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.
