology must place Jesus in that heroic context, offering a meaningful non-soppy heroism to children today, connected to the cosmic milieu in which their minds now operate. The George Lucas stories, the Narnia books, the Potter novels, and the “Lord of the Rings” all vivify the desire of children to live in a world that they can master and mould, escaping from one they patently can’t. That so many also want to escape from Christianity also is a problem that deserves the most careful thought. For instance, they have no time for those whose Christianity is merely nostalgia for a buttoned-up past, or for a Christianity that is largely the intellectual empire of those governed by fear of the present or future, or fear of youthful freedom.

Young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red ?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now ?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head ?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying ? Where’s her mummy and daddy ?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying ?”

. And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine-year-old persist in the ninety-year-old! In welcoming children (“let the children come to me”) and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood; and his warnings about scandalising the little ones included protecting that beautiful child within us from being reduced to an ugly urchin. The controversy over adult vs. infant baptism was resolved in advance by Jesus’ word to the old night visitor, Nicodemus, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms! Children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable of being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. Childhood’s meaning in society is represented in rituals, namely, “bar mitzvah”, cubs and scouts/guides with their distinctive roles and practices. Through these transitional rituals a society guarantees the integrity of this period called childhood.

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper to them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. In today’s terms, they will do a Harry Potter.

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

What happened to them by a few deadly strokes of a murderer’s axe is happening to millions more of their kind in an extended way. I refer to the living death of child labour and prostitution, the blank emptiness produced by divorce and separation, the slow disintegration of the moral personality in a consumerist and hedonistic culture that the late Holy Father had called “the culture of death.”

UNICEF celebrates 66 years of its existence. UNICEF is an emergency fund for children. Is there an emergency? With one child in three going hungry to bed there’s always an emergency.

All this tells is why we need Christmas, so that the child for whom there is no room in the world’s inn may instead occupy our hearts, leaving no space there for evil. Childhood is the invention of Christianity from the moment Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me”, whereas formerly children had no status. . The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them.

Thoughts of the future somehow become interwoven with the idea of innocence. Now, for the first time an infant becomes a symbolic figure  -  and his mother together with him:  Mother and Child. “And all fell prostrate before him”, becoming as innocent as babes themselves. Here we have a Child who is a constant reminder that in God the child is never extinct.

We are teachers and, by God’s mercy, co-workers of the Lord. May we never lose the prophetic vision of the perfectly secure child and the picture of the little ones reposing in the arms of Jesus.

And now, since today is Holy Childhood Sunday, our hearts go out to poor and neglected children, and as we do our part to help them materially let us also help them spiritually by this prayer:

PRAYER:       God our Father, be near to our children growing up in the peril and confusion of these times. Guard them from the forces of evil at work in our society, and lead them in the paths of goodness and truth; and enable their parents and us as teachers to give them at all times the security of our love, and the help of our example and prayers, through Jesus Christ our Lord.   Amen.

HOLY CHILDHOOD SUNDAY

HOLY CHILDHOOD SUNDAY

Today is Holy Childhood Sunday.

Young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red ?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now ?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head ?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying ? Where’s her mummy and daddy ?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying ?”

. And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine-year-old persist in the ninety-year-old! In welcoming children (“let the children come to me”) and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood; and his warnings about scandalising the little ones included protecting that beautiful child within us from being reduced to an ugly urchin. The controversy over adult vs. infant baptism was resolved in advance by Jesus’ word to the old night visitor, Nicodemus, “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms! Children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable of being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. Childhood’s meaning in society is represented in rituals, namely, “bar mitzvah”, cubs and scouts/guides with their distinctive roles and practices. Through these transitional rituals a society guarantees the integrity of this period called childhood.

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper to them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. In today’s terms, they will do a Harry Potter.

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

What happened to them by a few deadly strokes of a murderer’s axe is happening to millions more of their kind in an extended way. I refer to the living death of child labour and prostitution, the blank emptiness produced by divorce and separation, the slow disintegration of the moral personality in a consumerist and hedonistic culture that the late Holy Father had called “the culture of death.”

UNICEF celebrates 65 years of its existence. UNICEF is an emergency fund for children. Is there an emergency? With one child in three going hungry to bed there’s always an emergency.

All this tells is why we need Christmas, so that the child for whom there is no room in the world’s inn may instead occupy our hearts, leaving no space there for evil. Childhood is the invention of Christianity from the moment Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me”, whereas formerly children had no status. . The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them.

Thoughts of the future somehow become interwoven with the idea of innocence. Now, for the first time an infant becomes a symbolic figure  -  and his mother together with him:  Mother and Child. And all fell prostrate before him, becoming as innocent as babes themselves. Here we have a Child who is a constant reminder that in God the child is never extinct.

We are teachers and, by God’s mercy, co-workers of the Lord. May we never lose the prophetic vision of the perfectly secure child and the picture of the little ones reposing in the arms of Jesus.

And now, since today is Holy Childhood Sunday, our hearts go out to poor and neglected children, and as we do our part to help them materially let us also help them spiritually by this prayer:

PRAYER:        God our Father, be near to our children growing up in the peril and confusion of these times. Guard them from the forces of evil at work in our society, and lead them in the paths of goodness and truth; and enable their parents and us as teachers to give them at all times the security of our love, and the help of our example and prayers, through Jesus Christ our Lord.   Amen. 

Mt.  19, 13 – 15: At one point, children were brought to Jesus so that he could place his hands on them in prayer. The disciples began to scold them, but Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me. Do not hinder them. The kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And he laid his hands on their heads before he left that place.”

The Gospel of the Lord