These battered vehicles from my childhood are playthings for my grandsons today. The yellow one was designated an AA road rescue van by Abel, and has cut out stickers to make this clear. I mention that as an instance of how children can be creative with very little. The real story today is a continuation of Refuge Week.
Eric A Clayton is a press officer for the Canadian and American Jesuits and has a blog, ‘Now Discern This’. Earlier this year he went with a companion to see the Jesuits at work on the Mexico-U.S. border, helping migrants, refugees, from Latin America.
Among the people he met there was a nine year old boy named Jésus, who had two toy cars with him.
Read on for a fascinating story of a child’s creativity, resilience and hope, not dissimilar to what we read from Anne Frank yesterday.
This was the way of it. As I walked down the steps from the City Library I noticed a boy of about 8 years old, in floods of tears, and the passers-by, if they saw him at all, studiously avoiding him. To some extent I could understand that, having been on the receiving end of malicious allegations from children just a couple of years older than he was; the feeling of jeopardy was most painful.
But this lad was in greater distress than that. He was near panic.
This was before mobile phones were universal! He had been in town with his grandmother and his sister, and had lost them. His parents were at work. We established that grandad was home, a bit too far for him to walk over there, the state he was in.
Do you know their phone number? He did.
Could he use the phone box? He soon got the idea. Grandad was a calming influence. Granny had already spoken to him and was going to ring from the library when she got back there, the last place she’d seen him.
‘We’d better stay here.’ Not for long though. Big sister was ready to tear a strip off him, but granny gave him a big hug. And that was that.
Except that a fortnight later, he was going into the library as I was leaving, and we met at the old swing doors. He introduced his grateful mother and I was able to praise him for his part in his own rescue, when he rang Grandad and explained what had happened. The lost sheep back with the flock.
Tomorrow is Good Shepherd Sunday. Who knows when you might have to become a temporary good shepherd?
The Catholic Calendar celebrates Mary, the Holy Mother of God, on New Year’s Day. To mark the new beginning here is an extract from a story shared by the Bruderhof community, ‘Welcoming Every Child’.
It’s well worth reading the whole piece.
In Advent and Christmas, our thoughts turn to Mary and her special role in the Christmas story.
When the angel announces the birth of Jesus to her, he tells her that she has “found favor with God.” And indeed, every time a child is born today, the mother and father must also have found favor with God, because a new soul is entrusted to them. And like Mary, we as parents must simply respond: “Let it be with me according to your will.” At birth, God entrusts a child to the parents, and it is their duty to help it fulfill God’s will and the task for which it was put into this world.
Here is Saint Nicholas, ‘of this church the patron’ according to the Latin inscription at the foot of the window. The saint is holding a model of ‘this church’, Saint Nicholas’ at Barfrestone near Dover in Kent, a tiny gem of the 11th or 12th Century.
Notice, too, his impressive beard, as good as any department store Santa, who of course is a distant descendant of the generous Saint Nicholas.
The three discs repeated on his mitre (or bishop’s headdress) and his cope (or robe) stand for gold coins which Nicholas tossed into the chimney of a home where three daughters were too poor to get married. The story of the boys in the tub tells that the saint restored them to life after a butcher had killed and pickled them.
These stories are not to be believed as historically factual but they show that Nicholas was a conscientious bishop and well aware of the needs of children and families, a fitting patron of children. But do we want children to believe in Father Christmas? A man who comes down the chimney with presents for reportedly ‘good children’?
GK Chesterton explored this question in a 1935 article for the National Catholic Reporter, ‘Santa Claus and Science: On imagination, faith, and the natural fancy of children’. Here is an extract; read the whole essay by following the link below.
What do our great modern educationists, our great modern psychologists, our great makers of a new world, mean to do about the breach between the imagination and the reason, if only in the passage from the infant to the man? Is the child to live in a world that is entirely fanciful and then find suddenly that it is entirely false? Or is the child to be forbidden all forms of fancy; or in other words, forbidden to be a child? Or is he, as we say, to have some harmless borderland of fancy in childhood, which is still a part of the land in which he will live; in terra viventium, in the land of living men? Cannot the child pass from a child’s natural fancy to a man’s normal faith in Holy Nicholas of the Children, without enduring that bitter break and abrupt disappointment which now marks the passage of a child from a land of make-believe to a world of no belief.
Keith Waterhouse grew up in Leeds, Yorkshire between the two World Wars. He was brought up by his mother after his father’s death, which was due in part to his Great War service. I was struck by this paragraph describing Keith’s eight year old self. Leeds had plenty of prestigiousXIX and early XX Century buildings, including along the shopping streets, like Boargate shown here, as well as civic statements like the town hall.
Architecture was a word I had yet to encounter, and so I had no idea that I had an interest in the subject. What I did know was that buildings, their shape and proportions and fabric and style of adornment or lack of it, fascinated me. Although I suppose my love of the cobbled terraces and the dark satanic mills fascinated me, I had great enthusiasm for the modern.
Keith Waterhouse, City Lights, a Street Life, London, Hodder and Stoughton, pbk 1995, p55.
I can imagine the eight year old Keith wandering through Kirkgate Market and taking it all in, as far as an eight year old could, measuring up the City Hall with one of his long stares, but not having the words to describe what he was seeing. I love to see my grandsons taking pleasure in new words and what they stand for.
Abel is nearly eight. I think his mother would be frantic to think he was wandering the city streets alone. His mind and heart are his own, but need feeding, nourishing by his elders in the family, at school, in cub scouts. Keith Waterhouse had no internet to explore, possibly a far more dangerous habitat than Leeds city centre. Abel too has great enthusiasm for the modern!
Let’s pray that parents, teachers, leaders of young people, catechists, may exercise Wisdom, Understanding and all the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and help our young people to find creative ways to express their fascinations and enthusiasms.
In this section of his poem, Rawlings celebrates the bond of love between Mary and her babe, her bliss, her child, her choice. Let us pray for those mothers whose children are not their bliss and joy but a source of worry and despair, mothers who feel they have no choices.
My wits, my words, my deeds, my thoughts, And else what is in me, I rather will not wish to use, If not in serving thee.
Sing, lullaby, my little boy, Sing, lullaby, my lives joy.
My babe, my bliss, my child, my choice, My fruit, my flower, and bud, My Jesus, and my only joy, The sum of all my good.
Sing, lullaby, my little boy, Sing, lullaby, my lives joy.
My sweetness, and the sweetest most That heaven could earth deliver, Soul of my love, spirit of my life, Abide with me for ever.
Sing, lullaby, my little boy, Sing, lullaby, my lives joy.
Live still with me, and be my love, And death will me refrain, Unless thou let me die with thee, To live with thee again.
Sing, lullaby, my little boy, Sing, lullaby, my lives joy.
Pope Francis opens the Year of Mercy in the Central African Republic.
Cast your mind back to yesterday’s post, or scroll back to it, then ask yourself what dies a brave little girl have to tell us about every Christian being a missionary? We concede that the professional missionary ad gentesmayrisk her or his life, prepared to die for the faith but also to live for it, or better, to live it. Yet Pope Francis reminds us that it is not just the professionals; every Christian is called:
120. In virtue of their baptism, all the members of the People of God have become missionary disciples (cf. Mt 28:19). All the baptized, whatever their position in the Church or their level of instruction in the faith, are agents of evangelisation, and it would be insufficient to envisage a plan of evangelisation to be carried out by professionals while the rest of the faithful would simply be passive recipients… Every Christian is challenged, here and now, to be actively engaged in evangelisation; indeed, anyone who has truly experienced God’s saving love does not need much time or lengthy training to go out and proclaim that love.
But we must go deeper even than that. Johannes Metz reminds us that the mission to go out and proclaim God’s saving love is not an add-on to our basic humanity, an optional extra for the Christian; rather it is an intrinsic part of being human, or as he puts it, of becoming human:
Becoming human … is a mandate and a mission, a command and a decision … freedom reveals itself at work when we accept and approve with all our heart the being that is committed to us, when we make it so much our own that it seems to be our idea from the first … the free process of becoming a human being unfolds as a process of service.
Metz refers us to John 8:32 – the truth will set you free – a truth we discover through service, obedient to God’s command; a service unto death, even death on a Cross, as we read in Philippians 2:8. Becoming human is a process of service: the little girl risking her life, shows how serving others, even in the form of a doll, is intrinsic to being human. And yet the little girl is totally dependent upon her parents as we are on God’s grace.
We at Agnellus Mirror do not claim to agree totally with everything we publish, but we hope that somebody out there finds it interesting. We questioned, no, disagreed with Tagore at the beginning of the month, and today we find him interesting but writing from a privileged point of view. Perhaps we should, each of us, stand outside the current of time, occasionally. But who stands beside us and shares our inner world? We offer a response to Tagore at the end of the post. What are your feelings?
SHELIDAH, 24th June 1894.
I have been only four days here, but, having lost count of the hours, it seems such a long while, I feel that if I were to return to Calcutta to-day I should find much of it changed—as if I alone had been standing still outside the current of time, unconscious of the gradually changing position of the rest of the world. The fact is that here, away from Calcutta, I live in my own inner world, where the clocks do not keep ordinary time; where duration is measured only by the intensity of the feelings; where, as the outside world does not count the minutes, moments change into hours and hours into moments. So it seems to me that the subdivisions of time and space are only mental illusions. Every atom is immeasurable and every moment infinite.
There is a Persian story which I was greatly taken with when I read it as a boy—I think I understood, even then, something of the underlying idea, though I was a mere child. To show the illusory character of time, a faquir put some magic water into a tub and asked the King to take a dip. The King no sooner dipped his head in than he found himself in a strange country by the sea, where he spent a good long time going through a variety of happenings and doings. He married, had children, his wife and children died, he lost all his wealth, and as he writhed under his sufferings he suddenly found himself back in the room, surrounded by his courtiers. On his proceeding to revile the faquir for his misfortunes, they said: “But, Sire, you have only just dipped your head in, and raised it out of the water!”
The whole of our life with its pleasures and pains is in the same way enclosed in one moment of time. However long or intense we may feel it to be while it lasts, as soon as we have finished our dip in the tub of the world, we shall find how like a slight, momentary dream the whole thing has been.
Glimpses of Bengal Selected from the Letters of Sir Rabindranath Tagore
We are not simply writhing under our sufferings in this life, dipping into the rub of the world. Eighty years of life are indeed as nothing compared to the light years of the Universe’s existence, but they are years of responsibility to each other, to creation, and to the Creator.
Then shall the king say to them that shall be on his right hand: Come, ye blessed of my Father, possess you the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.
For I was hungry, and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger, and you took me in: naked, and you covered me: sick, and you visited me: I was in prison, and you came to me.
Then shall the just answer him, saying: Lord, when did we see thee hungry, and fed thee; thirsty, and gave thee drink? And when did we see thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and covered thee? Or when did we see thee sick or in prison, and came to thee?
And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me.
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