Today's readings can be found here.
Reflection
“I give praise to you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”
There is no other way to see God than to make yourself childlike. The Gospel isn’t inviting us to diminish ourselves but to assume the best perspective with which to view life. Indeed, since human beings are created by God, whenever we remember our finiteness we begin to see things in a new way, one that is truer and more profound.
When on the contrary we play God, being infected with delusions of omnipotence, we lose contact with reality and no longer are able to see things as they are.
For example, if we all remembered that we will die someday, this memory of our mortality would lead us to live with more humility and focus on essentials. We would give more importance to things that we tend to neglect and we’d understand that every good thing that we ought to do, we should do today, not tomorrow.
But since we ignore the idea of death and we think we’re immortal, our life suffers from a structural blindness that makes us live for foolish things and lose sight of what matters.
Jesus says that “the childlike” are the ones to whom God reveals things because they don’t use the things God reveals to them to get a swollen head, but to savor the joy they bring.
Only “the childlike,” for example, enjoy a sunset, or the flight of a bumblebee, or the laughter of a child, or the gaze of the people they love. Only “the childlike” accept the sufferings of life without transforming them into resentment, and know how to weep without despair, and accept boundaries without feeling judged by them.
But this privilege is a gift from God that is born from the choice to be a creature of God through and through, without playing God, which is the root of all pride.
~
Father Luigi Maria Epicoco is a priest of the Aquila Diocese and teaches Philosophy at the Pontifical Lateran University and at the ISSR 'Fides et ratio', Aquila. He dedicates himself to preaching, especially for the formation of laity and religious, giving conferences, retreats and days of recollection. He has authored numerous books and articles. Since 2021, he has served as the Ecclesiastical Assistant in the Vatican Dicastery for Communication and columnist for the Vatican's daily newspaper L’Osservatore Romano.
