This past Thursday, the feast of St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus, I made a brief pilgrimage to the Carmel monastery of Port Tobacco, Maryland. In the sunlit chapel, my mind turned to the nature of children.
Most children hate waiting. When I was younger, my household would wait all Christmas morning for the rest of the family to assemble before opening presents. In condescension to my weakness, a unique allowance was made: a single gift set aside to open on Christmas Eve. After a few fleeting moments of gratification, I always felt a little guilty for insisting upon this special privilege.
Such childishness is really incidental to being childlike; that’s why society finds such petulance worthy of reproach in grownups. We mostly grow out of our hysterical aversion to waiting, though perhaps less than we’d like to admit. I’ve found a surprising amount of childishness in myself, waiting for certain Coronatide restrictions to be eased.
If there’s a part of childhood of which we’ve never fully let go, then so too our Lord tells us there’s a part of childhood we have let slip away: “Unless you change your lives and become like little children…” (Mt. 18:3)
For all their dislike of waiting, children are essentially—at the very crux of their nature—exemplars of it. In many respects, children can do nothing but wait: to be provided for, to be educated, and—most of all—to be loved. Out of this state of dependent reception, children learn trust and devotion.
Seeing little long-term benefit in trusting and even less in devotion, many adults discard their childlikeness as they leave the tutelage of their parents. Being childlike, however, is not merely a natural virtue; its quality is principally supernatural. We are never meant to leave our filial relationship with our Heavenly Father behind. He desires our trust and devotion. He wants us to wait upon his signal, which he sends in the form of the Third Person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit. He insists that we depend upon his love, hidden in the guise of common bread and wine at every Mass, in every tabernacle. He wills to direct all our desires. As St. Thérèse discovered, the little way of being a child is our title deed to an eternal inheritance.
Etymologically, to become a pilgrim is to become a foreigner. To make a pilgrimage, then, is to traverse the frontiers separating the workaday world of doing from another, more enchanted terrain immersed in the universe of divine things. The latter land belongs to the childlike.
With this image in mind, I found a certain fittingness that I didn’t catch a glimpse of any of the cloistered sisters whose Carmel I visited. My communion with them—and with their older sister Thérèse—transpired in our common waiting, however imperfectly, for our Father to give us the good things which he knows we need and which he has promised to give to his beloved children in that foreign land to which we are called. Such a communion need know no limit, either in membership or duration. The banquet of love is always occurring; we need only to enter.
Mr. McHenry is a 2nd Pre-Theology seminarian for the Archdiocese of Washington.