Come to me as a child

Many years ago I was feeling a bit melancholy and wrote a poem.

A million times as I lay curled
or toddled `bout my little world
I wondered at the big bright sun;
who turns it off? who turns it on?
And in my childish naivete
I gathered facts and filed `em away.
Answers everywhere I turned,
men who knew, wrote books I learned.
The flowers hue and scent so pure
was not for me, but bees to lure;
and thunders not the voice of God,
or clouds where all the angels trod.
No more to trust the rainbows pact,
for basic science is what I lacked.
Now armed with all the things I've learned
to stifle dreams the right I've earned;
and teach to all the little ones
the simple secrets of the sun.
Its sad to think I've come so far,
no more to wish on a twinkling star
or count the pixies in a tree,
or dream what's `neath the cold, blue sea.
And so I think that just for fun,
I'll wonder `bout the men who've gone
and filled our heads with all their `proof'
and strove for fact, discarding truth.
I'll picture them as little ones,
wondering at the big bright sun.

In hindsight I suppose some might see this as an attack on knowledge or learning. It certainly is not that. What it was to me at the time was a lament over the loss of childish wonder. Even still it makes me think of Christs instruction to come to him as child. I suppose that may mean different things to different people. I'd be interested in hearing different thoughts on this.

So what are the qualities of the child which are so crucial to our relationship with Christ? Innocence, Trust, real joy, but I think perhaps the most important, a sense of wonder about, life, creation, the creator. While our minds have this wonderful, God given ability to reason, learn, and grow; and while we are introduced to God and his Son through learning the stories of the bible, true belief cannot be learned. It is a leap of faith. There are many brilliant men who have dedicated volumes of material in a quest to prove the existence of God but in the end there can be no proof. Our faith is our salvation and where there is proof there is no faith. So as much as we may learn, or be able to reason our way to resolving the mysteries of this world, the mysteries of God's realm are, by design, reserved for the wonder, innocence, and trust of our inner child.

A witness to miracles

Each of us are a witness to miracles. Of course, even miracles require a certain amount of faith even when we see them first hand. I can only imagine that even as Lazarus walked out of his tomb with embalming cloth trailing from his body that there must have been someone there who thought to themselves, "Wow, he really wasn't dead after all". But we choose our miracles with the power of our faith in Him who calls us to see them with a child's eyes.

The most powerful personal miracle I witnessed happened a few years ago when my Mother in law lay on the last bed she would ever rest in. She had lived a very painful, and to some extent humiliating existence for the better part of 20 years after she was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease at the age of 42.
She was a proud and strong mother of seven; Almost stereotypically German by heritage and was Catholic to the core. She had a very strong devotion to Mary and was rarely without her rosary or green scapular. She was not without her faults but one of the things that impressed me in hindsight was that her faults weren't concealed. They were just out there for the world to see.

Side note: There is nothing worse than the church going scout leader that turns out to be a serial killer with everyone standing around saying, "We had no idea!!?"

Not my Mother in law. She was stubborn to the point of being dangerous (she took up driving only after she contracted Parkinson's and insisted on driving herself around despite numerous fender benders). She was a fierce mama bear when it came to her kids, even when they didn't deserve it.
Thus it was very difficult to see this proud woman reduced to a shaking, shuffling, quivering, shadow of herself who would often move about on her hands and knees as she resisted the walker and wheelchair. I'm ashamed to say that it was particularly difficult for me, what with me being the weak kneed sissy that I am when it comes to others suffering.
In her last days we visited at the hospital as the unbearable became inevitable. It was a long suffering death as vital organs each gave up the fight on some unknown timetable. Her family stayed with her and prayed with her for as long as she could speak and when that stopped they prayed over her instead. One day my wife told me that her mother had had a battle with Satan earlier that morning, before I had arrived after work. Her mother had pointed to the foot of the bed and had described Satan standing there, mocking her, urging her to give in and speaking all sorts of vile things. My wife said her mother was visibly shaken by what she saw and there was no doubt she was truly experiencing this. Now the skeptic will tell you that it is not entirely unusual for patients in the last throws of life to begin to hallucinate. And of course the fiercely religious will likely experience the demons and angels of their particular brand of theology. I am inclined to believe this particular incident actually occurred, not because I have the faith to believe in miracles, but because of something that happened later that week.
It helps to know that we had been visiting her at the hospital off and on for more than a couple of weeks and as is in standing with the typical hospital environment there was some piped in music playing soft and low in the room. We had been hearing this music every day for the whole of her stay there and it never wavered. It was a very generic, entirely instrumental, new age, easy listening tripe that would be found on a CD labeled "Natures Echos" or some other such title. I had, for the most part, already managed to filter it out entirely as I went about doing the normal hospital visitor type of things like reading every scrap of paper that happened to be laying about in the room or the hallway. It was later in the evening a few days after the Satan incident as I sat in the hall outside her room reading yet another magazine. My wife was in the room with her mother and few other family members and they all knew they were very close to spending their last hours in the hospital. The management at the generic nature music channel apparently decided that, for at least one song, they would change their musical style and a very beautiful mezzo-soprano voice came over the speaker singing the "Ave Maria". Even sitting in the hall I noticed the change immediately and stood up and moved toward the door to see if someone had turned on a personal radio. As I saw the look on the faces of my wife and her family I knew that they were thinking the same thing that I was thinking.

"Holy Mary, mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death."

In my mind the miracle was unmistakable. A tear streaked down the face of my Mother in law who had been mostly comatose the entire day and we knew that she too had heard the call of Mary. She died within the hour and the nature music channel resumed it's normal programming.

The Road Back

"There was a man who had two sons."
It is one of the most recognizable opening stanzas the bible has to offer. I was once asked, "How do you keep from getting bored with the same readings year after year". My answer? "I dont; But every once in awhile, if I'm paying attention, even that most recognizable parable that I have heard a thousand times if I've heard it once offers up a jewel of discovery that makes every little tedious moment worth while."

I don't know about you but it always seemed I could gauge the strength of my relationships by a palpable sense of distance I felt from the person/s in that relationship. I can remember times when my marriage was struggling. I would lay in bed next to my wife; the same queen size bed we had shared for a decade or more; and yet as we spoke coldly to one another it seemed to me as if the sound of her voice was coming from across a ravine. The sense of distance was very real to me.
It has been the same off and on with my relationship to Christ. There have been times when I have been on fire with my faith and it seemed as if Christ, through the holy spirit resided within me. But at other times the distance between myself and my Lord seemed insurmountable. Since I know that Christ will never turn his back on me; I have always imagined each of my sinful actions as the beginning of a journey away from God. Some of those journeys were short, as I quickly repented and returned to my waiting Lord's embrace. Some of those journey's were long, years long; Each sin taking me another step away from Christ who's arms remained ever open, awaiting the return of his prodigal son. In those times I remember feeling great despair and hopelessness as I moved further and further from Christ's embrace. I feared the long path that I had taken away from the love of God would be an unbearably long journey of repentance back to Him.
It is here, that on a cold winter day, as I sat through yet another Mass, and yet another reading I had heard so many times before, that I heard something that I had never "heard" before.

"But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him."

It was an innocuous line that almost seemed out of place. Why make a point of saying that the son was still a "long way off" if it held no importance to the parable? And so it must mean something.
Now I fully realize that, to many of you, the thing that I discovered that day may seem quite obvious. So much so that now you may have dismissed me as terribly ignorant. But in the end I kind of think that is the whole point. It had never occurred to me until that day, and what it said to me was something that I really needed to hear, that day. In that moment I knew there was no need to hesitate in fear of the long road of repentance that lay ahead of me, if indeed I did decide to end my sinful ways. I knew now that in the moment I turned my face back to God and chose repentance over sin; that even though I was still a long way off, the Father would come out to meet me, embrace me, and help me on the journey back.

I learned something else that day as well. This ancient book written so many years ago is not a dead text any more so than the man whose life it prophecies and celebrates is dead. This text is alive, poignant, and relevant as much today as it was all those years ago. God speaks through it directly to us, just what we need, just when we need it.