Summer vacation when I was a child meant going on treasure hunts in our Miami yard. Our mother drew a map, packed us peanut butter sandwiches and off we went.
My sister and I entered our own imaginary world surrounded by thickets of colorful hibiscuses and fragrant gardenias. Chameleons changed colors, crickets chirped and choruses of cicadas called.
Every so often, we’d stop for a snack and gaze overhead at the stately clouds slipping like ghostly ships across the sky.
In the evenings the adults sipped iced cocktails on the patio while we skittered across the lawn capturing lightning bugs in glass jars. The next day, we felt sorry for them and set them free.
I find children enchanting because they help us see the world with fresh eyes. They notice the tiniest things: an ant on the sidewalk or a broken shell on the shore, and these suddenly become precious and miraculous and wonderful.
As the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins so beautifully put it, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil.”
Still, adults often plod along fixated on our phones — and we overlook the grandeur.
Since installing a window bird feeder, I’ve seen finches, sparrows and chickadees, and a male cardinal shoveling seeds into the eager beak of his scruffy offspring.
But if I don’t remind myself to look outside I will miss the show entirely.
The other day the movie featured a squirrel pilfering water from the hummingbird feeder, while a crew of wily chipmunks devoured blueberries. They all ignored me when I tried to dissuade them, as if to say, “We were here first.”
My friend from South Carolina, along with her two children, came to visit one day, and in seconds the kids were mesmerized by the abundant pine cones in the yard, which they collected for a game of catch.
Even on beastly hot summer days, I see neighborhood youngsters, intrigued by things adults might find ho-hum, heading outside to collect worms or feathers or pebbles.
These kids loved my husband’s crooked walking stick, which he found on a Florida island— and they’d race toward him for a turn strolling with it. Not surprisingly, they were also fascinated by his hatband studded with alligator teeth.
The danger of adulthood is growing immune to the world’s wonders — which could be why Christ advised us to have childlike hearts.
Children are simple and humble souls who cry easily and forgive quickly. They struggle with subtraction and their handwriting is crooked.
They’re weak and they’re meek and they’re clean of heart — just like the Beatitudes say. And they are reminders that God provides glorious glimpses of heaven right here on earth.
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