You already know that I have been reading The Sacred Journey (which I finished by the way) but you most likely don't know that I have been preaching through the Gospel of Mark chapter by chapter for the past 10 weeks. To that end I found myself in chapter 10 this past week. I had narrowed it down to either preaching about verses 13-16 about Jesus' encounter with the little children or verses 35-45 about James and John's request to be on Jesus' left and right hand in heaven.
And then I read this in The Sacred Journey:
“Every pilgrimage is a journey backward. Every pilgrim’s step is a step toward childhood. And that, in the paradoxical logic of the kingdom, is the only way to go forward. It is only children who inherit the kingdom.”
I took that as a sign and decided to focus on verses 13-16.
Prior to 8 and a half months ago I had a mental understanding of what having faith like a child was. I remember the oft quoted story about a father telling his child to jump and the child jumps without hesitation. It was a simple story, and it spoke of a child's trust in his father, but that's about it. But then Henry came into my life (our life really) and my understanding of how a child acts and what a child is expanded dramatically. To that end I believe that there are at least three aspects of a child that we need to make our own if we want to inherit the kingdom that Jesus says is only open to us if we receive it as children.
The first thing that we need to obtain are the eyes of a child. So often we have created a life of normalcy, we do the same things each day, we go the same places, we eat the same food, we see the same things. It often seems that the goal of adulthood is to completely expunge surprise and spontaneous experience from our lives. But in the eyes of a child everything is new, the ordinary becomes the extraordinary.
For instance, we took Henry on his first journey to the zoo the other day. I was under the impression that Henry would be amazed by the animals, but to be honest I am not sure if Henry realized that there were actually animals at the zoo. So often he never got past the people that were closer to him. At one point in the day we arrived at the Cheetah enclosure, I picked Henry up out of his stroller so that he might be able to have a better view, which he did, of the fence. It was a fence made of cylindrical poles of wood, and to Henry it was amazing, he never took his eyes off that fence, didn't take his hands off it until I pulled him away.
To me that fence was completely irrelevant, after all we were viewing the cheetahs from a bridge, they might be able to leap that high, but they seemed too lazy to do it. To me the fence was overlooked, but to Henry the fence was the excitement. We need to recapture those eyes, so that the ordinary becomes the extraordinary, and everything will be new again.
The second thing that I think we need to reacquire is a child’s vulnerability and need for dependency. Henry is 8 and a half months old and is just now learning to pick up food and put it in his mouth, he is incapable of getting that food ready though, of making a bottle, of changing his diaper, of even getting out of bed, he constantly wants to lunge off of couches and beds, he wants to play with plastic bags and tip over fans and lamps, he is completely dependent on Mary and I. I am not sure how long Henry would be able to survive on his own, maybe a day, perhaps only a few hours. Children are vulnerable and it requires them to be dependent on others, the same is true for us, we just overlook that fact.
Too often in our lives we work so hard for a little more control. We speak about pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, which may have made illustrative sense back in the day. But if we are honest we have never done anything by ourselves, at least not completely. We have had influences, both good and bad, in our lives that have helped shape who we are today. At the very least we needed someone to feed us before we could do it. The same thing is true about our relationship with God, too often we convince ourselves that we can take care of it all, and only turn to God when things finally get out of control.
A child is completely dependent on his/her parents and feels no shame in it. It doesn't chastise itself for not being able to change a diaper, heck most of the time it doesn't even stay still long enough for the diaper to be changed properly. We need to once again get to the place where we are completely dependent on God, and perhaps if we do we will find more available to us than we ever knew.
The third, and final thing for my purpose, that we need reacquire is a child's heart, their love. Some months ago I preached about 1 Corinthians 13, and about how the love that’s mentioned is not human romantic love, but God’s love. You don't think so? Ask yourself the last time your spouse/girlfriend/parent/sibling/neighbor/ friend did something to you that you did not like, and if you have an answer you can cross yourself off the 1 Corinthian 13 love list because you seem to keep a record of wrong.
I still agree that it is about God's love, but I am beginning to think that it is also the love of a child, at least in part, because a child loves without cynicism, without suspicion, without envy, and as soon as you show love to them they completely forget how long they were in that crib or dirty diaper or were hungry. By and large Henry is not a loud crier, but when he is hungry it tends to go up a few decibels, and it is a cry where the tears run down his cheeks and his mouth waters also. He looks at you as if you are willing to let him starve, even after you start getting his bottle ready, it is a look as if you never loved him and never will. Yet almost the moment the bottle touches his lips the cry goes away and he looks at you with a brightness in his eyes that conveys that he loves you once again.
We hold onto things, we do things for selfish reasons, we fail time and time again, but a child forgive and lets you start anew, a child loves even through the hard times, even through the times of silence. We need to re-harness that love, that faith.
To that end, as Charles Foster states our daily prayer should be “Make me a child, make me a child, make me a child.” I long to rekindle the childish faith inside, and while I hope to rekindle it before I set foot on my pilgrimage I am hopeful that if I have not fully embraced it I will be able to mile after mile on my journey backwards.
Buen Camino,
Pastor K
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