I started working part-time at the school that currently employs me about a year ago. Most of my work then involved helping in the Kindergarten classroom, but I also occasionally helped at afternoon dismissal, escorting kids from all grades to their parents’ cars. My interactions with those kids, not the Kindergartners, were always brief, too much so to be the basis of any relationships with those students. I hardly thought about these encounters after they ended. There might be a touch of the hand and a wish for them to have a nice afternoon, and then they were gone from me.
One morning, I was standing in the hallway as students arrived when a second grade boy approached me. I didn’t know his name then; I had helped him to his car a few weeks before that but he was almost completely silent the whole time. Some kids are just like that.
He walked with a real sense of purpose directly to me, and looked up with his big eyes out from which he seemed to peer from deep inside himself. Without context or preface, his tone very matter-of-fact, he said, “They moved my seat and now I can see the board better.”
I didn’t quite know what to say, but it seemed to me that for this boy, this was a matter of great importance, practically sacred, so I went with my gut: I had to gas him up. “Hey, dude!” I said. “That’s so awesome! Good for you! Think of how much great stuff you can learn now!”
“Yeah,” he said shortly, having said his piece.
“That’s, like, way cool. Thank you for telling me. I’m so happy for you. I’ll see you later.”
“Yeah,” he said again. And that was that.
I was struck, in that interaction, by how this kid fully admitted me into his world, how I existed to him in a real and three-dimensional way, to such an extent that it was of the utmost importance that he tell me about his new seat in the classroom: his good news. I was touched and honored to have a place of any significance whatever in the thoughtful, teeming little city of his mind.
Tonight, I went to Mass. It’s Christmas! I love Christmas Mass, the altar decked out with wreaths and lights and poinsettias, the homilies about hope and joy and—it sometimes hits me with such force—this real event that transpired in our history, our infinite God coming to us in fragility and quietude to be a kid who played in the dirt of this earth. I love, too, at Christmas Mass, the big families with the kids dressed to the nines in sequins and silks who squirm and cry and make a mess of the pristine sanctity of the church’s usual soundscape. I used to be very ornery about these families: why can’t you make your kid sit still? Don’t you know I’m trying to pray here? But Christ said to let the children come to Him. I appreciated that, at the church where I attended Mass, there was no mothers and babies room: no, even the crying ones should be there with everyone else in the sanctuary. We need to avoid making places of worship into sanitized, adults-only spaces. Let those yucky bugs cry all through the holiest of hours. (Or, alternately, let me hold your babies at Mass, please! Please God!) Whatever they’re saying, they’re telling the truth.
I digress. One of the reasons I so love the restless children at Mass is that they invite me to go deeper within myself, into the innermost chamber of my heart to pray with God as if He and I are the only ones who exist. Today, with all the noisy families around me, in the quiet room of my soul, it occurred to me how loving and touching it was that Christ, the night He knew He would die, fed His Apostles, giving them food and drink, and also telling us how to celebrate His death in the form of bread and wine: sustenance for both their bodies and their hearts, because He wanted them to live past Him, and live well.
When I was in my earlier twenties, I went through a period of thinking of God as a Divine Absurdist, that everything in this whole world was arbitrary and existed only because God said it should be so and for no other reason. A line of thought along those lines crept into my head tonight: why, Lord? What did it matter? It seems to me, if I had been in His shoes (as if!), knowing that I would die, I wouldn’t give a damn about anything. I’d become catatonic. If I did anything at all, I wouldn’t take the care to do it well. Who cares! Into the valley of death I would march, sullenly, a sloppy brat about it all. Christ, however, fed His followers, and told them how to commemorate Him, thoughtfully, sweetly. And the simple answer to why that was came to me tonight quietly and without fanfare: He did it because He loved them. He loves us. This is the centering ethic around which all of creation coheres and by which it makes sense of itself. “God so loved the world” is not simply a declaration of fact; it is a profound ontological claim about who we are and what on earth is going on.
Nothing makes sense otherwise on a scale of any size—even, and perhaps especially, the personal. I have in my life a series of symbols that mean a great deal to me, and whenever I need His guidance, He finds a way to deliver one of those symbols to me in a new and surprising manner, showing me His way. And who am I, that I should have inside jokes with God Himself? Who knows; He loves me. It is what it is.
I don’t have too much else to say today, except that I have so much to say that I could probably write until midnight, but I have people to see, and it would be the same thing over and over again: God came here on human terms. I heard someone say once that for us to see conflict arise amongst fish in a bowl, turn ourselves into a fish, and enter the water to save them all would be more reasonable and more fathomable than the Incarnation; the difference between fish and us is, after all, finite. But our boundless God, who hails from Who knows where, came to us in our form, so we could see and know Him, and talk to Him, and laugh with Him, a foreshadowing of eternity when we will, please, please, be with Him and able to close the immeasurable distances between one another. He allows Himself to be real to us, and like the boy at my school, He need not announce Himself or give preface when we encounter Him, because there He is, right there with us, and somehow, He’s known us all along.
Merry Christmas. He loves me. He loves you.
Hi Joan! Thanks for the article, it's sweet and a nice way to make connections with God. Hope your Christmas is very enjoyable.