December 28, 2004
Innocence
It has been said, and I am proud to join in the chorus, that one of the blunders religious people are fond of making is the attempt to be more spiritual than God.
If this season of incarnation means anything at all, it means that our vocation is not to be more spiritual but to be more human. I’m probably more with W C Fields about children than with Jesus, but when Jesus suggests that we consider children to equipped with the owners manual to the kingdom of God, we’d better listen.
Hardly anyone is more human — and in touch with their humanity — than children. Perhaps that’s what the “terrible twos” are all about for that’s when the kids begin to see adolescence looming ominously ahead and throw all those tantrums watching their humanity go.
We remember the Bethlehem preschoolers today and call them the Holy Innocents not because they were without guilt so much as because they were without the burden of it. Precisely as we set out to make them like us — it’s called parenthood — do they catch on quick that guilt’s a thing to be reckoned with the rest of their lives. All the shrinks in the world will not let us see the rid of it.
And so Jesus’ counsel together with this twelve-days-of-Christmas reminder that we become less childish and more childlike is but another way of saying wake up and don’t let the grace grow under your feet. Go ahead and walk on it. It’s probably the very path back to the kingdom.