The Pearl

 I have thought about the parables for many years.

With the three to six year old child I see that the kingdom grows like a mustard seed or flour leavened with yeast. It is precious like a pearl, valuable like a treasure.

With the six to twelve year old child I see it requires we work, like the man who planted and the woman who mixes and kneads.  It requires we rest, like the man who sleeps as the seed grows.  Sometimes we must search for it, like a Pearl, others come across it by chance like a hidden treasure.

Sometimes the “child” helps me to see new things.  I asked my own college age atria bambini: but the language is not the kingdom is like a Pearl, it says the kingdom is like a merchant searching for fine pearls.  To which one responded:  oh, then we are the Pearl and Jesus is the merchant, he gives up everything.  The other: it is the found sheep in a new way.

Last week in a review with the older children, a new child to the atrium when asked what Jesus might have meant by comparing the kingdom to a Pearl said thoughtfully:  well pearls are very precious jewelry.  And…They take a long time to form.  This prompted a discussion on how pearls are formed over time.  And in my later reflection I saw something I’d never seen before.

In the parable of the Precious Pearl, is the mystery of suffering in the kingdom.  The value of the Pearl comes from an irritant.  It is through a painful grain of sand that the Pearl is formed over time.  

Which makes me think again of how the children for years have been trying to teach me.

The youngest child was drawn to the idea that a bigger Pearl must be more valuable.  I tried to steer them away from this worldly association by using a smaller but real Pearl.  They liked that.  

But perhaps, no not perhaps, they intuitively knew that bigger is better here, for it is how they love: big or not at all.

And it is how Christ loves, and how he lived, and how he died, and how he Rose to life again.

The mystery of suffering is not easy to grasp.  It is not easy to be grateful for.  But from the children, I have learned to hear his call in a new way:  

Pick up your Pearl and follow me.

The Story

God wants us to know Him.  He wants us to choose Him!  It is for this reason that he reveals himself in all of His creation. Through its order and through its beauty, we see Him if we look.  But what about in that which He didn’t create?

-Listen children.  I want to tell you a story.  In the beginning God created man.  In His image and likeness, He created them.  

-But who is He that we image?  

-He is Trinity.  

-And what does it mean to be like Him, what does He do?  

-Well God the Father loves the Son.  And God the Son loves the Father.  

-And the Spirit?  

-Ah, yes, The Spirit.  He IS their love.

-And He created us to be like Him?

-Yes, the Father wants you to love the Son.  And the Son wants you to love the Father

-And the Spirit?

-Ah yes, The Spirit.  He wants to live in you as He lives in the Father and Son

-So what happened next after the beginning?

-Well the devil is a clever one and he figured something out.  To be like God means to choose like God, and through his own personal experiment he realized this meant you could choose to NOT be like God.  It’s the way choice works.

-I don’t like the devil 

-That’s good, he’s not to be trusted. But like any good liar, he twists the truth.  He told Adam and Eve to be like God all they had to do was choose to eat from the One tree God had forbidden.

-Why did God forbid that tree?

-That is a good question.  But the answer to why God does anything is always the same.  Because He loved them.

-Did they forget that?

-They must have because they believed the devil that it is choosing that makes us like God.  But it’s not so much choosing, but what we choose that makes us like God.  But they fell for it hook, line and sinker and the whole world fell with them.

-That is sad

-It is.  Because all of creation was given for us to know and love God and with that first sin came suffering and death, the consequence of sin. And because it was released by man collaborating with the devil, He didn’t create it, so we couldn’t find Him there.

-And the devil had won?

-It appeared so.  What was God to do?  There was suffering and death all over his beautiful world, that stuff spreads like wild fire. But unlike fire, it spread darkness.  No one could find Him in all that suffering, and He was not in the death that was now part of His creation.  The devil had really put Him between a rock and a hard place:  we needed choice to be like God.  But to choose wrongly made it impossible for us to know and love Him through all that suffering and death.

-And?

-And what?

-That certainly can’t be the end

-Yes, you are a smart one.  The devil is a clever one.  But God, He is brilliance!  

The Father said to The Son, “We can’t take their choice.”

“No,” The Son said, “that won’t work at all.”

“Most certainly it will not,” said The Spirit. “But we could take the consequences.”

“No,” said The Father, “that’s the same thing.”

“The way I see it,” said The Son, “the real problem is that in the consequences, they can’t see Us.  We need to claim the consequences, not take them away.”

“That’s what I said,” quipped The Spirit.

“Yes, my Boy, that seems to hit the nail on the head.”

And with that word nail, the Son got very quiet, for they all saw exactly what must be done.  

-What? What was to be done.

-The Son had to leave His Father and enter as a light into the world filled with the darkness of suffering and death. And while He lived, He spent every moment of His earthly life choosing to love His Father as He had always done.  But, He chose to suffer the consequences of not choosing God anyway.

-He suffered?

-Yes, he suffered and he suffered and he suffered and then He died. Don’t cry.  He wanted to do it.  

-Why?

-Now that is a good question.  But the answer to why God does anything is always the same.  

-Because He loves us. Yes, yes.  I forgot that but remember now.

-And on the third day, when His friends went to find His dead body it was gone.

-What?  Gone?

-Yep.  He is alive!  He had conquered death, the devil’s greatest victory.  Now in death itself, we find God!

-Hooray! But not the suffering, how did He conquer that part?

-Well, He couldn’t take it away, right?

-No, that’d be the same as taking away the choice that lets us be like God

-You are exactly right.  He didn’t take it away, He entered it so that in suffering, we can find Him.  

-Because that was the problem all along.  He wasn’t in the suffering or death, but now He IS!

-That’s right, He IS, not was.  From now until the end of time, in that very stuff, we find Him most. You are very good listeners.

-Well, it’s a good story.

-Yes, the greatest story ever told!

Do this in Memory of Me

As we enter into the most Holy days of the year, perhaps we may ask ourselves, as the youngest child at the Passover meal asks, “How is this night different from all other nights.”

Memory, memorial, for the Jews is far more than our modern understanding of simply remembering.  Passover is how the Jews of every generation are able to participate in the moment of salvation history when God freed his people from slavery and brought them through the Red Sea into freedom.  This was not only for those alive and living under the tyranny of Pharaoh, this redemption was for all of his chosen people.  Each year, by remembering, by retelling the story, God allows his people in the present moment, through the ritual meal eaten on the night before the exodus, to be present in the act which defines the identity of all His Chosen people.

On the night before he died, Jesus gave to us a means to be present at the act of salvation which defines for us our identity as Christians.  His death and Resurrection were not only freedom from slavery and death for those present in the moment.  This conquering of death which entered the world through the first humans is for all people of all time.  It stretches back to Adam and Eve and stretches forward to include all of humanity.

When I ask my students what we are participating in through the Eucharist, they often say “The Last Supper.”  And I understand their confusion.  It makes one’s head hurt to contemplate the truth:

No, no!  The Passover meal doesn’t allow the Jews to participate in the first Passover meal.  It allows them to participate in the exodus from slavery to freedom. The Eucharist is not participation in the Last Supper!  The Last Supper and each and every Eucharist allowed the apostles and allows us to be present at Christ’s death and Resurrection!

(And it just occurred to me that all but one of His Chosen 12 were not present at His death.)

God has taken these most important events out of time in order to allow all people of all time to be re-present.  It is not a representation as a crèche at Christmas, but a miracle of space and time.

It makes my head hurt further to contemplate that both the Passover Meal and the Last Supper, in which the rite of each liturgical ritual was dictated by God Himself, took place on the night Before the event took place in time.  

May we never forget that Christ died for us, that He is Risen for us, and He will come again for us, all of us.  Through the gift of the Eucharist, this saving act is brought into my space and my time in the History of the Kingdom.  What an incredible gift!

And may we be compelled, this Holy Week and each and every day, to ask deep in our hearts:

And how shall I respond?

The other 99

Read today’s gospel, The Parable of the Lost Sheep, last night with my mother.  Here are the thoughts our discussion prompted:

How do the other 99 feel when the Shepherd leaves them behind to go and find his prodigal sheep?

Abandoned?

Sad?

Are they tempted to stray themselves?

Or are they too afraid to wander far from the familiar confines of the fold?

And that prodigal sheep?  That’s not actually in the text.  We assign lost to wayward and sinful.  But all we know is he has strayed.  Perhaps he is bold and courageous.  Perhaps he went out in service of the Shepherd or the fold and lost his way.  Perhaps he was pushed out by the others because he was different.

Perhaps he was a day dreamer and was lost in thought when the others moved on to greener pastures.

All we know is for whatever reason, he is not like the other 99 and this brought him closer, on the Shepherd’s shoulders.

This parable has always been a comfort when we recognize our own sinfulness.  But what about when we feel comfortable in our faith?  Comfortable in our spiritual life? What about when we identify with the 99?

We are certainly not called to sin.  But perhaps we are called to stray from OUR ways.  Push the boundaries of our complacency and comfort.  Perhaps we are called to trust the Shepherd.  Trust that if we try and live a radical life even just a little bit and fail, He will find us and put us on his shoulders.

Perhaps we are called to be afraid of the next step in our spiritual journey, but we take it any way trusting that what we fear is not going to take us a way from Him but closer to him.

Do we have to sin to identify with the lost sheep?  I wonder.  We certainly want to be him at the end of the story.  Who wants to be the boring 99?  We want the Shepherd to pick us up and carry us home.  

So is there something we can do for him to achieve that place on his shoulders besides leave him?  Maybe we aren’t leaving him but the 99.  Maybe we venture away from the safety in numbers, in convenience or in convention.  

Maybe it is a call to imitate the Shepherd’s own radical love which sets us outside the fold.  And in straying from the status quo, on his shoulders we return.

The Devoted Friend and Today’s Gospel

 I use Oscar Wilde’s story The Devoted Friend for a dual purpose when I teach.  As a former middle school literature teacher I know one of the hardest skills for kids at this age is to love a book they don’t like.  And so I begin:

I hate this story:  the plot, the characters, especially the ending!  But I love Wilde, and so I know if I hate the plot, the characters and the ending, he intended it.  He wants to teach me something.  And because I approach it this way, I still hate the plot the characters and the ending, but I love what he has taught me.  I use it often in my life.  By learning what he clearly believes is not devoted friendship, I ask myself:  am I being a Hans or the Miller:  am I being taken advantage of or using another?

We then switch gears to study friendship.  We take the stated tenants of friendship and analyze them.  One is that a good friend will do anything for friendship.  Is this true?  Should you lie or cheat for a friend?  Would a true friend even ask? Are there times friendship requires you don’t keep their secrets…

I also ask:  if your friend asks you to help move them to a new apartment, should you?  Yes, of course.  But what if to move them, you miss your daughters first communion or the funeral of your parents?  Should you help your friend?  No.  Friendship requires it be put in a proper order.  It must strengthen relationships with more priority, not diminish them.

In today’s gospel Jesus says, “let the dead bury the dead.”  I have always found this harsh, as my students often struggle to put friendship in its proper order.  But isn’t this just another way of saying the same thing.  Should we bury our dead?  Yes, of course.  But not if it diminishes our primary relationship, our friendship with Christ.  

In my last reflection on the Devoted Friend we came up with something I had not thought of before:  the Devoted Friend is not the story of friendship, but it is the story of a saint.  Hans gives up everything, even his life, for a misguided notion of friendship and a person he believes is a friend but is merely a tyrant.  But if the story had been called The Devoted Follower and he had done all he did for love of Christ in the face of a tyrant, we would hate the Miller but love Hans.  

I wonder if Wilde intended us to make this connection, it wouldn’t surprise me.  But if not, we at least have learned that to be used by a friend isn’t friendship and that to make friendship our primary focus diminishes its role in our lives.  And when we hear Jesus today, we know how to nurture all our relationships:  put Him first.

Happy belated Father’s Day!

When we think about the family as a living icon of the Trinity, what has always been forefront in my mind is the Love between the Father and Son which begets the Spirit:  marital love is so powerful and beautiful it creates not just children, but the proper environment for them to flourish.  It is not what we give our children which benefits them most, not even the unconditional love we have for them.  No, our greatest gift is our love for each other which creates in them a sense of well being and security.  My children have often questioned my love for them, this is natural when they do not understand why I denied what they wanted.  But they have never questioned my love for their father nor his love for me.  And it is that love which begets their security in a world with so few certainties.

But lately I have thought a bit differently about this icon.  My nephew recently got married and on his marriage certificate was a painting of a Bishop hearing the vows of a couple.  It clearly brought to my mind Rublev’s icon of the Old Testament Trinity.  But as I contemplated it, my thinking was stretched in new ways.

The bishop shares the spot of Christ in the triangle.  This makes sense as the church is His representative on earth.  But the bride held the place of the Father which made me contemplate how mothers are like God the Father.  The comparisons between earthly fathers and the divine Father are many.  But why does the future mother sit at His seat at the table?  

But more interesting is that the future father sits in the place of the Holy Spirit.  This is worth contemplating.  Mary is of course the bride of the Holy Spirit.  One of the most profound things I have read was from Maximilian Kolbe where he states that beget from the Father and Son, the spirit is THE immaculate conception, and thus Mary as the mortal Immaculate  conception is the bride taking her spouses’ name.  I love that!

But also, when we think of the father’s role in the family, he is the spiritual life blood.  While mothers primarily deal with the day to day, the father must be more forward thinking.  While we feed and comfort, nag and cajole, to make sure they are prepared for the world, he must lead his children to be prepared for eternity. We teach them to imitate Christ, he teaches them to be the force behind Christ: The unseen power that turns a seed into a tree.

It is for this reason that men must again take seriously their job of spiritual leader in the family.  For too long this has fallen to moms.  We are as spiritual, do not mistake my meaning, but the child sees in his earthly father a different sort of leader.  If our children see eternity as the stuff of women, even our girls may turn away.  They, boys and girls, must see eternity as the stuff of warriors, the stuff of heroes, the stuff of their father!

The Prayer of Children

 

One of the greatest gifts of being in the atrium with children is to experience how they pray.  To receive this gift, the catechist must make an enormous pedagogical shift from traditional methodologies of transmitting the faith.  We must begin by understanding on the deepest level:  We do not teach prayer.

When we understand that prayer is a means of knowing God (allowing him to reveal himself to us and a means for us to respond), we see that in many ways, the child’s prayer is more profound than our own.  The job of the catechist is not to fill an empty vessel but to create conditions for prayer.  Prayer is an experience.  Think of a roller coaster ride.  I can define it, explain it, give language to express how it makes one feel, even show pictures or videos of my own ride. But I cannot share the experience.  It is something one must do for oneself.  All I can really do is present to the child the roller coaster, and if I am blessed, experience it with him.

To aid in the child’s prayer, we must first look at how they pray.  Through many years of observation of the three- to six-year-old child, we have seen the primary characteristics are:  Silent and meditative; short and spontaneous; praise and gratitude; song and movement.

The first condition we meet to aid the child is to give them something to respond to.  We call this Kerygma or Proclamation.  The richer the content, the deeper and more meaningful the response.  But I must be careful to never impose my own ideas onto the child’s response. 

Let me give an example.  After reading a passage from scripture, we will ask the children some open-ended questions:  What did you hear?  What might this mean?  In the beginning, it took an enormous discipline to sit in the silence that often answers these questions.  But then I came to truly understand the profound response that IS their silence.  Perhaps it is because they don’t yet have the language or perhaps there is no language sufficient to express what is in their hearts.

Normal behavior of three- and four-year old’s who are bored or confused or frustrated is not silence.  They will ask a million questions one after the other, they are picking at their shoestring or poking the child next to them, they are telling a completely unrelated story about their dog or throwing something at you.  It is a big joke of parents everywhere:  The only time your children are silent is when they are absolutely doing something they want to do that they absolutely don’t want you to know about. 

And so too with their prayer:  They are absolutely doing something they want to do and, at that moment, they don’t need me to know about it.  It is between them and God.

How can this gift from the youngest child aid in our own prayer life?  I think often in the season of Lent, as we focus on our prayer lives a little bit more, we can get caught in the rut of thinking there is only one right way to pray.  Or that there is a particular way that prayer should make us feel. Perhaps you were told you should say a rosary every day, perhaps you were told you should do a weekly holy hour.  These are not bad pieces of advice.  But they are merely conditions for prayer, they are not the prayer themselves.  The rosary gives us the proclamation of events in the life of Christ and the words to respond. The Holy hour gives us the environment of being in the Presence of our Eucharistic Lord and the opportunity to respond.  But our experience flows from these. And the experience can be found in a carpool line, a laundry room or while washing the dishes.

Sometimes the experience is like a roller coaster. 
Sometimes it is like rocking in our mother’s arms.

Sometimes it is like standing alone in the desert.
Sometimes we respond in the poetry of a rote prayer,
Other times in our own voice of praise or in shouts of frustration,
And still other times with no words at all.

But what the child teaches us is that prayer is an experience between us and God.  It is our own unique response to what He has to say to us personally.  

And if we can become like little children, whatever He has to say and whatever the nature of our response, it is ALWAYS accompanied by peace and joy!  And will allow us to more fully realize and participate in the source and summit of our faith this Lenten Season.

"Our prayer is both a preparation and a vehicle for arriving at the greatest prayer of thanksgiving:  The Eucharist."  (Listening to God with Children, p. 117)