By Shiju Joseph, CSC –
Readings: Josh 24: 14-29: Mt 19: 13-15
The children have a natural fascination for the colorful and the beautiful. They love to be smiled at, and they easily recognize harshness of others. At this stage, they are also quite attuned to goodness. They reach out to what they recognize as a pleasure or joy-generating voice, touch, or visual. They reach out to goodness that they see around them.
Jesus asks his disciples and others not to stop children from going to him. Children were naturally drawn to the goodness that emitted from Jesus. They recognize only goodness; the age, color, nationality, liturgical rite and language are unimportant. It is the elders who worry about these.
It is the educated who cannot recognize goodness outside their set parameters. And they often believe that it is their duty to tell others how to ‘appropriately’ approach God; as though people do not naturally know how to approach their creator. Do we sometimes believe that most people do not know how to interact with God? Have we lost our naturality in relating with God, in being drawn to this goodness?
Is our interaction with God so ‘properly and canonically liturgical’ that we do not anymore know how to naturally respond to and rush to the loving goodness we experience in him? Still worse, have we ever stopped others from relating with God like a child because it was ‘liturgically inappropriate’? Let us then listen once again to Jesus’ rebuke: “Let the children be! Do not stop them from coming to me; for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such children.”.