Only in stillness do we become aware of Father God as a living, guiding presence.  Only in the stillness do become aware of mother God as an an unconditionally loving presence.  Only in the silence do we come to know our true identity as eternal children of God.  As you enter into the silence, the special stillness that must be realized to know God and to know yourself you enter into the place of peace of soul. Draw near to God and God will draw near to you and keep your mind, body and soul attuned. God hears every prayer and fulfills every good desire. Silently affirm: I draw near to God and God draws near to me keeping my mind, body and Soul attuned.

In the silence of prayer, you are aware of nothing but God’s presence. All doubt, fear, and the demands of your world are cast out by the power of your own indwelling Christ child.  In prayer, you are consciously unified with Father God and the source of all wisdom and guidance.  And you are unified with Mother God as the Source of your being so that your mind, emotions, and body are harmonized. Through Mother/Father God all needs are fulfilled for God is at once the demand and the supply. Knowing this and practicing the presence is the joy of spiritual life. An unspeakable wholeness that is found only in the silence.  Enter there now….

It is a joy to pray together and to seek the stillness that leads to your oneness with God. Throughout this day and throughout the upcoming week draw near to God and God will draw near to you and keep your mind, body and soul attuned. Affirm: I draw near to God and God draws near to me keeping my mind, body and soul attuned. God hears every prayer and fulfills every good desire.

Dear God, be thou my vision, my wisdom and my true word. You are my great father and mother and I thy true son.  Thou in me dwelling and I with thee one.  I turn to the healing, guiding, loving presence of God and my life is blessed and my needs are fulfilled. 

Thank you mother father God.  Amen.

SOUL GROWTH OFFERED BY FAMILIES:  PART 2- FATHER, MOTHER, CHILD

Last week was part 1 of a 2 part series on the Care of the Soul and in it I shared that the ancient meaning of the word ‘Family’ is  the ‘nest’ into which a ‘Soul’ is born, nurtured and then released into life. We also discussed that Soul is not a thing.  It is a level of experiencing our lives and ourselves at the level of the  6th chakra. Soul is that part of us which touches our hearts and opens the door of our mind so that Spirit and all the blessings of Spirit can flow into and through us. When we have a connection to our Soul we can demonstrate the good we want, the joy we want, the beauty, success and prosperity we want because our good isn’t dependent on what’s going on out there.  It isn’t dependent on the family or anyone or anything else, that’s the good news of the Gospels. God didn’t leave it up to someone else to determine your good. He left it up to you and me to individually draw near to him.  We also looked at the word ‘dys.’ The word ‘Dys’ used in dysfunctional is the Old Roman name for the mythological underworld. Soul is an aspect of our humanity that enters life from below.  This week we are exploring three important aspects of the Soul and thus our own Soul work:  Father, Mother and child. In culture today we are told to think that absent parents are a new problem, especially absent fathers. But this is an old problem and any problem that just won’t go away is revealing a Soul Need or a need for Soul Discovery. Mystic Edna St. Vincent Millay put it this way:  “It is not true that life is first one thing and then another.  Life is usually the same thing over and over and over again.”

1. Let’s begin by looking at the Father aspect of the Soul as revealed in Greek Mythology. The classic story of the father aspect of Soul is found in an epic poem attributed to Homer called “The Odyssey.” The story is about Odysses (Ode-ysEEus) trying to reclaim his fatherhood, a wife longing for her husband, and a son in search of his lost father. At the beginning of the story Odysseus is sitting on a seashore in the midst of his unplanned travels following a long and difficult war, wishing to be home with his son, his father, and the mother of his children. The story doesn’t begin by focusing on his great, manly and heroic adventures. It begins by focusing on his longing for home, the melancholy he feels over missing his family and he asks a famous question: “Does any person know who his father is?”  This is a question that we’re to reflect on in the different periods of our life:  “If my father is dead, or if he was absent and cold, or if he was a tyrant, or if he abused me, or if he was wonderful but is not there for me now, then who is my father now?”  Where do I go to get the ‘fathering’ feelings of protection, authority, confidence and the know-how, and  the examples of wisdom that I need in order to live my life?

The need to ask and find an answer to this question is then reinforced by the image of Odysseus’ son sitting on the opposite sea shore looking out across the water for his father, upset and worried because his father has been gone so long that his mother’s father is urging her to remarry and there are suitors vying for her affections.   The family is in crisis as a result of the absence of father.  So we have this image in mind of father and son both longing for the same thing-the return home. In other words, at the very instant that we feel the confusion of a fatherless life and wonder where he could be, the father aspect of Soul has been evoked.  (Jesus used this same image in his parable of the Prodigal Son.) During this time of separation, Homer tells us, Odysseus wife, Penelope, is at home weaving a shroud for Odysseus’ father and every night she unravels what she has woven. 

This is the great mystery of the Soul:  “Whenever something is being accomplished, it is also in some way being undone.” So, why don’t the Gods look compassionately on this broken family and allow Odysseus to return home? What possible value is there in this father taking 10 years (however long it takes) on the sea and surviving his risky adventures, before he can return home and restore peace?

In the telling of the saga, we learn that the meaning of this 10 years of time is (however long it takes) that you aren’t transformed into a father instantaneously just because you have a child. It is the long, adventure-filled journey that transforms Odysseus from a man and warrior, into a father including a journey into the land of the dead where he meets his recently departed friends, his mother and other important figures of his history.  A true father is someone whose perspective, knowledge, wisdom and morals are rooted in the underworld and tied to the forefathers, the elders who have gone before and who have created the culture that the father now takes into his hands. In many traditional cultures a person becomes an adult by hearing the secret stories of the community that have been handed down over generations. Black elk talks about this as a part of growing up a Sioux in his memoirs “Black Elk Speaks.”  He says that sometimes the neophyte has to endure ordeals designed to draw out the adult. The point is to stir the young person so deeply that he or she experiences a major transformation of character.

One final point about fatherhood: While Odysseus is away from home engaged in his own education about fatherhood, he has appointed a stand-in by the name of Mentor, who cares for the house and teaches his son. Mentor teaches but does not try to replace Odysseus. There are times when we all need mentors who act as father figures and who keep the notion of father alive in us and who instill the ideals of fatherhood without embodying it by trying to replace the father. 

2. Now let’s look at the Mother aspect of Soul:  The Greeks told another story about a mythic family, a story so highly revered that is was ritualized in the Eleusinian mysteries. It was the story of the Divine Mother, Demeter who loses her beloved daughter, Persephone. This myth informs us that sometimes you can discover Soul and the Underworld against your will or even by accident.  Persephone is just out picking flowers for her mother when Hades sees her, snatches her and drags her into the Underworld against her will. The point is that every parent knows how easy it is for children to be attracted to people and activities that are dangerous and that threaten to lead their children into dark places. Every parent knows that no matter how we try to protect our children the temptations and threats are so numerous that we can’t be with them at all times and protect them from all things.

Persephone’s mother, Demeter shows us the ultimate test of a mother:  even as she affirms attachment to her own wishes and dreams for her child, she remains loyal to Persephone as she goes through her forced transformative experience.  She waits for her daughter to re-emerge from the darkness and when she does, she embraces her warmly revealing that Mother love has a special quality. Mother protects her child and yet knows her child must be exposed to darkness in order to grow. Of course, our ideal for our children would be a life with no darkness but that’s not how life works.  Christianity gives us the image of the Virgin Mary as a comforting Madonna and it also gives us the image of her sacred heart surrounded in thorns and bleeding, the image of the sorrowful mother who witnessed the tragedy of her son’s crucifixion and his ultimate triumph in resurrection. 

In the story, when Demeter finds out that Zeus has approved her daughter’s abduction, she decides to go into the world as a mortal and takes an ordinary job as a nanny in a household as Eleusis, a town near Athens.  In today’s culture this is equivalent to saying “Lose yourself in your work or get your mind focused on something else” when a visitor from Hades has left us feeling depressed or disturbed. From Demeter’s point of view the abduction of her daughter is an outrageous violation of the mother child relationship but from Zeus’ point of view, from the wisdom of divine fatherhood, it’s seen as a divine necessity.  It is the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us wholeness.
In her job as nanny, Demeter is given an infant boy to care for and each night she anoints him with oil, breathes on him and places him in a fire in order to make him immoral. When his human mother sees what’s happening, she screams in terror.  Demeter becomes very angry at the mortal mother’s failure to understand and shouts:  “You don’t know when fate is bringing you something good or something bad.’ (Ha! the listener is urged to think, listen to yourself Demeter!) This is the basic theme in the story of Zeus and Hades, the Lord of Life and the Lord of Death and good advice from the mother of mothers. To have a whole perspective, we must understand that sometimes things that look dangerous from a mortal point of view may be beneficial from a greater perspective “You meant it for evil, God meant it for good.”

The myth of Demeter and Persephone teaches that mothering is not a simple matter of taking care of the immediate needs of another. It is a recognition that each individual has a special character, an unique fate and unique qualities of Soul that must be safeguarded and explored even at the risk of losing ordinary assurances of safety and normality. The myth reveals that there is a difference between human and divine mothering.  In the myth, Demeter reveals her divinity and asks that a temple be built in her honor and we go from Demeter as mortal nanny to Demeter as revered goddess.

In practical terms, whenever we sense that we are overdoing it as mothers or being too sensitive to the needs of others, it is an indication that we need to shift gears inside ourselves. It may be time to recognize and honor that a greater mother is caring for the welfare of our children in ways that are unseen and beyond our comprehension. The myth instructs us to evoke the spirit of Demeter at these times rather than trying to take that role upon ourselves – the role of ‘god or goddess’ in our child’s life. 

Even though Persephone returns every spring, she is pictured in art on her throne seated next to Hades meaning that she has an eternal place of honor in the underworld representing certain kinds of experiences about which we talk in a specific way. For example, most of us can probably tell stories of Persephone experiences that include resurrection saying, “I got through that period of my life, I survived and now I’m a better person for it.” 

What got us through that really tough time?  Divine Mother, as the profound maternal feeling in us for life, continuity and fruitfulness. We all have this Mother principle as an aspect of our Soul which we feel as a deep seated love of life and its possiblies. We feel that love of life most intensely when we are in the midst of a life experience and it feels as if our very life and welfare is being threatened.

People who don’t understand the Soul Principle of journeying into the darkness metaphorically, sometimes literally take their own lives, in an effort to live life more fully. They commit suicide in an effort to experience a greater sense of freedom. They make an very unskilled effort of running toward life by embracing death rather than journeying into the darkness metaphorically. In the ancient world celebrations of Demeter, the celebrants at Eleusis would hold a shoot of grain in their hands and recall that life continues in a world penetrated by all forms of death. So we have talked about father’s and mothers.

3. The third image offered in Soul Growth is the image of Child/holy Child/ Christ Child - Christmas is the celebration of Jesus as an infant and as divinity entering into the human arena.  The story of the divine child is common to many religions, suggesting not only the childhood of an aspiring God, but also the divinity of childhood. 

Mythology from cultures around the world tell of the special child abandoned by its parents, raised in the wild or by foster parents: one example is Hercules, another is Moses who was placed in a basket made of reeds and put afloat on a river.

There is an aspect of the child in these stories that is utterly innocent, helpless and exposed to fate, time and conditions. This completely vulnerable exposure is what allows the child to become someone new and powerful.  Our own exposure to human life is both a threat and an opportunity and as the myths reveal it is in those moments when we feel or appear to be the most defenseless, that we are in fact being prepared for a very special role in life. As we learn from the story of the Buddha’s parents, who tried to protect him from all human suffering; full Buddhahood requires the compassion that evolves by seeing all sorts of human suffering.

At the scene of the nativity, the father, mother, shepherds, kings, animals all bow to the child.  The infant child is honored because we expect him or her to grow up and become something special. The infant child is honored specifically because it is not grown up. 

Every day we hear or use phrases like, “I’m being very immature’.  This is ‘dis’ ing the child and it is a form of a self-criticism of what is perceived as a childish or primitive feeling.  It’s saying “I feel uncomfortable with this feeling and I want to grow out of it.” The trick is to say that simply as a matter of fact and not as a criticism of the child.  “I am being immature because immaturity is a natural part of my total nature.”  

Or we might say, “This is an old problem, going back to childhood.” Again, we’re thinking of childhood as something to grow out of- something that is the cause of all of our present troubles. If only our childhood would have been different. The rejection of our childhood is simply another way to reject ourselves. Sometimes we hear adults say, I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.”   No matter how lightly this comment is made the feeling that is behind it is inferiority. ‘What is wrong with me?  I should be a success by now.  I should be making plenty of money.  I should be settled.’ 

The child is eternally present and full of weakness and strengths.  These moments signal a soul reflecting on its fate and wondering about its future. Feeling the ‘smallness’ and inadequacy of the child can open us to our divine father and mother. It can open us to the unfolding of our own potentiality and to the child aspect of our nature that is needed in order to be teachable enough to be transformed.

The child’s unknowing is the fertile ground that the grown man Jesus talks about. In the Gospel stories, the child Jesus is separated from his parents on a trip to Jerusalem, and he is found discussing theology with the Rabbis in the temple.

This story is reminding us not only of the specialness of the man Jesus but of the special intelligence of the child, yet unformed by adulthood, and the fixed ideas of adulthood and yet so wise. In the 15 century, theologian Nicolas of Cusa wrote about the importance of ‘educated ignorance.’  He said, “We have to find ways to unlearn those things that screen us from the perception of profound truths.  We have to once again achieve the child’s unknowing because we have been made so smart.”

Zen Buddhism recommends not losing the ‘beginner’s mind’,  so important for living in the now moment. Jesus said, “Unless you can become “like children” you shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven.”  In each of us, there are childlike qualities that never grow up, and that we never grow out of like wonder and excitement, hope, and the ability to be teachable. 

The Greek word ‘Educare’ from which we get the word Education means to ‘draw out.’  We seem to think this means to draw out of childhood, rather than thinking of it as drawing out the innate, natural wisdom and talents of the child itself. A child already has God given talents and intelligence that need to be drawn out from within. Child wisdom is different from adult wisdom, but it is equally important.  As we begin to care for our own Soul we begin to appreciate the roles of father, mother and child the soul plays in our lives.

In closing I want to share a story to remind you that you are personally responsible for making a connection with your own soul so that you can receive all of its wonderful gifts.  A husband and wife went to see a doctor because the husband wasn’t feeling well. The doctor ran a bunch of tests, ordered some x-rays and then told the man to go and put his clothes back on. While he did this, the doctor invited the man’s wife into his office to discuss the results and said, “Your husband has a really serious problem and he needs your help.She had been married to the man for over 30 years and wanted to do whatever she could to help.  So she said, “Tell me what to do.” And she took out a pen and piece of paper so she could write it down exactly.

The 1st thing I want you to do is to wake him up in the morning with a good, hot tasty, healthy breakfast already on the table.

2nd I want you to love that man and perk him up and send him off to work each morning feeling good.

3rd At lunchtime, I want him to return home to another hot, tasty, nutritious meal.  Have the house in order. If he has been having a bad time that morning, jolly him out of it.  Build him up, fix him up and send him back out into the world. 4th When he comes home for dinner.  Have the children in bed, the house clean, candles on the table and be wearing one of your sexiest outfits. Don’t’ make him take out the garbage or do any chores.  Just let him sit in front of the TV after dinner and read the paper or flip through the channels.  I want you to love and mellow that man. If you do these things, your husband will live.  If you don’t he will die.

In the car on the way home, the husband asked his wife, “Honey what did the doctor say.”  She looked at him with tears in her eyes, “Honey, he said you are going to die.”

The moral of the story is, we may not die physically, but we will certainly die to the gifts of the Soul if we aren’t willing to come to know the truth and let the truth set us free.

the mythological underworld. Soul is an aspect of our humanity that enters life from below. 

This week we are exploring three important aspects of the Soul and thus our own Soul work:  Father, Mother and child. In culture today we are told to think that absent parents are a new problem, especially absent fathers. But this is an old problem and any problem that just won’t go away is revealing a Soul Need or a need for Soul Discovery. Mystic Edna St. Vincent Millay put it this way:  “It is not true that life is first one thing and then another.  Life is usually the same thing over and over and over again.”

Let’s begin by looking at the Father aspect of the Soul as revealed in Greek Mythology. The classic story of the father aspect of Soul is found in an epic poem attributed to Homer called “The Odyssey.” The story is about Odysses (Ode-ysEEus) trying to reclaim his fatherhood, a wife longing for her husband, and a son in search of his lost father.  At the beginning of the story Odysseus is sitting on a seashore in the midst of his unplanned travels following a long and difficult war, wishing to be home with his son, his father, and the mother of his children. The story doesn’t begin by focusing on his great, manly and heroic adventures. It begins by focusing on his longing for home, the melancholy he feels over missing his family and he asks a famous question: “Does any person know who his father is?” 

This is a question that we’re to reflect on in the different periods of our life:  “If my father is dead, or if he was absent and cold, or if he was a tyrant, or if he abused me, or if he was wonderful but is not there for me now, then who is my father now?”  Where do I go to get the ‘fathering’ feelings of protection, authority, confidence and the know-how, and  the examples of wisdom that I need in order to live my life?

The need to ask and find an answer to this question is then reinforced by the image of Odysseus’ son sitting on the opposite sea shore looking out across the water for his father, upset and worried because his father has been gone so long that his mother’s father is urging her to remarry and there are suitors vying for her affections.   The family is in crisis as a result of the absence of father.  So we have this image in mind of father and son both longing for the same thing-the return home. In other words, at the very instant that we feel the confusion of a fatherless life and wonder where he could be, the father aspect of Soul has been evoked.  (Jesus used this same image in his parable of the Prodigal Son.) During this time of separation, Homer tells us, Odysseus wife, Penelope, is at home weaving a shroud for Odysseus’ father and every night she unravels what she has woven. 

This is the great mystery of the Soul:  “Whenever something is being accomplished, it is also in some way being undone.” So, why don’t the Gods look compassionately on this broken family and allow Odysseus to return home? What possible value is there in this father taking 10 years (however long it takes) on the sea and surviving his risky adventures, before he can return home and restore peace?

In the telling of the saga, we learn that the meaning of this 10 years of time is (however long it takes) that you aren’t transformed into a father instantaneously just because you have a child. It is the long, adventure-filled journey that transforms Odysseus from a man and warrior, into a father including a journey into the land of the dead where he meets his recently departed friends, his mother and other important figures of his history.  A true father is someone whose perspective, knowledge, wisdom and morals are rooted in the underworld and tied to the forefathers, the elders who have gone before and who have created the culture that the father now takes into his hands.

In many traditional cultures a person becomes an adult by hearing the secret stories of the community that have been handed down over generations. Black elk talks about this as a part of growing up a Sioux in his memoirs “Black Elk Speaks.”  He says that sometimes the neophyte has to endure ordeals designed to draw out the adult. The point is to stir the young person so deeply that he or she experiences a major transformation of character.

One final point about fatherhood: While Odysseus is away from home engaged in his own education about fatherhood, he has appointed a stand-in by the name of Mentor, who cares for the house and teaches his son. Mentor teaches but does not try to replace Odysseus. There are times when we all need mentors who act as father figures and who keep the notion of father alive in us and who instill the ideals of fatherhood without embodying it by trying to replace the father. 

2. Now let’s look at the Mother aspect of Soul:  The Greeks told another story about a mythic family, a story so highly revered that is was ritualized in the Eleusinian mysteries. It was the story of the Divine Mother, Demeter who loses her beloved daughter, Persephone.This myth informs us that sometimes you can discover Soul and the Underworld against your will or even by accident.  Persephone is just out picking flowers for her mother when Hades sees her, snatches her and drags her into the Underworld against her will. The point is that every parent knows how easy it is for children to be attracted to people and activities that are dangerous and that threaten to lead their children into dark places. Every parent knows that no matter how we try to protect our children the temptations and threats are so numerous that we can’t be with them at all times and protect them from all things.

Persephone’s mother, Demeter shows us the ultimate test of a mother:  even as she affirms attachment to her own wishes and dreams for her child, she remains loyal to Persephone as she goes through her forced transformative experience.  She waits for her daughter to re-emerge from the darkness and when she does, she embraces her warmly revealing that Mother love has a special quality. Mother protects her child and yet knows her child must be exposed to darkness in order to grow. Of course, our ideal for our children would be a life with no darkness but that’s not how life works.  Christianity gives us the image of the Virgin Mary as a comforting Madonna and it also gives us the image of her sacred heart surrounded in thorns and bleeding, the image of the sorrowful mother who witnessed the tragedy of her son’s crucifixion and his ultimate triumph in resurrection. 

In the story, when Demeter finds out that Zeus has approved her daughter’s abduction, she decides to go into the world as a mortal and takes an ordinary job as a nanny in a household as Eleusis, a town near Athens.  In today’s culture this is equivalent to saying “Lose yourself in your work or get your mind focused on something else” when a visitor from Hades has left us feeling depressed or disturbed.

From Demeter’s point of view the abduction of her daughter is an outrageous violation of the mother child relationship but from Zeus’ point of view, from the wisdom of divine fatherhood, it’s seen as a divine necessity.  It is the nature of things to be drawn to the very experiences that will spoil our innocence, transform our lives, and give us wholeness.
In her job as nanny, Demeter is given an infant boy to care for and each night she anoints him with oil, breathes on him and places him in a fire in order to make him immoral. When his human mother sees what’s happening, she screams in terror.  Demeter becomes very angry at the mortal mother’s failure to understand and shouts:  “You don’t know when fate is bringing you something good or something bad.’ (Ha! the listener is urged to think, listen to yourself Demeter!)

This is the basic theme in the story of Zeus and Hades, the Lord of Life and the Lord of Death and good advice from the mother of mothers. To have a whole perspective, we must understand that sometimes things that look dangerous from a mortal point of view may be beneficial from a greater perspective “You meant it for evil, God meant it for good.”

The myth of Demeter and Persephone teaches that mothering is not a simple matter of taking care of the immediate needs of another. It is a recognition that each individual has a special character, an unique fate and unique qualities of Soul that must be safeguarded and explored even at the risk of losing ordinary assurances of safety and normality. The myth reveals that there is a difference between human and divine mothering.  In the myth, Demeter reveals her divinity and asks that a temple be built in her honor and we go from Demeter as mortal nanny to Demeter as revered goddess.

In practical terms, whenever we sense that we are overdoing it as mothers or being too sensitive to the needs of others, it is an indication that we need to shift gears inside ourselves. It may be time to recognize and honor that a greater mother is caring for the welfare of our children in ways that are unseen and beyond our comprehension. The myth instructs us to evoke the spirit of Demeter at these times rather than trying to take that role upon ourselves – the role of ‘god or goddess’ in our child’s life. 

Even though Persephone returns every spring, she is pictured in art on her throne seated next to Hades meaning that she has an eternal place of honor in the underworld representing certain kinds of experiences about which we talk in a specific way. For example, most of us can probably tell stories of Persephone experiences that include resurrection saying, “I got through that period of my life, I survived and now I’m a better person for it.” 

What got us through that really tough time?  Divine Mother, as the profound maternal feeling in us for life, continuity and fruitfulness. We all have this Mother principle as an aspect of our Soul which we feel as a deep seated love of life and its possiblies. We feel that love of life most intensely when we are in the midst of a life experience and it feels as if our very life and welfare is being threatened.

People who don’t understand the Soul Principle of journeying into the darkness metaphorically, sometimes literally take their own lives, in an effort to live life more fully. They commit suicide in an effort to experience a greater sense of freedom. They make an very unskilled effort of running toward life by embracing death rather than journeying into the darkness metaphorically. In the ancient world celebrations of Demeter, the celebrants at Eleusis would hold a shoot of grain in their hands and recall that life continues in a world penetrated by all forms of death. So we have talked about father’s and mothers.

3. The third image offered in Soul Growth is the image of Child/holy Child/ Christ Child - Christmas is the celebration of Jesus as an infant and as divinity entering into the human arena.  The story of the divine child is common to many religions, suggesting not only the childhood of an aspiring God, but also the divinity of childhood. 

Mythology from cultures around the world tell of the special child abandoned by its parents, raised in the wild or by foster parents: one example is Hercules, another is Moses who was placed in a basket made of reeds and put afloat on a river.

There is an aspect of the child in these stories that is utterly innocent, helpless and exposed to fate, time and conditions. This completely vulnerable exposure is what allows the child to become someone new and powerful.  Our own exposure to human life is both a threat and an opportunity and as the myths reveal it is in those moments when we feel or appear to be the most defenseless, that we are in fact being prepared for a very special role in life. As we learn from the story of the Buddha’s parents, who tried to protect him from all human suffering; full Buddhahood requires the compassion that evolves by seeing all sorts of human suffering.

At the scene of the nativity, the father, mother, shepherds, kings, animals all bow to the child.  The infant child is honored because we expect him or her to grow up and become something special. The infant child is honored specifically because it is not grown up. 

Every day we hear or use phrases like, “I’m being very immature’.  This is ‘dis’ ing the child and it is a form of a self-criticism of what is perceived as a childish or primitive feeling.  It’s saying “I feel uncomfortable with this feeling and I want to grow out of it.” The trick is to say that simply as a matter of fact and not as a criticism of the child.  “I am being immature because immaturity is a natural part of my total nature.”  

Or we might say, “This is an old problem, going back to childhood.” Again, we’re thinking of childhood as something to grow out of- something that is the cause of all of our present troubles. If only our childhood would have been different. The rejection of our childhood is simply another way to reject ourselves.

Sometimes we hear adults say, I still don’t know what I’m going to be when I grow up.”   No matter how lightly this comment is made the feeling that is behind it is inferiority. ‘What is wrong with me?  I should be a success by now.  I should be making plenty of money.  I should be settled.’ 

The child is eternally present and full of weakness and strengths.  These moments signal a soul reflecting on its fate and wondering about its future. Feeling the ‘smallness’ and inadequacy of the child can open us to our divine father and mother. It can open us to the unfolding of our own potentiality and to the child aspect of our nature that is needed in order to be teachable enough to be transformed.

The child’s unknowing is the fertile ground that the grown man Jesus talks about. In the Gospel stories, the child Jesus is separated from his parents on a trip to Jerusalem, and he is found discussing theology with the Rabbis in the temple. This story is reminding us not only of the specialness of the man Jesus but of the special intelligence of the child, yet unformed by adulthood, and the fixed ideas of adulthood and yet so wise.
In the 15 century, theologian Nicolas of Cusa wrote about the importance of ‘educated ignorance.’  He said, “We have to find ways to unlearn those things that screen us from the perception of profound truths.  We have to once again achieve the child’s unknowing because we have been made so smart.”

Zen Buddhism recommends not losing the ‘beginner’s mind’,  so important for living in the now moment.

Jesus said, “Unless you can become “like children” you shall not inherit the kingdom of heaven.”  In each of us, there are childlike qualities that never grow up, and that we never grow out of like wonder and excitement, hope, and the ability to be teachable. 

The Greek word ‘Educare’ from which we get the word Education means to ‘draw out.’  We seem to think this means to draw out of childhood, rather than thinking of it as drawing out the innate, natural wisdom and talents of the child itself.  A child already has God given talents and intelligence that need to be drawn out from within. Child wisdom is different from adult wisdom, but it is equally important.  As we begin to care for our own Soul we begin to appreciate the roles of father, mother and child the soul plays in our lives.

In closing I want to share a story to remind you that you are personally responsible for making a connection with your own soul so that you can receive all of its wonderful gifts.  A husband and wife went to see a doctor because the husband wasn’t feeling well. The doctor ran a bunch of tests, ordered some x-rays and then told the man to go and put his clothes back on. While he did this, the doctor invited the man’s wife into his office to discuss the results & said, “Your husband has a really serious problem and he needs your help. She had been married to the man for over 30 years and wanted to do whatever she could to help.  So she said, “Tell me what to do.” And she took out a pen and piece of paper so she could write it down exactly.

The 1st thing I want you to do is to wake him up in the morning with a good, hot tasty, healthy breakfast already on the table.

2nd I want you to love that man and perk him up and send him off to work each morning feeling good.

3rd At lunchtime, I want him to return home to another hot, tasty, nutritious meal.  Have the house in order. If he has been having a bad time that morning, jolly him out of it.  Build him up, fix him up and send him back out into the world.

4th When he comes home for dinner.  Have the children in bed, the house clean, candles on the table and be wearing one of your sexiest outfits. Don’t’ make him take out the garbage or do any chores.  Just let him sit in front of the TV after dinner and read the paper or flip through the channels.  I want you to love and mellow that man. If you do these things, your husband will live.  If you don’t he will die.In the car on the way home, the husband asked his wife, “Honey what did the doctor say.”  She looked at him with tears in her eyes, “Honey, he said you are going to die.” The moral of the story is, we may not die physically, but we will certainly die to the gifts of the Soul if we aren’t willing to come to know the truth and let the truth  set us free.