“To overcome
the world we must become children. To become a child we must fold our
consciousness upon the Divine Infant who is the center of our being, who is our
being itself. All that we are must be absorbed in Him; whatever remains of self
must be the cradle in which He lies.” (The
Little Way of the Infant Jesus by Caryll Houselander)
To become a
child…. something so simple, and yet so difficult to attain. It basically all
boils down to trust (it seems most everything does). Children have an incomparable amount of trust.
They don’t worry about anything - they trust they will get fed when they are
hungry, rocked to sleep when they are tired; they even trust that they will be
caught when their fun-loving dad throws them in the air! They have no fear.
They KNOW that all of their needs will be met.
Jesus tells
us to do the same, to live, to love, to trust like a little child because HE is
taking care of all of our needs - both temporal & spiritual. There is interplay
between the two that can be difficult to understand or trust. Sometimes being deprived of some temporal things is for the attainment of a spiritual need,
or vice versa. This interplay often seems more like some sort of confusing
juxtaposition, but the thing is: we aren’t meant to know & understand it
all. That’s what trust is - believing that what’s supposed to happen, will
happen! And that the needs we seek (and sometimes the ones we don’t even know that
we need), will be met!
We need to
snuggle up with Our Little Infant King… to make ourselves small enough to fit in
the cradle beside Him… and to let Him - the most Loving One - teach us how to
be like Him. We learn to be like someone by spending a lot of time with them.
We can all notice how, after spending time with people that we love, we start
to say or do things like them; we pick up on their tones, mannerisms, different
phrases, etc. If we spend time with Jesus like that - in the Blessed Sacrament,
in His Word in the Sacred Scriptures, in contemplation of His life, in our
daily prayers & thoughts of Him throughout our day, we will become more
like Him; like the little God-Child in the manger. We will have more of Him
& less of us, so that (as Houselander points out) whatever little is left
of us becomes His cradle; that the ‘us’ in us, melts away so that only HE
remains. As St. John the Baptist says, “He must increase; I must decrease… the
one who comes from Heaven is above all. He testifies to what He has seen and
heard, but no one accepts His testimony. Whoever does accept His testimony
certifies that God is trustworthy.”
(John 3:30-33)
By our
acceptance of Christ & His word of testimony, we certify that Our God is
worthy of our trust! Do we live so that these words are true? Do we trust like
a child, the child that we need to be in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven?
Where do we
start? How do we live so as to love & trust as a child? It’s simple: start
by spending time with the Perfect Child. Crawl into the cradle of the manger
with Him; sit with Him & let Him teach you how to be like Him.
