A Reflection for Saturday of the Nineteenth Week in Strange Time
Children were delivered to Jesus
that he might lay his hands on them and pray.
The disciples rebuked them, but Jesus said,
“Let the youngsters come to me, and don’t prevent them;
for the Kingdom of heaven belongs to corresponding to these.”
After he placed his hands on them, he went away. (Mt 19:13-15)
From this verse’s expression in King James, we’ve gleaned the more evocative: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come back unto me…” Such is the dominion of heaven indeed.
One can only wonder how radical that gesture was in first-century Judea. Sociologists tell us that “childhood” as we understand it today is a late Twentieth-century invention. Parents little doubt loved their children then just as we do today—how can we help it?—but children weren’t valued the identical, and their social interactions with non-peers weren’t as tolerated.
Their lives of play and exploration were short, quickly traded for the common drudgeries and burdens of contributing to the family weal, just like several other adult.
The apostles were little doubt scandalized by a crowd of laughing, rushing children—ignoring their scowly disapproval, drawn to Jesus—reaching to embrace him, sit with him and touch him. As he did again and again during his ministry on earth, Jesus overturned expectations and defied social niceties and traditional behavior.
“Let the youngsters come to me.” Little doubt he was as charmed, amused and drawn to those children as they were to him, seeing in each of them the spark of the divine and enjoyment of creation, blessing these children and treating them like a blessing.
One in six children in the USA grow up in absolute material poverty, running the gamut of social and environmental threats to their full flourishing that might be easily addressed if we had the political will.
What a lesson that is still for us today, a generation that prides itself on our esteem and care for kids. Yet one in six children—16 percent—in the USA, certainly one of the wealthiest nations on earth, grow up in absolute material poverty, running the gamut of social and environmental threats to their full flourishing that might be easily addressed if we had the political will to accomplish that.
And what of the real-life children we encounter every day as we manage the social and college lives of our own children, those who’re greater than grim abstractions in a social development survey? How fully will we allow them to come back to us?
Can we isolate and ignore them, in slights from the superficial to the profound? Or will we truly welcome all the youngsters, after which encourage our kids to do the identical?
Children who’re otherwise abled, neurodivergent children, children from different backgrounds, religions, races—children classified or boxed off in any of the tons of of the way we divide and conquer childhood. Does their difference unnerve us a bit, too? Or do our hearts ache for these children, isolated, discarded because they were perceived as someway mortally “different” by their peers?
We are saying things like “children might be so cruel” once we witness a baby forlorn of friendship or bereft of curious, kindly interactions. But is that just how we relieve ourselves of the duty to model a greater way of including everyone, of accepting and even celebrating differences? How often will we resolve that perhaps kids might be cruel but no, today, they’ll not be so cruel, we is not going to allow them to? Today we are going to suffer all the youngsters, and we are going to try this with kindness, mercy and love.