Dear Friends,
Have you ever found yourself following a school bus? And when this happens do you just feel a big wave of impatience flow through your body knowing that you’re going to be stopping many times? Sometimes the buses let you pass, sometimes they don’t and sometimes you’re afraid to pass them. It’s a good time to practice patience.
Not long ago I found myself following a bus and we came up to a red light. So, there I am behind the bus waiting patiently. But I then notice all these little faces staring back at me from the back window, staring at me from that door that’s always in the back. I don’t know why they weren’t just sitting facing forward, but there they were, just staring and grinning. Maybe they could sense my discomfort, and then it happened they all just started making faces at me. And so, I made a face right back at them. I was smiling, they were smiling, and their childish antics just made me laugh.
Today in Mark’s gospel Jesus takes a child and places him in their midst and says, “Whoever receives one child such as this in my name receives me.” And if we were to look at the parallel gospel passage in Matthew its put a little differently, St. Matthew writes, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like children you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven.” To become like children, however, doesn’t mean we become like the kids on the bus behaving childishly. Rather, it means humility. The apostles were acting envious and ambitious, and they were arguing about who was the greatest. Jesus has just revealed to them the Christian Mission and this mission is all about self-forgetting love. And this self-forgetting love lets the love of God surge through us and out into the world. And here are the apostles arguing about who’s the greatest, a big contradiction to the mission. And our Lord’s solution to this arguing, to this envy, and to this ambition is a little child.
There is no little child who’s ambitious to rule a kingdom or to be in first place in a kingdom as the apostles were. St. Hilary a fourth century saint once commented on this gospel by saying this about little children, “They follow their father; they love their mother; they wish no evil to their neighbor; they have no care for riches; they don’t hate; they believe what is said and they regard as true what they hear.” When we imitate these characteristics of little children we imitate the humility of our Lord.
In Saint Mark’s gospel we’re told that when we receive a child in Jesus’ name, we receive him. Again, this speaks of humility. The word for child in both the languages of ancient Aramaic and Greek can also mean servant because in those ancient societies children were viewed as non-persons without any legal rights or status of their own. Jesus is teaching his disciples to have a whole new esteem for and accountability towards those who are the most helpless and inconsequential. Today that would include the unborn, the aged, the imprisoned, the poor, the homeless, and the immigrant. Our treatment of these persons is the measure of our treatment of God Himself.
St. Therese of Lisieux, a French saint, who died at the age of 24 in 1897, was made a Doctor of the Church in 1997. Pope St. John Paul II elevated her to this status because of her doctrine of Spiritual Childhood. Her diary, The Story of a Soul, is well worth reading. Get it. St. Therese had this child-like trust in God and like Jesus; she called him Abba which means daddy in Aramaic, a very affectionate and warm word. At any moment she felt no fear in flying to God. She went to him with all her wants and needs. She went to Him with everything. Even in moments of sin she felt no fear in going to God. She had grabbed him by the Heart she would say. She has a story in which she relates this child-like confidence in God’s love and our spiritual goal of higher and higher sanctity. She writes of a little child who is beginning to stand up but doesn’t yet know how to walk. And this child is determined to reach the top of the stairs to find her father, she lifts her foot to climb up to that very first step. But it’s a wasted effort! She keeps falling back without being able to go on. Therese accepts this starting point, the child can’t climb even the first step, but she can lift her foot.
Therese then tells us to be this child. And we can be this child by practicing the virtues, to keep trying to keep lifting your foot to keep trying to climb the stairs of sanctity. God only asks for your good will and that you keep trying.
Therese then says, “If you have faith, know that from the top of the stairs our Lord is watching you, and he is waiting:” At the top of the stairs, our Lord is looking at you lovingly. Soon, conquered by your efforts, He will come down himself, and, taking you in His arms, will carry you forever into His Kingdom where you will not leave Him again. But if you stop lifting your little foot, if your stop trying, He will leave you on earth for a long time. Keep trying, don’t give up, you will grow in sanctity.
It would be ridiculous to try and climb the stairs if God were not at the top watching and waiting for us. And when He judges that we are ready, He comes to carry us up. Here’s the seeming contradiction; our apparently fruitless and futile effort in the spiritual life, our repeated visits to the confessional produce a result. It wears down our pretentions, it wears down our hardness of heart, and it wears down our pride, to make us pliable and docile to the way of our Lord.
Therese then finishes by saying, “I am no longer distressed at seeing myself always at the bottom of the stairs. I know I’m powerless to even lift myself up one step, I let the others go up and I am happy to keep on lifting up my little foot by continual efforts. I am therefore waiting in peace for that blessed day when Jesus will come down to carry me up in his arms.”
My prayer for us today is that we take the same trusting attitude towards God our Father. That we have this certainty of being loved by our Heavenly Father which makes possible our surrender, our complete trust, and our lack of fear. And all three of these; surrender, complete trust, and lack of fear are the hallmarks of little children to whom Christ promises the Kingdom of Heaven.
Peace and all good,
Fr. Christopher J. Ankley