The Fourteenth Sunday of the Year - July 3, 2005

            I have said before that I do not want to be young again; but I could almost -- almost -- be a child again, to recapture some of that thrill of beholding the big, wide world around us with that wonder that is the very beginning of all philosophy – to be enraptured, as I think most children are, with being, existence itself.  But we all “grow up” and forget these childhood dreams and think them safely locked away in the past, because we are adults now; we don’t have time for such daydreams.  There are more important things that we must occupy ourselves with.  Or so we think.  What, really is more important than existence? Than being? 

            “I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to little ones,” prayed our Lord.  Revealed them to little ones.  How is that? we ask.  Well, children are the ones who know, in an inarticulate way, but they know that surely this big thing called life and existence cannot be reduced to something as small as a career, something so tiny as a house, a car, a boat, fancy clothes or a vacation overseas.  Children know.  They take over a house, what their parents have slaved to buy, and they turn it into a whole other world of the imagination, into a whole universe of the fantastic.  Children don’t care who has the deed to the yard around their parents’ house or to the small patch of woods across the street.  They move about in them as owners and transform a small parcel of property into a kingdom.  They take the labor of the office, the factory or kitchen, mimic it and turn it into play.  

            How unchildlike our culture has become.  And yet not really mature either.  Adolescent might be a good way of describing it.

            A while back I was having a farewell dinner with a young friend of mine, and he was sharing with me some of his reading in modern philosophy.  And he questioned, what he called the “fairness” of how it is that we all of a sudden find ourselves existing.  Can we not, he asked me, can we not simply reject this so-called gift of being, of existence?  We weren’t around to ask for it; but here we are in it.  Can we not justifiably say “no” to it, check out of life as it were?  I answered by quoting to him from that first of modern men, Hamlet, the so very confused and indecisive character of Shakespeare: 

“O, that this too, too solid flesh would melt,

Thaw, and resolve itself into a dew!

Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d

His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter!  O God! O God!

How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!

Fie on’t!  O fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden,

That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature

Possess it merely.  That it should come to this!”

            There is the tired -- and so wearying -- philosophy of the modern world.  There is the “sophisticated” adult speaking, who can no longer wonder.  There is Hamlet, the death of the child.  And yet, Hamlet, like all of us, is still too human to be so fixed against the truth, and he says in a moment when life has come rushing back to him, he says to the philosophy student, his friend Horatio, “There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

            There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in all our reductions of life to the material, to possessing this or that, to being popular in this or that crowd, in holding power over others.  There is much more, so very much more.  And children, all those who are childlike, know this.  And it is to them, to those who refuse to stop wondering at things, that God reveals ever more about the source of this wonder, namely Himself.          

            This is what St. Paul is getting at in the second reading, when he writes “We are not debtors to the flesh, to live according to the flesh.  For if you live according to the flesh, you will die, but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live.”  There is nothing really more deathly than my young friend’s imbibing of a philosophy that rejects life and the wonder of human existence.  There is nothing more death-dealing than pretending that life is merely a looking after one’s possessions, a kind of life that is oblivious to the possibilities our Lord so often spoke about, possibilities of glory.  That glory-less existence, that’s the life according to the flesh, as St. Paul describes it.  And we all know the saying, “the way of all flesh,” and that is death.  The flesh grows old and dies.  And my young friend, Hamlet, as well as most modern philosophers despair because all they have to live for is over so quickly.

            But not for the child, the childlike.  There are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in most modern thought.  And I, as a priest, have felt no greater joy than in awakening people to that fact, to see someone, anyone, a young person light up with the realization, to grow eager with the understanding that there are things in our Catholic faith undreamt of in the everyday “adult” world of work and buying and selling:  things so astounding in their splendor that they stir up in one’s heart a joy unspeakable tinged with fear at so magnificent a truth.  These are the things of God revealed, as Jesus said, only to the childlike, to the little ones, to those who wonder at so great a thing as is life.  And if I, if I as a priest have led anyone in this place to begin to wonder again at so great a God as is the Father of Jesus Christ, to wonder again at so rich a treasure as is our Faith, to be childlike again and so full of the knowledge of the truth -- then I can surely say, that salvation is not far from that man or woman, and I have well-nigh accomplished my task.  As our Lord Himself said, after He had set a child in the midst of His disciples and warned them – and us – that only those who become like this child will ever enter into the kingdom of heaven.  “For the kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said in no uncertain terms, “belongs to such as these.”