December 28, 2007
Ingenuity
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 The Incarnation — and of our incarnation — means anything at all, it means that our vocation is not to be more spiritual. It is to be more human.
Speaking of human, W C Fields it was who said, “Anyone who hates children and animals can’t be all bad.” Some may be more with W C Fields about children than with Jesus, but when Jesus suggests that we consider children to be equipped with the owners manual to the kingdom of God, we’d better listen, for hardly anyone is more human…
… and more 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 and then, of course, soon wondering where it went.
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 — we call it 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’s 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 leading you back to the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the very path, if I remember, to the kingdom.
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