​Father Chris – TWENTY-FIFTH SUNDAY ORD TIME 2021 – Homily

“The Child Still In Us”

When you were young, still just a child, what did you want to be when you grew up? An old adage used to say: doctor, lawyer, butcher, king. But our generation was more likely to say: ‘a teacher or writer, engineer, farmer, policeman, politician, businessman or accountant, actor, singer, dancer, artist, scientist or astronaut.’ Today, our children want to be help with climate change, enter the Olympics or become Canada’s next Singing or Dancing Idol’.   
 
Many of us were told we could be anything we wanted to be; that we should aim to be the best in whatever we did, and above all, make sure we sought the good things in life: money and the security it would bring us. We quickly learned the best things in life were ‘not’ free, but that our natural rights as human beings meant we were entitled to the best in life. In short, we had a right to everything we wanted by way of happiness, comfort, pleasure and leisure. … Love? Well, that was one of the frills that came with a good life of security, good credit, and solid employment. To seek the ‘higher’ and ‘better’ way in everything was the mantra of modern society.  
 
But as we got older, our hopes would be shaped by the opportunities or lack of them in our lives. Dreams and aspirations would often turn into practical pursuits or simply dissolve into the shadows of childhood memories. And this wasn’t a bad thing. It was just the ‘true reality’ of life showing itself to us as we matured.
 
The award-winning journalist, Roberta Walker, has been interviewing specialists on the ‘brain’ in a CBC radio series called, ‘Think About It’. One of her guests pointed out it takes much longer for us to mature than we realize. After the profound growth of our brain in the womb, our frontal cortex leaps into another unprecedented phase of growth during our mid-teens, causing much emotional mayhem until we are in our mid to late twenties. The innocence we once knew disappears, basically forever.  
Brain specialists and psychologists say we can never go back to that freedom, freshness, and openness of mind and thought again.  
 
This weekend we celebrated our second group of little ones receiving their First Holy Communion. At the end of the month, we hope to celebrate Confirmation for another group of students who have already begun the switch from child to adult.
 
This switch from child to emerging adult was easy to detect even in our on-line catechism lessons. The First Communion students were always animated, eager, adventurous, uncomplicated, speaking without pretense, malice or judgement.
In a zoom meeting with students, parents, teachers and myself, we asked what they liked and didn’t like about our new online catechism website for which I recorded some fun but informative video lessons using a giant teddy bear, ‘Bilbo’, as my assistant. One child said, ‘Well, Father, I think the only thing I didn’t like was sometimes you talk too much.” After some parental chastisement, he backtracked a little saying, “Well, it’s not that you talked too much, but there was an awful lot of talking.” Of course, it was all the ‘adults’ could do to keep from laughing out loud. (Later, ‘good’ friends of mine said, ‘They sure got that right, didn’t they?”) But it was also their keen interest in ‘Bilbo’. They wanted to know where he lived and how he was doing. Some were skipping rope with a newly invented Bilbo song. No adult could suspend their logic to relish such a noble creature as ‘Bilbo’ the bear.
 
However, the Confirmation students had already begun to lose this innocence.
In fact, even in Zoom meetings, the shyness brought on by physical and mental changes in their dispositions made them hide behind favourite images instead of showing their own faces. It proved pretty difficult to coerce them to reveal themselves, but also understandable given the life changes coming over them.      
 
So, are we wondering: what did I want to be, but where did I end up? Did I seek only money, security, even prestige at the expense of my spiritual needs? Or did I maintain balance in my life, giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but giving to God what is God’s, and without overriding someone else’s childhood dreams? Because we are all equal and must maintain that equality. The current re-emergence of the White Supremacist movement should itself give us great cause for alarm. We are equal to the person in prison, the drug addict, our trans-gender brothers and sisters, people of different colour, faith and culture. We will excel in this life even more if we practice, ‘the last comes first, and the first, last’ as Christ says it is in heaven.
 
We can’t return to our childhood, but like Christ suggests, let us learn from our childhood the joy of openness and acceptance, wonder and hope in things invisible, and delight in things visible which we must share-in equally with charity and love.
     
 – Rev Fr Christopher Tracey, Saint Joseph Parish, Saugeen Shores, Ontario