A Reflection for Friday of the Twenty-Sixth Week in Unusual Time
I even have handled great things that I don’t understand;
things too wonderful for me, which I cannot know. (Jb 42:3)
The image of the newly blessed Job, living one other 140 years and getting to look at his children and his grandchildren and even his great-grandchildren, resonates with me as I watch my five-month-old granddaughter negotiate the space to show from her back to her stomach. Her physical calculations grow by the day as she learns to bring the toy giraffe to her mouth and make the celebrities and moon of the mobile above her head dance when she bats at them. Watching her brings me joy.
The biblical Job has had a rough time of it, but in the long run he finds peace by letting go of any pretension to knowing the mind of God. Like a toddler, he accepts the mystery of “things too wonderful” for him to grasp. Luke’s Gospel expands on the theme of simplicity as he recounts Jesus’s words of praise for the “Lord of heaven and earth, for although you will have hidden this stuff from the clever and the learned, you will have revealed them to the childlike.” Jesus doesn’t encourage us to be childish, which is a special, self-centered connotation, but to be childlike within the practice of our faith: to like and serve a God we’ll never really understand, to trust and follow God into the unknown. We adults can spend our lives aiming to be spiritually childlike, with varied success.
Jesus doesn’t encourage us to be childish, which is a special, self-centered connotation, but to be childlike within the practice of our faith: to like and serve a God we’ll never really understand, to trust and follow God into the unknown.
It’s perfect that today’s readings concentrate on the childlike as we have fun the feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus. St. Thérèse’s short life reminds us to understand the only of God’s blessings, to follow her “little way” of unassuming, small acts of service to others, to scatter little flowers of affection wherever life takes us.
“The revelation of your words sheds light / giving understanding to the easy,” says Psalm 119, and that holy light is the thing we easy souls count on to light up the dark patches on our path to God. Like Job, I feel so fortunate to get to look at my granddaughter’s progress, her purity of intention, her intensity of focus, her determination to explore, all wrapped in a way of wonder that seems boundless. She delights in her mother’s face, within the flight of a butterfly, within the family dog rolling within the grass. She got here into this world with an unspoken, unshakable confidence in being loved. Under all our adult layers, that childlike belief in the reassurance of divine care whispers to us. Blessed are the ears that hear it.
