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.