Journal of Sacred Work

Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.
Mark 10:15

    When I first heard this scripture long ago, I thought it meant, literally, that if you didn’t receive God as a little kid, you were done for. I felt badly for all those old folks in distant parts of the world that didn’t seem to have caught God and how it was too late for them now. As a child, I liked the images in church windows and paintings of Jesus welcoming us.
   It took me awhile to appreciate that Jesus was saying, instead, that, as adults, we needed to regain the innocent openness of little children in order to appreciate God’s kingdom. Society teaches us sophistication and orders us to follow its rules. Society also teaches us a vast range of fears…

   Psychologists know that we are born with only two fears: of falling and of loud noises (startle reflexes). It is the fear of falling that Alfred Hitchcock understood so well as so many of his movies, from Vertigo to North by Northwest, exploit this fear.
   What is important, here, is that life teaches us fear. Some versions of faith teach fear of God rather than love. And yet Jesus invites us to return to the open innocence of childhood to receive God’s kingdom. We must find the courage to let go of the things of this world. We must regain trust.
   Why is it hard for us to trust? We have, of course, been betrayed many times. And each betrayal has left a scar, and a memory of how painful it was to "lose" something or someone.
   As adults, we are called to reach beneath all of these scars, to stride through the many curtains of our remembered wounds, to conquer our fear by trusting God with the purity and certainty of an infant in the arms of a mother’s love.
   Life teaches us to fight. Jesus calls us to surrender, to trust with the innocence of children.
  What does this trust look like in adult behavior? When Mother Theresa chose to enter the slums of Calcutta to care for the poorest of the poor, many thought she was a fool and riduled her. Undeterred by this criticism, she stated, "I am following Christ where He is leading me."   

   When Rosa Parks chose to keep her seat in the back of a Montgomery bus, she trusted God, not the angry bus driver that ordered her to stand. When Gandhi patiently received the physical blows of angry policeman, he was listening to God’s voice, not the world’s.
   Caregivers know that each time they feel themselves letting go of their will and following God’s, they experience a glimmer of God’s Love. And each time they trust as children, the door to the kingdom slides open another inch.
   This doesn’t mean caregivers are free of betrayal and protected from wounds. The world will always wound those who trust. It means that God blesses those who trust in Love with sincere intention.

   There will always be those who ridicule the lovers of this world. "You fool!" they will shout to someone who puts aside his or her own safety and comfort to meet the needs of another – whether it’s the man who, in the middle of a cold night, gives up his coat to warm a stranger or the nurse who sits for long stretches with an Alzheimer’s patient or the caregiver who offers loving kindness to a rude and angry patient.
   "Why bother?" some will say. And the answer is that this is what how lovers behave. This is what it looks like to offer our love knowing, sometimes with certainty, that we will be betrayed. This is what it is to trust like a child with the courage of an adult. To love God more than this world.