Unless you change and become like little children you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. So what does Jesus have in mind when he holds up the heart of a child as an ideal? The quality of heart, seen in a child, that Jesus most challenges us to imitate is that of acknowledging powerlessness and helplessness. A child is powerless. It cannot provide for itself, feed itself, or take care of itself. For a child, if mum and dad do not get up and make breakfast, there will be no breakfast! A child knows dependence, knows that life comes from beyond itself, that it is not self-providing and self-sufficient.
But how can this be undone? How can we “change and become like little children”? Nature, God, and circumstance often do it for us. Here is an example: Several years ago, I went to the funeral of a ninety year-old man. While he had always been an honest man, a good man, a family man, and a man of faith, he had also, at least up until the years shortly before his death, been a particularly strong man, fiercely independent, proud of his self-sufficiency, and not infrequently hard on others and cantankerous in his dealings with them. His son, a priest, preached the funeral mass and said this in his homily:
Scripture tells us that the sum of years of a man’s life is seventy, eighty for those who are strong. But my dad lived for ninety years. Why those extra ten years? Well, it’s no mystery: In my dad’s case, God needed ten extra years to mellow him. He wasn’t ready to die at eighty; he was still too strong, too independent, too self-reliant. But the last ten years did their work on him: He lost his wife, his health, much of his independence, his place in society, and his firm grip on life. And that mellowed his soul. He died ready to grasp a stronger hand.
We have a choice: We can do this process deliberately, on purpose (so to speak), or we can fiercely guard our strength and sense of self-sufficiency and wait for nature, God, and circumstance to do it for us. [Except from Ron Rolheiser’s “The Heart of a Child” August 2008]