Note from the Pastor

From the second floor windows of the rectory I daily get to behold God’s marvelous art work: the magnificent oak trees that are preparing for their annual show of color, the young family of deer that dance around the backyard and most beautiful of all, the little children playing on the school grounds next door (the only objects I would rather not see are the goofy geese that seem to know the location of every sidewalk on our property).

Little children and God. They are a marvelous mix for they continually point to each other. Seek God and you will be led to a child. Look at a child and you will easily see the face of God. Jesus’ favorite audio visual to reveal the reality of God and his kingdom was a little child. The moment the disciples began to shove one another for the first place in line, the Lord would bring out a little child and tell them, “Unless you become like one of these, you will not know God; you will not enter the Kingdom for the Kingdom belongs to such as these.” Why? Because they have not yet eaten of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. They have not yet entered into the world of judgments and splitting and comparing and being right or wrong or first or last. They have not yet learned how to jockey for position and therefore are already in the perfect position to receive and to reveal the Divine.

As I tried to emphatically share with the parents of our RE students a few weeks back, children are inherently and naturally religious. You do not need to teach them to be religious, they already are. Religio means to bind or to tie together. They are intimately bound and tied together with God and will remain so until they begin to choose otherwise, other gods…the gods of goods and grades, the gods of winners and losers, the gods of competition and comparison.

I used to be a little disconcerted when I would ask little children their favorite subject and they would respond: “Recess!” Oh, they like to learn their arithmetic and many loved to read but they hated tests and weren’t too thrilled about alphabetical order especially if their last name began with Z. No, what they really loved was recess. They loved to be out on the playground, running around, doing no-thing except enjoying being a kid. Now, that’s holy stuff. It’s a true level plain field where they can let their imaginations go wild, run and scream for the pure joy of being alive. Did you ever hear a little kid just scream with delight for no particular reason? That’s prayer, that’s communion with God. In the common room of the rectory there is a picture of Snoopy dancing up a storm with a smile on his face and the caption reads, “Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” These little ones contemplate the face of God in all of creation and in their holy play and are naturally filled with joy. They only begin to lose it when we introduce the measuring stick, the adult rules of the game and overly organized activities where winning isn’t the only thing, it is everything.

Now, what drives me nuts is getting a call at 10 o’clock at night from a nursing home asking if we can get a priest there right away because so and so is dying and they are not sure that he or she will make it through the night. “How long have they been ill?” I ask. “Oh, about six months, Father.” I bite my tongue and pray for grace. Don’t they know? Obviously, they don’t. If they did they would have called me 6 months ago. And now you know! Don’t wait until the last minute! It is not the Sacrament of the Dead. It is a Sacrament that heals.

One of the things I hope to do while I am here at Mary Queen is to teach contemplative prayer. Contemplative prayer is not saying prayers but seeing…all the way through to the great Reality in which we move and live and have our being. Babies and little children are natural contemplatives. Lock your eyes onto the gaze of a newborn and you will see her download your soul. She is seeing everything for the first time and so she is really seeing. She has not yet learned categories of things or people and therefore dismisses nothing. She sees and therefore she truly sees God. Not just with her physical eyes, but the eyes of her mortal soul. But she will forget, we’ll see to that. We’ll teach her to forget. The trick for us is...will we be able to remember? Can we remember the time that we screeched with delight for the sheer joy of life? Can we remember what the face of God looks like?

Well, we have a lot of visual aids around. In case you forgot, take a look. Look at your children. No, really look at them. See them all the way through. They are living revelation of the divine presence of God. They will forget soon enough but for now they hold the mystery. Look at it, contemplate it and see the face of God.

In Jesus God’s face incarnate,

Father Tony

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Father Tony's homily for July 13, 2008

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Last updated Sept-29-2008