Fr Mark Schultz

Dear Friend,

I don’t know if you remember your childhood particularly well, but I don’t really remember mine. I mean…I do, but... Let me explain.

There are certainly flashes of memories and events and feelings that I remember from childhood, good times and growth times, a few dreams and nightmares, some things clearer than others, an ocean of images and fragments of things…which is to say, there’s a lot I actually do, in fact, remember: enough, at least, to shore up a sense that the person I was as a child is in continuity with who I am as an adult. But do I remember my childhood? Not really.

At least not according to the various standards of childhood that inform our contemporary sense of what that word is supposed to mean. There’s a very popular notion of children as objects of sentimental attention, as precious or cutely adorable—I resist and don’t endorse that notion of the child not only because it seems adult-centric and creepy to me, but also because I’d never characterize my own experience of what it was like to be a child as readily sentimentally objectifiable, as precious, cute or adorable. It was just my life.

But these notions of childhood are extraordinarily prevalent. Which is why, when Jesus in our Office Gospel today places a child in the midst of the Apostles and says, “become like children,” the nature of that becoming can be easily inflected toward our ready-made expectations and notions of childhood. We’re likely to imagine that Jesus is telling us, “be free!” or “be innocent!” or “have a sense of child-like wonder at things!” or “be cutely adorable!” But I don’t think that’s what Jesus is saying, in part because all that seems to speak to a fantasy of childhood (which children may not share) and not what childhood actually is…

…and particularly not what childhood was in Jesus’ own day. In Jesus’ time, children were the lowest of the low on the social hierarchy, in large part because they were completely dependent. There was nothing much they could contribute, nothing much they could do, they were completely vulnerable, they had no voice, no say, and were more or less problems to manage until they grew old enough to be actually useful. Without doubt, this vision of childhood is far more fraught than the contemporary version of it (though both remain completely and problematically adult-centric). And I say this not just as Curate for Children, Youth and Family Ministries, but as a human being and regardless of any other job titles I may have in this parish or any other in the future: I think it’s the God-given responsibility of the church to foster and affirm children’s gifts and contributions, to foster and affirm their voices as prophetic and eminently worth listening to, to see as blessing the duty to protect children, and to learn from them and with them as we are all formed by the Spirit into deeper relationship with God and greater and more visible Christ-likeness.

So what is Jesus really asking of us when he tells us to “become like children”? He’s asking of us to identify with “the least of these,” to take our stand with and among the least, the lost, the lonely and the last. He’s asking us to fully and completely and lovingly depend on God for all things, and in that complete reliance, to know God as One who delights in giving us not only everything we need, but everything that God is. He’s asking us to be vulnerable to grace and to the work of the Spirit in us and in the world around us. He’s asking us to stop thinking we can save ourselves or the world or the church, that we can do it all, and to receive the grace that, working in us, can do more than we can ask or imagine and has the power to save, transform and uphold all things.

On Jesus terms, then, my Beloved Friend, I hope we can grow together in faith into a gloriously wonderful second childhood!

Under the Mercy,
Fr Mark+