Have you noticed that it’s nearly impossible to get a woman to tell you just how painful childbirth was? I’ve heard more than one woman echo my own mom’s words, “You don’t really remember that part afterwards.” I’ve always figured that it’s about the immediate surge of post-partum oxytocin that wipes the maternal brain clean of the excruciating memories. Could this be a clever evolutionary mechanism to hoodwink women into repeating the process to ensure the propogation of our species? I wonder if something like that is going on in me as I pine for a grandchild or two?
Gone are the days of organizing my life around naps, sports schedules, music practices, recitals, plays, playdates, or overnights. In many ways, my days are my own to build out in any way I see fit. So why is it that I catch myself jonesing for little people again?
You don’t have to be a Biblical scholar or even a Christian to know that Jesus had a soft spot in his heart for kids. In my Church’s Gospel selection for this Sunday (Matthew 11: 25-30), Jesus, once again, asked the reader to have a look at the Kingdom of God through the lens of a child.
I can easily get with Jesus on this proposition when I glimpse a youngster from afar. From a distance, it is as though I am watching kids in aHallmark-greeting-card-style T.V. commercial. You’ve seen these. A special lens is placed on the camera to give the little cherub a kind of warm glow. The scene opens with a bit of dialogue between a parent and their youngster. The little philosopher/poet says something with that precious little five-year-old lisp that causes the cinematic parent to spontaneously drop everything for a hug. As the music swells, the camera frames a scene that is so sweet that it could make Clint Eastwood reach for a tissue.
If you’re a parent, or just someone who intimately knows at least one child, do you ever imagine what goes on when they turn the camera off? With the jaundiced, crusty old eyes of family life experience, here is what I make up. The soft, tender music suddenly winds down like a record player running out of RPMs. The minute the director says, “That’s a wrap!,” the child reminds all the adults in the room who struck the deal with him, that now is the time for the treat or amusement that they had promised if he would “just sit still” and act cute for five more minutes. I imagine a little whining, a little demanding, a rebuke that reminds the little Mussolini that tyrants do not generally get the rewards they want.
Dostoevsky once said that, “Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams.” A parent who is raising children in real time knows the truth of that statement.
When I honestly contemplate the phenomenon of a real child in action, instead of the cinematic child-cherub of a grandparent-wannabe’s dreams, I can recall grocery store melt-downs, disgruntled parental calls from playdates, unhappy stories from teachers, and more. There were stitches, and fevers, and nightmares that robbed them and me of sleep.
I doubt that children have changed that much in 2000 years. My guess is that when Jesus chose children as his frequent homily props, he was not deluded by some idealized Hallmark version of who they were. I believe that Jesus saw in children a perfect antidote to adult grandiosity. Just when we adults are taking ourselves too seriously, just when we think we have “arrived” at real maturity, these little miniature people have a way of exposing what is unfinished within us.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that God is not “tame.” Along the same lines, Jesus once said that the Spirit blows where it will. You never know where it’s coming from or where it’s going (John 3:8). God’s creativity and activity are unpredictable. There is nothing like a child to interject a note of unpredictability into our well-ordered lives. In their “untamed-ness,” children have a way of making space for an awareness of the untamed presence of God. They also have a way of stretching us to give more than we ever thought we could give, love more than we ever thought we could love. They have a way of expanding our horizons by rescuing us from the tyranny of always having things go the way we planned them to go.