One night over drinks in the Jesuit community of Gonzaga University, one of the members of the community made a comment: “Boy, oh boy, nothing much has changed! We still make rules out of the hardness of our hearts!”
He was referring to the encounter over divorce between Christ and the Pharisees in this Sunday’s Gospel. We read the same Gospel that night in the community Mass in Gonzaga.
On my first year as high-school principal, there was one rule or policy that caught my attention. The policy pertained to freshmen students who were accepted into the high school on an admission appeal. The policy stated that these students, after one year in high school, cannot take summer classes or cannot appeal any failing mark. In short, they must pass the freshman year clean.
I wondered about the policy because ordinary students could appeal a failing mark, take summer or repeat the year. I argued with our deliberations board and eventually the School Council, the highest policy-making body of the high school, that once we accept the appeal students, they should be treated in the same way we did ordinary students.
I argued that their status as being on probation academically for first year ought to be more supportive than punitive. We already knew they had difficulty getting in and would most probably need more time to adjust. Following this line of thinking, we should at least allow them to appeal to either pass or take summer.
Resistance
There was much resistance to the proposal. Since no one could seem to explain the logic behind the harshness, as I put it, of the policy, I asked that the history of the policy be reviewed.
The review eventually led us to the School Council meeting years earlier that passed the policy. Once we had traced it to a specific meeting, we were able to look at the minutes of the meeting and all the deliberations that led to the policy’s approval.
The minutes clearly showed that the policy was set to protect the principal from further pressure by appeal students. I could still recall my reaction when I learned about this: “But why should I protect myself from my students? Should the principal not be the one to protect his students?”
This piece of information made it easier for me to get the School Council to revoke the policy and come up with a more supportive one. I remember that this became one of the turning points in renewing the culture of the school toward a fundamental point: that the primary stakeholders of the school are the students, and that the school exists primarily for them.
Infidelity
Christ’s exchange with the Pharisees in this Sunday’s Gospel reminded me of this experience in my work. How often do we come up with rules “out of the hardness of our hearts”? I would like to think that what Christ critiqued is not the law per se, but the hardness of our hearts.
This hardness really reveals the infidelity of our hearts, how we veer away from God’s original intention or purpose.
While this passage was addressing a specific issue, the way Christ dealt with the issue is food for thought as well. How often have our unfaithful hearts distorted the original intention or purpose of so many matters in our life?
Christ makes us constantly confront what is essential. Christ makes us come face to face with what is essential in us, in our life, in our work, in our relationships, in our relationship with God. He gives a simple formula, so to speak: “Whoever does not accept the kingdom of God like a little child will not enter it.”
The eyes and heart of a child make us see what is essential. The eyes and heart of a child make us see things in their simplicity. What is it in a child that gives him or her this gift?
Voyage of discovery
There is a chapter in the book I cited in last week’s article (Life Entrepreneurs) called “Awakening to Opportunity.” The chapter’s section on “Waking Up to Possibility” opens with a quote from Marcel Proust: “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.”
This is what it means to be like a child again—but perhaps not “new” eyes, but “renewed” eyes.
The section also points out: “Human beings are wired to box things in… The ruts of our routines grow deeper as we grow older, making it even harder to change the way we do things.”
This was what Christ criticized in the Pharisees—their hardness of heart, the infidelity of their hearts that made them blind to God’s purpose and intention. The Pharisees and company believed they had the answers to everything. They believed they knew God and had the monopoly about His plan and will. In fact, they had boxed in God.
No limits
The beginner’s mind is the mind of child. This is why Christ chose the image of the child as our ticket to the kingdom of God.
Children are filled with awe and wonder. For children there are no limits. Children believe in heroes. Those heroes—Spiderman, Bro, their father, their older brother, their teacher, God, etc.—can make things happen, can make things right.
Children are helpless too—innocently helpless. Perhaps this helps them trust others. This helps children believe that others are there to do good. Thus, they allow others to be good. No, maybe they inspire others to do good because of their innocent helplessness, because of this trust they give others.
“Life Entrepreneurs” cites Pablo Picasso’s observation that “’All children are artists; the problem is how they remain artists when they grow up.’”
The book continues: “When we cross into the land of adulthood, we start obsessing over all the ways things can go wrong. We talk ourselves out of a dream or a vision of a different future because of its complications and impracticalities.”
Seeing the heroic
This Sunday’s Gospel is a call for us to renew the eyes and heart of the child in each one of us. It asks us to set aside our hardness of heart to see, to hear and feel once more God’s intention, purpose and plan; to see the heroic, to hear the call to greatness, to feel the grace and love that abound in life.
This Sunday’s Gospel reminds us that there is a bit of the Pharisees and company in us with our own infidelity of heart, in the way we continue to “make rules out of the hardness of our hearts.”
The Gospel invites the child in us to trust and believe in heroes and allow heroes to do the good they can do to make the world a better place. The child in us allows God to be God again.
When Christ says “To such belong the kingdom of God,” we must remember that, yes, while he is referring to the kingdom of God in heaven, he’s also telling us that this kingdom is in our midst. The kingdom of God in our midst belongs to the children and the childlike.