11 August 2020
Memorial of St. Clare, Virgin
So far this week the Gospels have exhorted us to cultivate two realities in our soul: trust and detachment. Today our Gospel tells us why: that we might become like children, and thus enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Is Heaven like Neverland after all? Hardly.
Eternal life is not about being a child forever—lacking in maturity and full growth—but rather it is about being child-like in spirit. Jesus says “Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” Children, at least during a certain stretch of their childhood, are incredibly self-forgetful. They can be deeply trusting, such that we must watch out for them especially, because they will indeed go off with a stranger. They will share readily, even offer to share things they should not, like half-eaten food. There is a radical, openheartedness that children can possess that is so endearing and tender, yet it is often lost as quickly as it blossoms, as the reality of life’s dangers and the callousness of more “mature” hearts settles in. But Jesus would have us cultivate some of those child-like virtues of the heart, that we might more easily enter into His Kingdom, being docile and trusting as children without being as foolish.
By the trust called for by Sunday’s Gospel of the storm at sea, we learn to look to God in all trial and danger, as a child feeling afraid calls out for its father and mother, even if neither are in sight. It reaches out for its parents on pure, trusting, instinct; so ought we be with our Heavenly Father, for as St. Paul writes, “For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’” (Romans 8:15). Likewise we need the detachment spoken of in yesterday’s Gospel, that we might not seek our comfort in the security blankets of this world but rather in our Father, clinging to God like a child clings to their Father’s leg, being embraced by Him rather than by the lifeless clutches of a world that offers comfort but not care.
Thus by detachment we are able to progress in growth for eternal life, and by trust we are able to retain a child-like dependence upon God as our Father, rather than falling for the world’s lie that we can be utterly self-sufficient. In other words we must seek to remain child-like, rather than becoming child-ish, to nourish and fortify within us the holy virtues of children without remaining immature, unrealized in our holy potential.