“Change and Become like Little Children”

✦ Become Childlike

Thomas Centolella ✦ Joy



When it comes back to teach you, or you come back to learn how half alive you’ve been, how your own ignorance and arrogance have kept you deprived — when it comes back to you or you yourself return, **joy is simple**, unassuming.



Red tulips on their green stems. Early spring vegetables, bright in the pan. The primary colors of a child’s painting, **the first lessons**, all over again.

Rainer Maria Rilke ✦ The Sonnets to Orpheus (*Part Two, Sonnet XII*)



As long as you catch only what you've thrown yourself, all is mere skill and little gain; but when you're suddenly the catcher of a ball thrown by an eternal partner with accurate and measured swing towards you, to your center, in **an arch from the great bridgebuilding of God**: why catching then becomes a power — not yours, a world's. And if you were to have the strength and courage to return the throw, nay, even more miraculous, if you had forgotten about strength and courage and had already thrown . . . as the year throws birds, the migrating flock that an older warmth flings across seas to a younger — **only through your daring is your play genuine**. You neither make throwing easier nor harder for yourself. From your hands issues the meteor and races towards its place in the heavens.

Matthew 11 ✦ Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition



25 At that time Jesus said, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have **revealed them to the little children**; 26 yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.

Matthew 18 ✦ Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition



1 At that time the disciples came to Jesus, saying, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” 2 And calling to him a child, he put him in the midst of them, 3 and said, “**Truly, I say to you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven**. 4 Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of God.

Eugen Fink ✦ The Oasis of Happiness: Toward an Ontology of Play



When poets and thinkers point to the immense importance of play in the profoundest manner of which man is capable, then we should also remember those other words: that **we will not be able to enter the kingdom of heaven, if we do not first become as children**.

Rainer Maria Rilke ✦ Letters to a Young Poet



If your everyday life seems to lack material, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to summon up its riches, for there is no lack for him who creates and no poor, trivial place. And even if you were in a prison whose walls did not let any of the sounds of the world outside reach your senses - **would you not have your childhood still**, this marvellous, lavish source, this treasure-house of memories? **Turn your attention towards that**. Attempt to raise the sunken sensations of this distant past; your self will become the stronger for it, your loneliness will open up and become a twilit dwelling in which the noise other people make is only heard far off. And if from this turn inwards, from this submersion in your own world, there come verses, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses.

Rainer Maria Rilke ✦ Fourth Duino Elegy



O childhood hours, the shadows of

whose shapes were not yet mere

repetitions of shades past-

when that which gleamed ahead

was not yet the future.

**Growing, we often wished we were**

**already grown, half to please those**

**for whom nothing but their own**

**maturity remained.**

Yet, when alone, we played

with eternal toys and stood

enchanted in the breach between

our playthings and the world:

a place primordially prepared

for an immaculate advent.

A.W. Tozer ✦ The Pursuit of God



Lord, make me childlike. Deliver me from the urge to compete with another for place or prestige or position. **I would be simple and artless as a little child.** Deliver me from pose and pretense. Forgive me for thinking of myself. Help me to forget myself and find my true peace in beholding Thee. That Thou mayest answer this prayer I humble myself before Thee. Lay upon me Thy easy yoke of self-forgetfulness that through it I may find rest. Amen.