"Your body is the first thing any child of man ever wanted. Therefore dispose yourself to be loved, to be wanted, to be available. Be there for them with a vengeance. Be a gracious, bending woman. Incline your ear, your heart, your hands to them.... To be a Mother is to be the sacrament - the effective symbol - of place. Mothers do not make homes, they are our home." from Bed and Board, Robert Farrar Capon

Wednesday, March 26, 2014

A Christian Perspective on Children





These are excerpts from a lecture given by Anthony Esolen. You can watch it here onYouTube.


"Do you remember when you were growing up, back in the day when there were these things called children? And they ran around in what used to be called yards and streets. And they engaged in an activity called play

...[As a culture] We have become the kinds of people who do not like children. Why do I say we do not like children? We have few. If you really do like children, you have them. And if you can, you have quite a few of them. You like them. You like their company. You like their ways. You find them somehow to brighten your life. You enjoy them.

...Children remind us of our weakness and destroy our illusion of choice.

...People are afraid of children because they think that children will destroy their lives.They are absolutely right! Children will destroy their lives. That's why God gave us them. Because otherwise our lives are like little hard kernels of selfishness. Kernels of egotism. And it's really hard to break through that shell. But God sends children, as invaders, precisely to do that. To break open that hardest substance in the universe, the human heart. The child comes to break open our dead lives, and to show us what life is, and life in abundance. And that’s what the Christ child came to do."  



Paintings: Theolphile-Emmanuel Duverger (1821-1901) Hopscotch, and  Gaetano Belli (1857-1922) Grandmother

6 comments:

  1. Love this!
    I'm reading his Imagination book now- good stuff!

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  2. "otherwise our lives are like little hard kernels of selfishness." I'm so glad the Lord blessed me with children, who drive me out of my own selfish world. And what a good reminder to enjoy my children just being children :-) the paintings you chose depict the childlike simplicity so well.

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  3. I love the picture on the bottom of the post! Thank you.

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  4. Thank you for sharing Cathy, what a good perspective!

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  5. Thanks Cathy! How blessed we are that we get to live the life he is talking about. A good reminder of what we've been given:)

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