10-1-21 - Child's Eye View

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here.

There are exercises for training care-givers, to help them better understand the experience of given populations. People working with the sight-impaired don light-proof blindfolds and try to get around; people who serve the infirm are told to navigate spaces with canes or wheelchairs.

I don’t know if any such exercises exist to better understand the world as a child experiences it, but I wonder what we’d have to do to recover that way of seeing. Certainly we’d have to get several feet closer to the floor, and maybe be told to regard every object as a potential plaything, and be encouraged to ask every question that comes to mind.

As Jesus tells it, we need to be able to get back into our “child mind” if we want to be serious about our faith journey: “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”

This comment may well have shocked the serious adults to whom he addressed it. His own disciples had been busy shooing away the children who were crowding around Jesus, and he told them to let the children come. But to go further and say we need to emulate them if we want to enter the kingdom of God? That’s a radical notion.

That means we need to embrace dependency instead of going it alone. It means we are able to believe in things that we cannot see – and even see them, as our faith vision develops. It means we come to expect joy and playfulness, and strengthen our capacity for wonder. It means we ask our questions when we’re curious, and cry when we're sad, and act silly when something tickles us, and sit down for stories that capture our fancy. And we share these good things with each other.

How much of that applies to your experience of church and Christian community? How might we adapt our circumstances to foster this way of being?

I’ve been talking about how we might perceive the Kingdom as children do. But Jesus didn’t say “perceive,” he said “receive.” We must become receptors if we are to truly accept God’s gifts, even God’s calls to action. When working and giving outweigh receiving, we find ourselves stuck outside the threshold of God-Life, yearning to get in.

That’s kind of where those children were who wanted to get close to Jesus. And here’s what he did: And he took them up in his arms, laid his hands on them, and blessed them.
If we come to Him like that, he will offer us no less.

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