Daily Thought For July 7, 2020

A Children's King

  I was once visiting a rectory and the guest bedroom
    had a familiar picture of Jesus surrounded by children.
  I had seen this print so often in other places,
    yet I had never stopped to see the signature of the artist.
  That did not seem too important, I guess.
  This time, for some reason, I was struck with the traces
  of real hunger that the children revealed—all of different races—as they approached Jesus.
  There they were, a kind of juvenile version of the United Nations,
    circling in on the Lord.
  “What were all these kids doing off on their own?” I thought.
  Jesus was pictured in the center,
  more or less a center of gravity around which these little ones seem to orbit.
  Perhaps the portrait of Jesus’ strength
    is what made the children appear so much more needy;
    these were real sheep without a Shepherd.
  In a certain way, as young as these children were,
    they looked old, gray and weary from their journey,
    begging Jesus to provide comfort,
    an answer to life’s burdens.
  Children are like that:
    they are not afraid to admit to their needs.
  It is only when we grow older
    that we start putting on masks of learning
    and cleverness to disguise our vulnerability.
  But Jesus is like a child;
    he thanks his Father for revealing a mystery
    to the merest of children and hiding it from the wise.
  There is a long history of spirituality that
    could be gleaned from this passage,
    a kind of repetition of an earlier Beatitude:
    “Blessed are the poor in spirit,
    for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt 5:3).
  The children Jesus speaks of are the anawim, the lowly
    and humble in the Hebrew Scriptures;
    they are the ones most disposed to be dependent on God—
    without social rank, big degrees, a fancy office;
    nothing on their faces that could prompt a boast,
    like the familiar bumper sticker that proudly hails,
    “My child is a an honor roll student.”
  Humility knows nothing
    except honest-to-goodness dependence on God for everything.
  The very self lives something like a rental car:
    to be a trusted vehicle at God’s disposal.
  This particular passage in Matthew’s Gospel
    is also used for the Feast of St. Thérèse of Lisieux.
  Well-known as St. Theresa of the Child Jesus,
    the popular Carmelite saint has become much sentimentalized
    since her painful death from tuberculosis in 1897.
  Yet the recent edition of her famous autobiography, The Story of a Soul,
    reveals a depth of love characterized by deep simplicity.
  She called her love for God the “Little Way.”
  It was a voyage—a short, acutely painful journey—about complete trust,
    and the cross,
    and love returned to God.
  That humility took courage, passion, and great determination,
    qualities not often associated with childhood.
  Yet these are the very gifts that we baptized adults claim
    in order to shake off our pretensions to sophistication
    and recognize our intense need for God.
  We become holy often by shrinkage, by becoming little.

  We are all vulnerable when we encounter Christ in sacramental love.
  The sacraments of the Church often catch us “off guard,” as it were;
    they discover us at liminal moments.
  Edge moments.
  I remember going to the hospital to anoint a man named Leonardo
    who was badly injured in a car wreck.
  At seventy years old, he had just returned from Italy
    when his car was T-boned, broadsided.
  He was hooked up to all sorts of machines, but he was conscious.
  When his family gathered around his bedside,
    we celebrated the sacrament of the sick.
  It was clearly an emotional moment for the entire family.
  Just before we concluded our prayers,
    I traced a little cross on his forehead and said,
    “Va bene, Leonardo, va bene.”
  Suddenly, the man became very alert and looked at me with bright eyes.
  Something came alive in that room.
  Better put: Someone came alive:
    the risen Jesus.
  We may not have to be completely down and out
  to experience the “easy yoke” that Jesus offers us
    in Word and Sacrament.
  Ideally, couples who celebrate the sacrament of marriage
    transition to the state where they are no longer one but two.
  That requires humility and the daunting strength of the “Little Way.”

  Msgr. Ronald Knox described, in a sermon “On Priesthood,” reaching a state that was an emptying,
    even a rejection of rational thought for the blessed moment.
  Knox writes that “the future priest stretched out at full length,
    face downwards, like a corpse, like a dummy,
    while the solemn chant of the litany rolled over his head …
  He was yielding his body to Christ to be his instrument, as if he had no life, no will of his own.”*

  Love demands no less:
    putting aside the self for the sake of the other.
  That kind of love can best be described on a child’s laughing face,
    which sparkles with confidence when she is lightly tossed
    into the air by a loving parent.
  The thrill is not the leap itself;
    it is the certain, confident, complete knowledge
    that love has sure, big hands.

  One of the Sunday Prefaces for Ordinary Time
  that is especially appropriate today recognizes God’s children
    as wanderers,
    pilgrims looking for their true home.
  The text says, “You gather them into your Church to be one as you, Father,
    are one with your Son and the Holy Spirit.
  You call them to be your people, to praise your wisdom in all your works.”
  We pray this prayer all the while lifting up our hearts,
    allowing the Eucharist to gather us in so that our eyes
    can glimpse the promise that we will one day behold the great King.
  We pray that all God’s children will become one
    even as we put away all that separates us.
  It is, after all, often the pretensions of the sophisticated that make divisions,
    and the segregation on buses,
    and the apartheid in whole communities.
  I believe that today we call the polite, middle-class term
    “gated communities.”
  Hard to believe it, but it is true: what we think is progress
    may not be so progressive after all.
  Some administrative people who thought they were clever once took a map of Africa,
    put it on a big oak table
    and drew lines dividing folks that had been living side by side
    for centuries.

  Worldly “wisdom” like that has no place at the God’s table.
  But guided by the Spirit, God’s children leave the maps home.
  They come to rejoice in what Zechariah has seen:
    one God coming to us as a child himself;
    one God, meek and riding on an ass, not a stallion of war;
    one God, bringing his people only bread and the new wine
    of the covenant that he himself has made possible.



DeBona, G. (2004). A Children’s King: Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. In Lift up Your Hearts: Homilies for the “A” Cycle (pp. 201–205). New York; Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.