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| The Sacredness of Childhood; Glimpses of Foretaste of Joys of Heaven | |
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| Topic Started: Friday, 1. October 2010, 07:19 (182 Views) | |
| PJD | Friday, 1. October 2010, 07:19 Post #1 |
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The Sacredness of Childhood Fr. Daniel O’Leary Now and for ever more THE SPECIAL GRACES THAT PERMEATE CHILDHOOD MAY APPEAR LOST TO ADULTS, BUT IT IS POSSIBLE TO BELIEVE THAT CHILDREN GLIMPSE A FORETASTE OF THE JOYS OF HEAVEN Late summer evenings can make our childhood memories silently ambush us and carry us away to secret places. There are strange and subtle stirrings in the heart – sudden, unbidden glimpses, pressing invitations to revisit, for a fleeting moment, our past losses and joys. My mother warned me, even as a boy, about the later memories that would bless and burn within me. She spoke wistfully about the ways we mourn our unfulfilled dreams. How achingly right she was. Dylan Thomas in his “Poem in October” was no stranger to such grief: And I saw in the turning so clearly a child’s Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother Through the parables of sunlight And the legends of the green chapels And the twice fold fields of infancy That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine. It is difficult to write dispassionately about childhood. It is too sacred, too much intimately a part of us. There is a haunting kind of poignancy running through our memories, a touching pathos, the struggle to express something inexpressible and very beautiful. There is also a constant desire to return to that primal state as though everything afterwards was somehow a disappointment. Poets strive to capture those memories of childhood that carry shades of the numinous, of a familiarity with the divine, and then, of a gradual loss, in time, of that graced intimation. William Wordsworth believed that we are born “trailing clouds of glory” and that “heaven lies about us in our infancy”. Thomas Traherne remembered being “entertained like an angel” when “all time was eternity” and “knowledge was divine”. For Dylan Thomas, his childhood companions in “Fern Hill” were “Adam and maiden”. So it must have been, “he reflected,” after the birth of the simple light in the first spinning place….” In his poem “The Retreat”, Henry Vaughan’s hope is that “when this dust falls to the urn/In that state I came, return”. In one of his moving reflections, theologian Karl Rahner offers a more hopeful point of view. He holds that our childhood is not the elusive mirage of an unattainable heaven, a moment to be lived through and lost forever. It is, rather, each human being’s potential for beatitude, in this life and the next. Paradoxical as it may seem, we grow into the fullness of the childhood we once lived through. For him, the gifts and graces of our early years are the clearest and closest expression of God’s incarnate nature – and of our unaware and partial participation in it. He reflects on the child’s unknowing familiarity with the mystery that is denied to “the wise and clever”. Is this not why Jesus summed up his teaching about the kingdom of heaven in the vibrant symbol of a child? Rahner takes us an astonishing step further. He is convinced that this childhood is what we fully recover, completely possess, and ultimately freely celebrate in the playgrounds of heaven. “We do not move away from childhood in any real sense,” he writes. “We move towards the eternity of this childhood, to its definitive and enduring validity in God’s sight – a field which bears fair flowers and ripe fruits such as can grow in this field of childhood, and no other, and which will be carried into the storehouses of eternity.” Some people grow like a tree grows. A tree never loses the integral, authentic shape of itself. Like the child, the tree does not want to be anybody or anything else. It only wants to become more fully what it already is. It is this “being true to themselves” that people most resemble and worship God. In his poem “The Bright Field” (“of great price”) R.S. Thomas reflects this vision: ….It is the turning aside like Moses to the miracle of the lit bush, to a brightness that seemed as transitory as your youth once, but is the eternity that awaits you. There are many unique qualities in our childhood state and memories, but the grace of openness flows through them all. It is openness that allows wonder to steal in, and our dreams to steal out. It is in our openness, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, that we most resemble God. It is a vulnerable openness, this readiness to apprehend the invisible world, this recollection of an elusive heaven almost within our grasp. Such sacramental moments of openness have an eternal edge of expectancy to them, a reaching beyond our capacities, a yearning for gifts from beyond. John Betjeman remembers a moment of this excited anticipation. It was during a storm when the spring tide and blizzard united to force the sear to rush back up the lane near his childhood home. Warm in their waders, he and his friends waited for the wreckage of treasures to come swirling into reach. His poem “Trebetherick” ends with a touching prayer: Blessed be St. Enodoc, blessed be the wave, Blessed be the springy turf, we pray, pray to thee, Ask for our children all the happy days you gave, To Ralph, Vasey, Alastair, Biddy, John and me. I used to ask my mother what I was like when I was small. She said I was always celebrating something, and always wanting more than my head or heart or arms could hold. She compared me to the slua sidhe, the invisible faery-folk of Ireland who were always searching between two worlds – the real and the really real. I was one with nature then, she reflected. I clung to the high branches of the swaying trees when the Atlantic summer winds blew magic around our house in Sliabh Luachra, the Valley of the Rushes. There was music everywhere for my bare and dancing feet. I must have been living then in some kind of sacramental world. Everything was new, and everything was now, and everything was forever. And that is why I wanted to be a priest. And that was before everything changed……. But still the search goes on. Tablet columnist Jonathan Tulloch and his wife, Shirley, wrote and recited a poem to mark my recent Golden Jubilee. The final words of “Heaven is Seven” came to them, they said, like echoes from between two worlds: I will meet you On tomorrow’s dawn At the crossroad of Rathmore, At the parting of the world’s ways, And together we will wait for Father Christmas, Ice cream in Killarney, Woodbines behind the church wall, And the final morning’s lark singing above the field of great price. Daniel O’Leary, a priest of the Leeds Diocese, is based at Our Lady of Graces Presbytery, Tombridge Crescent, Kinsley, West Yorkshire WF9 5HA. Reprinted with permission* by The Tablet. [4th September 2010 Edn] Retyped by Catholic Cyberforum, a lay led UK based discussion group from their printed copy E. & O. E. * Permission granted by Ignatius Kusiak, Publisher, The Tablet Publishing Company Ltd., 1 King Street Cloisters, Clifton Walk, London W6 OGY website address http://www.thetablet.co.uk |
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| PJD | Friday, 1. October 2010, 07:54 Post #2 |
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I would just like to express my sincere thanks to Rose; who obtained permission from The Tablet for us to transcribe this profound essay by Fr. O'Leary. PJD |
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| Gerard | Saturday, 2. October 2010, 19:34 Post #3 |
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PJD mentioned that this post would fit here as well. being a typical academic I take the oportunity to plagiarise myself: It is abundantly clear from scripture that we will have bodies. Glorified bodies. So they are going to feel great. We know quite a lot about one such body - that of Jesus. He showed his pierced hands and feet to Thomas. This suggests to me that these are marks of glory and not of pain. We know that Jesus, after his ressurection, cooked and ate fish. He walked along a road and held conversations. Can your friend remember being a teenager and being totally and romantically in love? The feelings will be like that only magnified. And the feelings will be returned. Personally, I think worship will be unimaginably enjoyable. But not everyone can understand that concept. But I expect to do everything I enjoyed while on earth. Cycling, gardening, eating drinking socialising - you name it. Gerry |
| "The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998). | |
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| Gerard | Saturday, 2. October 2010, 19:38 Post #4 |
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I read and enjoyed the opening post. I was enjoying the poetry but thinking the poets were still not quite capturing it. I was then surprised to see how well Rahner captured it. Gerry |
| "The institutional and charismatic aspects are quasi coessential to the Church's constitution" (Pope John Paul II, 1998). | |
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| PJD | Saturday, 2. October 2010, 20:09 Post #5 |
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Thank you for obliging Gerry. For myself I am still studying it and finding it more difficult than I first thought. You see you try to condense into some form of analysis but it keeps, so to speak, shifting around - like choosing a sweet from a seemly ever extending table of options. PJD |
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| PJD | Saturday, 2. October 2010, 22:07 Post #6 |
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Since writing just above, I have just come out of the bath, wherein was reading Mark Dowd's article in 10.9.10 edn. of The Catholic Herald. Read this Gerry [T.S/Eliot]:- Oh! (sorry) and everyone:- words strain, crack and sometimes break, under the burden, under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still That is something coming near to what I was trying to convey. PJD [edit: the Dowd article was called The Real Benedict] Edited by PJD, Saturday, 2. October 2010, 22:08.
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| Rose of York | Saturday, 2. October 2010, 23:40 Post #7 |
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The article presents an idealised image of childhood. We tend to forget the bad bits, bury them in the recesses of our minds, and we joyfully remember the places, people and experiences that made us happy. Sadly some, in childhood, rarely if ever glimpse a foretaste of the joys of Heaven. How come my memories of a field opposite my parents house, a proper meadow with livestock and wild flowers, surface more accurately than those of the slum properties I used to see in some parts of the same town? One teacher who brought me great joy and encouragement is remembered, often. Another teacher is deep in my subconscious, it suits me to forget here. Maybe it is the will of God that we remember the innocence of childhood and if possible, forget any evil that befell us. |
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Keep the Faith! | |
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| PJD | Sunday, 3. October 2010, 09:12 Post #8 |
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"Maybe it is the will of God that we remember the innocence of childhood and if possible, forget any evil that befell us. " Some theologians have taken up this in a parallel manner regarding the joys of Heaven i.e. what happens when meeting persons who we didn't approve of in our earthly life. The suggestion, taking for example the teacher you would rather forget Rose, is that that teacher had good points which you did not see or did not know of. These will be glorified to such an extent as to immaterialize any other considerations in the memory - thereby maintaining perfect happiness whosoever you may meet in the afterlife. Obviously we are just guessing, but that seems reasonable to me. PJD |
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7:53 PM Jul 11