Children are the hope of the human race, for they enable it to start anew in each generation. Without them, those who have grown to maturity might well lose the spirit of wholesome sacrifice. If it is faults which they inherit, they show their parents the worst in themselves and therefore inspire them to a salutary repentance. If it is good qualities which they inherit, they stimulate the elders to finer qualities. They turn service into care and work into love; they preach not with their lips but with their innocence, and in their presence every evil soul feels a reproach in the yearning to be young and to start living all over again.
Their questions set the supposedly wise thinking, and prove that their young minds are the true philosophers as they multiply the question: "Why?" Better than all the syllogisms of philosophers they prompt lives to nobler purposes and make them think of heaven. As there could never be a hero without dangers, so there could not be tenderness without their helpfulness. Their loveliness substitutes joys for pleasures and makes us realize that all love ends in an incarnation - even the Love of God.
Children come to parents as so much plastic material and the shape that they take later on in life is to a great extent the responsibility of the parents themselves. When God sends a child into this world, He makes a little crown for it in heaven, and woe to those parents who do not instruct their children and so make their own child a victim of heavenly disinheritance. Every child is born close to heaven's gate, which accounts for the readiness with which their affections so quickly turn to God when their parents do communicate the wonder of that love. Serious indeed it is to throw any impediment between them and their Savior and to hold them back from being folded in the arms of His Grace. From this point of view, children sometimes makes parents feel very awkward, for how can parents teach them Divine Love unless they feel it themselves? The vine that will climb in June will be trained for heaven's walls less aptly in the dry heat of the late summer.
No man can work well for the nation and the common good unless he is deeply rooted to a home. An engine cannot run a ship unless it is bolted to the hold. There is nothing that so much screws and bolts mankind to homes and to genuine patriotism as children. Before the father and the mother to speak of the love that bound them together as "our love." They always referred to a third term outside of themselves as if to imply that they could not be bound together except by some strong arm which belonged to neither. When a child is born they begin to see concreted in visible form the embodiment of the mystery of their love.
Like the love of earth and tree, as their marriage becomes fruitful unto new love, as their two hearts conspire against their individual impotence, by filling up at the store of the other the lacking measure. And they build up not the mere sum of themselves but that new life which gives to the winter of marriage the springtime of fruit. Thus, does marriage preserves its mystery and thus do husband and wife see that their love is a loan from the bank of life and is to be paid back into that bank with life and not with death.
If up to this point their love has been just an exchange of egotism, they now feel all of their selfishness crushed and destroyed as they look out to that which their love mutually produced. The child of the human race, and the home becoming young again are therefore the hope of humanity.
BY ARCHBISHOP FULTON J. SHEEN ( 1895 to 1979 )
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Sunday, May 24, 2009
I have through years of reading, pondering, reflecting and contemplating, the 3 things that last; FAITH . HOPE . LOVE and I would like to made available my sharing from the many thinkers, authors, scholars and theologians whose ideas and thoughts I have borrowed. God be with them always. Amen!
I STILL HAVE MANY THINGS TO SAY TO YOU BUT THEY WOULD BE TOO MUCH FOR YOU NOW. BUT WHEN THE SPIRIT OF TRUTH COMES, HE WILL LEAD YOU TO THE COMPLETE TRUTH, SINCE HE WILL NOT BE SPEAKING AS FROM HIMSELF, BUT WILL SAY ONLY WHAT HE HAS LEARNT; AND HE WILL TELL YOU OF THE THINGS TO COME.
HE WILL GLORIFY ME, SINCE ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. EVERYTHING THE FATHER HAS IS MINE; THAT IS WHY I SAID: ALL HE TELLS YOU WILL BE TAKEN FROM WHAT IS MINE. - JOHN 16:12-15 -
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