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
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