We are the children of God / by Leonard Feeney. WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD By REV. LEONARD FEENEY S,. J. Weston College, Weston, Mass. Five addresses delivered in the nationwide Catholic Hour (produced by the National Council of Catholic Men, in cooperation with the National Broad- casting Company) on Sundays from November 1 to 29, 1942, inclusive. November 1 The Child in Us — November 8 Our Eternal Childhood November 15 The Child’s Sacrament November 22 God As a Child November 29 The Mother of God Statement of the Catholic Hour’s Purpose List of Stations Carrying the Catholic Hour List of Catholic Hour Pamphlets Page ... 3 „... 12 16 21 26 27 29 NATIONAL COUNCIL OF CATHOLIC MEN Producers of the Catholic Hour 1312 Massachusetts Avenue, N. W. Washington, D. C. Printed and distributed by Our Sunday Visitor Huntington, Indiana Nihil Obstat: REV. T. E., DILLON Censor Librorum Imprimatur: ^ JOHN FRANCIS NOLL D.D. Bishop of Fort Wayne THE CHILD IN US Address Delivered on November 1, 1942 My dear listeners : I have chosen as my general topic something I could phrase in a short sentence. I have decided to call it ‘Ve are the children of God.’' By 'Ve” I mean all of us—every single one of us—no matter who we are, where we live, or what we look like. The children of God! What a beautiful title for us to bear! And if you think I am going to be ungen- erous and restrict it to any one class or group of my own, let me ask my- self a question. What have* I, or what has anyone done to deserve it more than you? Your credentials, my dear listeners, for being the children of God are much simpler than those required for importance in any of your specialties. For, being God’s child is nobody’s spec- ialty. It is the common birthright of us all! Do you not exist? Did you not obey God’s command and issue out of sheer nothingness when His creative act required you to? Were you consulted about your own ex- istence? Rather, did you not have it mysteriously thrust on you ? Were you not born, and were you not once little and loved by your parents and taught how to speak and walk? Did you not go through the experience of slowly realizing that you had arrived in our midst and were living and breathing in a place called ‘The earth,” ^a place that had been here long before you came, and would, somehow or other, carry on long after you left it? Are you not now assuredly posses- sed of human hands and eyes and blood and a heart, and a mind that wants to know things, and a will I that is searching about desperately for something to love? If this be true—and who cannot qualify in an assignment as simple and as thrill- ing as I describe—then you are God’s child and His delight. You came from nowhere, brought here by God’s omnipotence especially chosen for existence because He loved you, and now that you are, you will ever be ! God does not expect you to be different than He made you, either. All He asks in return for the great gift of creation is that you be your- self. “Will you be John Jones or Mary Smith for me?” God asks each one of us, “Will you be big or small, young or old, good-looking or not, with many talents or few, just as I planned you? If you will. 4 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD and will bear the burden of being yourself for a few years on this earth for me, then I shall be your God for all eternity. I shall be your Father, your friend, your protector. I shall always interpret you with sympathy and understanding. Others may think they know how wicked you are for they see in your sins what has been consented to; but I shall always remember what has been resisted, and the struggle you have made to keep at least something in you fine and innocent and pure. I shall be your defender against your enemies, and no one will dare to speak unkindly of you without having to settle a score with me. I shall be the faithful watcher at your bedside when you are ill, or tired, or uninteresting. For you will never be uninteresting to me, never a bother, never a bore. You will always be my creature, in- finitely fascinating, whom I made out of nothing for my own celestial purposes. You will always be my loved one, always my child.’’ Some may say : This is naive religion : this looking upon our- selves as God’s children. Let it be so. It is absolutely the only love- hold on life and reality that can make the kind of thing we are going through bearable. Besides, God has commanded us to address Him as ‘‘Our Father” ; and in having enough self-respect to call ourselves His children, we are merely doing what we are told. ''Unless you become as little chil- dren, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven” {Matt. 18:3), is another of His Divine encour- agements not given to apes, or dogs, or bugs, but to us who stand erect and straight and look each other in the eye and know both our human level and our human dig- nity. Our simple status as God’s child is the foundation in us of every thing beautiful we know : of friend- ship and romance and marriage and babies; of art, song, gaiety, and laughter. Even good manners (I mean instinctive good manners, not the kind that are studied artificial- ly in books of politeness) and every sense we have of refinement and courtesy derives from the fact that we are God’s sons and daughters making this earth our temporary home. My dear listeners, if you have been intrigued into believing, from some book you have read or lecture you have listened to, that you are merely a scientific accident, that your ancestry is in the jungle, and that your destiny is to collapse in a few years in a heap of positive and negative electrons, you are free to be persuaded of this, I suppose. But try seeing how much joy you THE CHILD IN US 5 get out of the thought, how much courage, hope, or even simple suffi- ciency for remaining civilized and human. There is mental discipline even among children. Anyone can have a fit of intellectual tantrums and by way of being a sceptic, a sophisticate, or a professor, write an unpleasant book or deliver an unpleasant lecture on the vileness of the human race. But it is not from such melancholy sources that we discover our dearest and truest selves. It is rather in the simple innocence of our hearts, in our un- spoiled thoughts, the thoughts that no one has ever been allowed to tamper with and that still urge us to look around for life’s joyful ex- planation with the unprejudiced vision of a child. Not long ago I saw a picture of a man who was a hundred years old. I saw it in the newspaper. You know that old man who keeps crop- ping up year after year in the newspaper—he always seems to be the same old man, but of course he isn’t. Well, anyhow, I saw him again this year, wrinkled and tooth- less and a hundred years old, sit- ting on the front doorstep and hav- ing his picture taken on his one hundredth birthday, by way of showing how old one of us can occa- sionally become when he tries to overdo it. Well, I looked at the pic- ture of this old man of a hundred years, and I admired it. I always admire it. There was a short ac- count in the newspaper to go with the picture. He never seems to come from the city, this one-hun- dred-year-old man, always from the country, usually from ‘"upstate.” We are told that he smoked a pipe all his life or he didn’t ; he drank or he didn’t; he was a vegetarian, or he wasn’t ; and one way or the other, tobacco or alcohol or vege- tables were, or were not, responsible for his good (or bad) health at the age of one hundred years. There never seems to be any real birthday celebration for this man who has lived for a century. No mention is made of a birthday cake: perhaps the thought of a hundred candles has created such an extraordinary problem in the matter of a cake as to discourage the idea of it alto- gether. And so our poor old man spends his one hundredth birthday pretty much the same as he spent his ninety eighth and ninety ninth, without any fuss or bother. He sits on the front doorstep and has a few words to say about the weather. He says “0 Pshaw!” when the news- paper photographer arrives to take his picture; but finally lets it be taken, and then the next day we see him in the paper, the old man of a hundred years, with that quizzical 6 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD look in his eye that seems to say—at least it always does to me—“I am not a hundred years old. Nobody ever is. For by the mercy of God I moved, a few decades ago, into my second childhood, a childhood so like the first that all its innocence and helplessness have returned to me. I don’t do anything any more. I just am—am what God has made me in all its stark simplicity, a child, waiting to become in a few months more as ageless as eter- nity.” We are the children of God. I say so because God said so first, be- cause it is religion’s first lesson, and because around this central and graceful truth is built up all con- tact between God and man in the beautiful theology of the Catholic Church. The more effort we make to realize what we are in God’s sight, and to act upon it, the dearer we become to ourselves and others, the more bearable to live with, and the more missed and remembered when we die. One cannot say everything in a single talk. Even in five talks, which by the kindness of the Na- tional Broadcasting Company I am allowed to give, one cannot say more than a little. But more of what I have tried to say tonight I shall have to say again next week at the same time. God bless you. And good-night! PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR (Adapted from Cardinal Newman) 0 Lord Jesus Christ, Who in Thy mercy hearest the prayers of sin- ners, pour forth, we beseech Thee, all grace and blessing upon our country and its' citizens. We pray in particular for the President — for our Congress—for all our sol- diers—for all who defend us in ships, whether on the seas or in the skies—for all who are suffering the hardships of war. We pray for all who are in peril or in danger. Bring us all after the troubles of this life into the haven of peace, and reunite us all together forever, 0 dear Lord, in Thy glorious heav- enly kingdom. OUR ETERNAL CHILDHOOD Address Delivered on November 8, 1942 I do not think it is nice to tell our soldiers, sailors, and marines that when they die in the defense of their country, we shall be grate- full, and they shall cease to exist. I do not think it is very encourag- ing to offer them as prospect, when they drop on the battlefields, sink in the waves, or fall from the sky, an eternal oblivion in the dull world of chemistry and electricity. You may say: They will live on in our memories; but how long will we live on and continue to have mem- ories? I find no memories terribly alive in our land at the moment, for the soldiers who died a hundred years ago, let’s say in the Revolu- tionary, or even in the Civil War. It is true we speak of those by-gone heroes with a certain amount of formularized respect; but we have no definite memories of them. Be- sides, each succeeding war destroys in some way even the memories of the previous one. Where are the wives, sweethearts, and mothers who had memories of the beloved boys who died in Washington’s army; or in Lincoln’s, or in Lee’s? Have both the remembered and the rememberers been blotted out of existence forever? War sharpens the mind—does it not?—rids it of a lot of sloppy and routine sentiment. War makes us ask each other challenging ques- tions. Shall our heroes who will lay down their lives for us in this pres- ent struggle for freedom, survive as personalities anywhere in God’s great universe, or shall they not? If not, what good are the tears we shed? We weep for what we have lost, and expect to get back again. If we know we can never, never get it back again, we do not weep; we dry up and become as stoical as a statue and as tearless as a stone. One can weep at death ; never at an annihilation. Wreaths on a grave! And memories! What good is the memory of a nobody? In this country during the past two decades, as you well know — and may I say it was part of our unpreparation for war—a number of petulant professors, melancholy atheists, nervous novelists, and un- intelligible poets, have tried to in- still in us the foundations of intel- lectual despair. These writers and teachers and talkers and verse- makers, have enjoyed the notoriety that comes from appearing, in print or on platform, in the role of being 8 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD spectacularly unhappy. They seemed to have almost the vocation to in- form others of the relative hope- lessness of this life, and the com- plete hopelessness of the next. The end of all our days Is in forgetfulness I guess, In the cisterns of distress. In the boiling bays Where the human heart is swilled When its function is fulfilled. This little snatch of verse hap- pens to be my own. I wrote it be- cause I realize that those whose propaganda is pessimism cannot often phrase their own despair, hardly in literature, and never in art; and so we have at times to help them say what we think they are trying to say when they are trying to think themselves out of existence. Almighty God—both in the nor- mal instincts of the human mind, and in the clear statements of Rev- elation—offers us a saner outlook on death than can be found in cold- ly contemplating the suspended pleasures of annihilation. Almighty God says the human soul can never die, that it is immortal, and that when it sheds the raiment of the poor body it has carried through this life, a better and richer and deeper life is awaiting it in eternity. Into that richer and deeper life our heroes pass in death. They en- ter their Creator's eternal country, their Father's eternal home, and in the unencumbered life of the spirit, freed from the bondage of three dimensions, they personally know and appreciate what they have done for us by dying for us when we needed them to. They do not end in bloodstains on a battlefield or in cold corpses floating in the sea. For all that, this present life has plenty to offer by way of hardship. I do not wish to disparage it, my dear listeners. I rather like this world, and I expect you do too. I like it because it is the only kind of world I know—so far. Our stars in our skies are beautiful, are they not?—no matter what we are wor- rying about when we look up at them. Our sun is faithful to us, day after day; and our moon is a great comfort, night after night. I greatly admire our mountains, rivers and lakes and forests. I like to listen to our music; and I am terribly fond of our games, es- pecially the games our children play, all through the spring and summer. And even now, when the full autumn is upon us, and winter is threatening, we can still hear the echoes of last summer's children in the playgrounds, and we still OUR ETERNAL CHILDHOOD 9 remember the message they were trying to bring us in their songs. We are the children who play in the park, All the day long from the dawn till the dark, We are the children, the chil- dren. We shall grow older, as everyone knows. But when we grow older what do you suppose Will become of the children? Will there be children again. When we, who are children, are women and men ? Yes! Surely the world will love chil- dren no less. Children will come when we chil- dren are gone. Out of the darkness and into the dawn. Taking our places. Bearing our brightness and lightness of limbs and our laughter and love in their faces ! The children know! Their out- look is surest and fullest of hope. In terms of their thought I want always to think; not in terms of some slumbery lecture I have lis- tened to, or broody book I have read. Human friendship and so- ciability are delightful experiences; and it is grand to be fond of one another, even for a while ; and there are some days when it is marvelous- ly marvelous just to be alive! But—here’s the rub, and the children know it, and it’s the burden of all their gay-sad songs. Out we go from all this in a few years! Take it or leave it—out we go ! And the prospect of death leads us to ask ourselves some desperately pointed questions when we are alone, when we are locked in the secrecy of our own thoughts, and are not being bothered and con- fused by being written at, or lec- tured to. Peace has its deaths the same as war, and death will continue to go on when this war is over, I assure you it will. When all the enemy’s dive-bombers have been shot down in the skies, and all the enemy’s submarines have been raked out of the sea, death will return again to its quiet business of getting rid of us in other ways—by disease, disin- tegration, destruction by accident, or by that ultimate exhaustion which comes from having lived a bit too long, and which is gently and respectfully referred to as: old age. And then what? And then the problem—shall we rejoin our loved ones in eternity, or shall we have lost them irrevocably in death? 10 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD You have all heard, I think, of a Saint called ‘The Little Flower/’ It’s a kind of pretty name we apply to a young French girl, who died in 1897, at the age of twenty four, and who was admired by God for much more than her pretty name. Her real name was Therese (Teresa would be the English of it) and she lived in a small town in Northern France, called Lisieux—a town no- body ever heard of until she made it famous by dying there, hero- ically, about forty five years ago. If she were alive today, this young Carmelite nun, Sainte Therese of Lisieux, would be just sixty-nine years of age not a very old lady at that. Well, Therese of Lisieux was a saint, and therefore a genius. Dr. John C. H. Wu, the great Chinese legal scholar, who studied law in this country and then went back to his native land and gave much as- sistance to Chiang Kai-Shek in the drafting of the constitution for the New China—Dr. Wu, the China- man, says that Sainte Therese of Lisieux was one of the most re- markable geniuses of all time. He says: “In twenty four years she learned more about God than man- kind has been able to do in twenty centuries.” That is strong praise coming from the Chinese, who are nothing if not conservative. Well, the Little Flower’s genius like that of all the saints, consisted not in being extraordinarily gifted for any one specialty in life, but in having a remarkable talent for ac- quiring in a lightning-flash all she needed to know in order to love God. She was not well-educated, and yet she could express her spiritual thoughts in a most beau- tiful French prose. She had never studied psychology, and yet she knew to a nicety every one of our intellectual, volitional, and instinct- ive habits. She let nothing escape her in the knowledge of how a soul works. Most modern psychologists say there are two areas in the soul — the conscious and the sub-con- scious. On the top we are more or less all right, but just below the surface of our conscious mental processes, we are all seething and troubled and bothered and full of phobias, that need constantly to be analyzed and corrected by a psychiatrist. Well, the Little Flower says there are three areas in us, not two. She goes the modern psycholo- gist one better. She says that there is an outward self—a self that we show to the world—that we fix up and bother with and discipline with formalities: in the way we look or smile or pretend—but that outward OUR ETERNAL CHILDHOOD 11 self is least of all our real self, no matter how brave a show we may put on. For underneath that out- ward self, says the Little Flower, is a worried, troubled, and frightened self, a self that has been confused by all sorts of wrong experience, and bad education, and it must constantly put up psychological de- fenses to dispel doubts and pre- serve human dignities. But the Little Flower also declares that deeper still than this worried and bothered self, there is a third area of the soul, the final and funda- mental one, that underlies the other two; and way down deep there, we are always a child, who always knows that all is well. Way down deep there, we find courage, love, laughter, simplicity, and hope, spontaneously. Way down deep there nobody deceives us — least of all the pessimist who tries to tell our worried self that we are going to end in death. Way down deep there is the very sanctity of our personality, to which religion makes its appeal, and to which God speaks pleadingly when He asks us to call Him “Our Father.’’ Way down deep there is where Our Father in Heaven is urging us cour- ageously to forfeit the childhood of this earth in favor of the child- hood that is waiting for us in eter- nity. Way down deep in us, my dear listeners, is where none of us can be fooled, least of all by our own dear nature—God-given and God- preserved. Prayer In Time Of War THE CHILD'S SACRAMENT Address Delivered on Movember 15,1942 When God assumed our human nature, as He did nineteen hundred years ago, in order to help us solve the problem of our aloneness. He did not become fastidiously human. He entered our world by way of birth and left it by way of death. What could be more human than that? All our helplessness and hu- miliation—our twenty-four hour cycle of eating and working and washing and sleeping—God shared. His advent among us was not in the form of some wraith, or phan- tom, or infantile ghost. God be- came most definitely and obviously a baby. He was born as a baby, and had to be laid in a crib by His mother and covered with clothes and kept warm. If you went to visit Him on the First Christmas night at Bethlehem, you would most probably have found Him asleep. He spent months and months doing no more than any simple child does: looking at His mother, being tended to in His wants, and being made comfortable and happy. He even allowed Him- self to be taught how to walk and speak—and when He did speak, and in the fullness of His powers, and when it began to be evident that a Divine nature was allied to a human one in the personality of Jesus, and when His lips began to shape those utterances of His which were so unique and unforgettable — for all the sublimity and mystery of His teaching, He never made His religion some sort of esoteric thing you completely close your eyes about and imagine you have. He made it visible and picturesque and colorful through the use of this world's materials, elevated and sanctified by God's power into the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. There are seven of those beauti- ful Sacraments of which we could speak, and each effects an alliance between the spiritual and material world so as to give us visible con- tact with the Divine. But let me speak this evening of just one of these Sacraments: the first: the simplest and most fundamental : the child's Sacrament, the Sacrament of Baptism. Through Christian Bap- tism, right here on this earth we are adopted into a Divine Child- hood, by the power of God wedded to one of our noblest and simplest substances: water. When on the head of a little child, we pour water and say, as we were THE CHILD’S told to by Our Lord, 'H baptize thee in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost,” we will by some be praised for having performed a worthwhile religious act; we will by others be ridiculed. Those who ridicule—so I have found—do so for a more subtle reason than appears on the sur- face of what they say. It is not that they want to ridicule God pre- cisely—because, generally, they be- lieve in no God at all—it is be- cause water has never meant any- thing more to them than a few drops of moisture that drip into a sink when you turn on a spigot. Water, to the unreligious, signifies something common, inconspicuous, prosaic, cheap. The unreligious would be hard put to it to define water as anything more than ‘‘what you sprinkle streets with” or ‘'use to flush out a sewer.” The unre- ligious have never once looked on water for what it is : that marvelous and indispensable raiment of won- der and refreshment with which God has clothed the world. The Pagans respect water be- cause the Pagans have religions. In the Pagan religions water is made good use of, and for holy purposes. Among the Pagans libation is a sacred ritual and every pool has been adopted as a deity. But senti- mental Christians—or rather peo- ple in whom Christianity survives SACRAMENT 13 not as a set of truths and facts, but as some sort of take-it-or-leave- it emotion, indefinitely identified with Christ—these people despise water when used for any purpose higher than the wash basin. Water does look very prosaic and uninteresting if you hold a little of it in a glass, or dry a little of it from your hand .with a towel. Water has neither taste, nor odor, nor color, nor even shape—for it takes the shape of that into which you pour it. It would be impossible to describee water to one who had never seen it or watched it work. Water follows a most freakish phys- ical law when it cools, for at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, on its way to becoming cold, instead of continu- ing to contract as other substances do, it starts to expand again—so that ice may be lighter than water —so that ice may float, and in- stead of sinking to the bottom of the ocean and freezing the world to death, it may rest on the sur- face of the waves and be mercifully melted out by the sun. Water is both dangerous and dear. Water is the one indispensable without which it is impossible for us to live for any length of time when we are without supplies. When men are lying on the hot sands of the desert, parched and feverish, they do not cry out for money or gold or diamonds or any fantastic 14 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD forms of food. They cry out for water, for we are mostly made of water, and death is nothing more than a drying up of our resources. Water has a noble history: in the Flood, in the passage of the Chosen People through the waves of the Red Sea; and in all journeys, dis- coveries, and explorations. It is impossible to spoil water, for no matter how much filth you pour into it, you need only drop it on the earth and let it sink into the ground, and it will purify itself and return to you in the spring and fountain, as pure and virginal as it was originally created. Indescribable as is this essential- ly colorless, odorless, tasteless, and unshaped substance, God lets water roam through our world in all man- ners and varieties so as to give interest and color and light to our thoughts. A dehydrated human mind physically cannot function, imaginatively cannot think. Water supplies us with a whole reservoir of thoughts and words. What will you say of one thing, water: water—^which is the brook and the well and the spring and the fountain and the pond and the lake and the river and the stream and the gulf and the strait and the bay and the sea and the ocean? Are they not all, water? Yes, and water is the whirlpool and the eddy and the falls and the torrent and the geyser ! It is surf, foam, break- er, wave, roller, brine, mist, dew! It is hail, snow, frost, slush, and sleet! It is ice, icicle, and iceberg; rainbow, cloud, and stream! The swimmer plunges and dives and splashes in it. The sailor travels on it in his ship, boat, sloop, canoe, schooner, yacht, vessel, or sail. Water is what makes things moist and damp and wet and soggy and humid—yes, and it sprinkles the world, sprays it and spatters it, laves it and bathes it and washes it and rinses it—for there is never an end to what it can do. Water is one of the world’s greatest nat- ural mysteries. And when God’s only begotten Son, Jesus Christ, entered our world to talk our lan- guage and take us on our own terms. He used as the first in- strument of our sanctification that which was most natural for us to know and understand. He saw water all around us and did not despise it. He turned it into the child’s Sacrament. He took water and sanctified it with spiritual power. He transformed it into the Sacrament of Baptism—by the union of water and the Holy Ghost. You may say, all this is poetry. My dear listeners, poetry is not its own preservative. Poetry is never religion, but it is the illustration of religion, and without religion it ceases to be even poetry. If we THE CHILD’S SACRAMENT 15 cannot do something more with water than give it to poets to wash with after they have written a lot of unintelligible verse, then let us give it back to the Pagans. The Pagan poets are religious. They re« spect water! But most of us are not going to give it back to the Pagans, for Christ has given it to us—^to do with it what no Pagan could ever do. Most of us are going to re- member that water has a sacred Christian history—nineteen hun- dred years of it—and that spiritual wonders are wrought with it when we use it as Christ wants it used. Most of us are not going to let Christian Baptism be dried up by a couple of wars and a few despairs. As in the material, so in the spir- itual world, with water we are going to refresh the world. Oh, God is very versatile, I know, and to those who have not yet heard, or been let hear, of the covenant that has been set up by Jesus between the water we see and use, and the living water that imparts to our souls the adoption of a Divine Childhood, God will be able to bestow the fruits of Re- demption in other and special ways. But the honest, simple, clear, af- firmative way of Sacrament is the best way—the way of God’s own in- stitution and choice—^which we are free to reject, at our peril. I could say what Christ has done for us in six other Sacraments, besides Baptism. I could say what He has done for human courage, with the sign of the cross and oil — but that would be the Sacrament of Confirmation. I could tell what He does with sins, in Penance, the Sac- rament of Forgiveness. I could add what He does to the love of a boy and girl, in Matrimony, the Sac- rament of Love; and the comfort He imparts to the aloneness of our human hearts in the Holy Eu- charist, the Sacrament of Food. I could tell what He does with us when we are sick, and need the Sacrament of Consolation, which is Extreme Unction; and finally what He does to make most of these Sacraments possible, in Holy Or- ders, the Sacrament of Service : the Sacrament of the priesthood. But because my subject in these five Sunday night talks is ‘'We are the children of God,” I have spoken to- night of the Child’s Sacrament, the Sacrament of Life—and I have re- minded you how the littlest child can, by the mercy of Jesus, be made a Christian, yes even right in his own nursery, when love and faith and reverence and charity are his guardians. Good Night. Prayer In Time Of War GOD AS A CHILD Address Delivered on November 22, 2942 Christianity is the religion of the child, about the child, and for the child. It teaches that God be- came a child, and our first response to the Christian message is condi- tioned by our esteem of children for their own innocent and intrin- sic worth. Do we like children, and did we not know that God had become a child, and were we about to be told it for the first time, would it please us to learn this bit of news; or would we be dead set against the arrangement from the start? All the Pagan religions are an- cestral. They look back to God in some aged form, as a hoary symbol, as an ancient of days. Christianity does not. It is primarily and cen- trally the love of God as a baby. Christianity begins at Christmas and to Christmas it returns, year after year, December after Decem- ber, to renew and refresh itself at a little crib where God, as a child, is sleeping. If you have a distaste for the child, for his small behaviour and the artless ways in which he can be pleased, then it is impossible for Christianity to take hold of you. Not only will you not believe that Christ is God, you will not be- lieve anybody is God after a while, and will begin to complain that the very notion of God is beyond your reach, because you cannot trans- late Him into any of your terms. But a child is one of your terms; and if in the role of a child God is rejected, then there is likely to be little or no relish for Him left in the realm of abstract thought. Much of the anti-Christian sentiment in so-called Christian lands, is due to our dislike, our disdain, and even our dread of the child. Moral indignation is the easiest of all violent sentiments to indulge in, and let me say frankly that there is a temptation among re- formers to indulge in it too freely. If I am not willing to take the time and care that is required for the writing and preaching of a sermon in which religious values are deli- cately handled and gracefully pre- sented to people who are willing to learn if only we will teach—then I am wont to take refuge in the large gestures of a reformer, his loud voice, and a good deal of his general shouting on the subject of sin. It is not by way of moral indigna- GOD AS A CHILD 17 tion that I wish to present to you this evening the sad condition of affairs that prevents our even being interested in the subject of God as a child. Moral indignation should be pre- served for those who are to blame for things, and I am quite sure that not any of you are particularly to blame for a phobia as horrible as child-hatred. We are, all of us, better than that at heart; but we have inherited a bad culture. It is a culture that persuades us, or at least allows us to be persuaded, that a child is non-essential to re- ligion. However satisfactorily this antipathy may work among Pagans, it is the absolute destruction of Christianity. However, let us not be too hard on ourselves for our wrong feelings in this matter, and let us lay lots of the blame where most of the blame is due: to the diseased thought of the past two decades, and, in larger scope, of the past four hundred years, whose clearly expressed intention has been, slow- ly, insidiously, but relentlessly, to outlaw our lovehold on the child, and through him to overthrow all factual Christian truth. One cannot make babies out of grown-ups. This is childishness, a sin of which children are never guilty. Children are childlike, but they are never childish, certainly not with the childishness that is the burden of our novels, our plays, our courtship, and so many of our songs. When an actress, with an icy voice, on an American stage, sees fit to refer to babies this way : ‘‘Oh, babies ! You mean those queer little things that look like lobsters?'' —and gets laughed at for saying it, then you know to what depths our culture has descended. I have referred to our dislike, our disdain, and even our dread of the child. It seems not by accident that these three phobias can be phrased alliteratively, for they are more than alliteratively allied. They are “mind-weapons" employed by grown-ups in a veritable WAR against babies, a war in which, in the long run, there will be far more casualties than there will ever be in a war of planes and tanks and guns. Dislike of the child is bound to come where father and mother are not sure of their love, and do not even want to make sure of it. Dis- like of the child is inevitable when he is in constant danger of being taken out of his crib and put into the custody of the courts. Un- stable love between his parents has given the child a nuisance value which he is helpless to rid himself of. As a possible nuisance he comes 18 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD into the world, if he comes at all. As a nuisance he is handed over to a nurse, who, not being his moth- er, cannot always be expected to understand him with a mother’s sympathy. As a nuisance he is sent off to school, not to be edu- cated, but to be gotten out of sight. For the child has challenging eyes, and they try so hard to reunite love, where love has been broken. And the child asks desperately em- barassing questions, questions for which he may be scolded or pun- ished—but which always remain unanswered. Dislike for the child is bad enough, but disdain for the child is devilish—and such a spirit obtains among those who have been taught to put little more than an athletic value on their little ones. Eugenics, you may call the practice if you want a fancy name. Its purpose is to supply us, if possible, not with a race of children, but of super- children. If our children can qual- ify, muscularly as gladiators, or mentally as geniuses; if they are pretty enough to win beauty con- tests, or are self-consciously cute enough to get into the movies (for purposes of general entertainment). Eugenics will allow us to breed them. But the simple little infant who sometimes has a cough and often is not well, and who looks at you wonderingly for months and months after his arrival, suing for your charity and pleading for your pity, because he needs them so much—this little fellow is taboo. Eugenics disdains him. And his commonplace parents are urged to surrender commonplace parenthood in favor of the uncommonplace chil- dren of the superfit. So you see how democratic the principle of Eu- genics is, and you see what large liberties it allows to simple people in simple homes, amidst the simple sanctities of Democracy. The last great emotional refusal of the child in the un-Christian dispensation of Christian lands, is dread; the dread of him as an eco- nomic hardship. The sterile dollar which has been made fruitful with its regular and unfailing interest, has made the fruitful mother child- less for the sake of the fruitful dollar. The practice derives from a religious principle which first ad- vocated perpetual Heaven without merit, and in short order, perpetual wealth without labor. Wealth may be curtailed by taxes, but never if those taxes are in the ingratiating form of one’s own flesh and blood. My dear listeners, I see the diffi- culties of applying these uncom- promising principles to a general roundup of our social sins. If we are ever to correct our mistakes. GOD AS A CHILD 19 it must be done slowly, and with sympathy and with charity. But if we are never to look a principle squarely in the eye, and for its own sake—^what right have we to talk of principles ? Why not run the whole business of human life with- out principles, and say so? The child we dislike, the child we disdain, the child we dread! The child who is a nuisance, the child who is a misfit, the child who is all expense! What chance has he got? Poor little fellow! If we do not get rid of him one way, we will in another, for there are three doors, wide-open, through which he may depart. And if he goes, and does not return, what chance has God, the Christian God, to come in — since the Christian God has one first overture of love, and it is in the Incarnation of Himself in the form of a child? God became a child because the child is the truest reflection of God. ‘'Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not. For of such is the kingdom of God’^ {Mark 10:14). In Heaven God is not eternally old. He is eternally young, every instant as fresh, as infinite and powerful and unspoiled—as unde- terioratedly Divine as He has re- mained in the forever of the past and will be in the forever of the future. If you do not like the child, you will make yourself some sort of aged and hoary God to deal with, and He will get very old on you, before you know it, so old that He will vanish in some gray abstrac- tion and leave you just where you started. But if you take our God, Christianity's God, you will find Him every Christmas, just as bright and new and fascinating, just as trustful and unsuspicious and ready to make friends with you, as only a child can want to and only a child can. We are the children of God. And we are also the children of men. Despite the fact that we are not marvelous physical specimens, neither too good-looking, too bril- liant, or even, at times, too well — someone once believed in us. We were once welcomed into a moth- er's and father's heart. We were nobody's nuisance, nobody's mis- fit, nobody's economic bother. Our parents never regarded us as some- thing that arrived annoyingly, and had to be paid for like the gas bill. If there is anywhere in our hearts a remembrance of this charity— a charity extended to us when we were small and silent and sleeping in the cradle—upon that remem- brance religion will build, God will 20 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD come to us, and Jesus, the little Infant of Bethlehem, wil be our God. Don't you worry about God, my dear listeners, or fear He will be diminished by the charity of Christmas. Infinity is safe in the little hands of Jesus that lie on the coverlet. All majesty and beauty are securely and sweetly hidden in the innocence of those large little eyes. God wants not to frighten us, but to surprise and delight us. Were He to outleash His own light- nings and be brought down to us in some world-shattering revelation, who, could bear the experience? No one can see the face of God and live! But, sifted to suit our sight, and dwelling amongst us as one of our own, one can see the face of little Jesus, and love. One day when this life is over, we shall have to appear before God in the awful scrutiny of Divine Judgment. That day, the question which is now put to us tenderly and in pure trust and innocence, will be put to us in terror. ‘'What did you think of me as a child?" Prayer In Time Of War THE MOTHER OF GOD Address Delivered on November 29, 1942 This is my last talk, and before I begin it I am going to make three acknowledgments of gratitude, to those to whom I should be most grateful. First, to you for listen- ing to me, if you have listened, and for liking what I have said, if you have liked it; second, to the Na- tional Broadcasting Company and the National Council of Catholic Men for letting me speak ; and third, to God for making it possible for any human voice, not merely mine, to travel, almost miraculous- ly, such tremendous distance, into your homes, wherever you are, on Sunday evening. Tonight I am going to speak about a mother and her child ; about a human mother and her divine child. Report has it—to speak cau- tiously by way of a beginning—re- port has it, that there was once such a mother who bore such a child; that the mother was human and the child divine. Report has it that this event occurred about nineteen hundred and forty two years ago, and that is why we call this the year of Our Lord 1942, because it is one thou- sand nine hundred and forty two years since His birth. Report—let me go on saying this way for a mo- ment—report has it, that the mother was a little Jewish girl, in her early teens, and that she lived in a small town called Nazareth, which is in the province of Galilee, the northern province of Palestine, called 'The Holy Land,'’ where most of the Old Testament was fulfilled and where dwelt God's greatest spiritual race: the Jews. Report goes on to say that an angel—a spirit from a world above us—^took temporary shape, and as God's messenger, appeared to this little girl, and said: "Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee" {Luke 1:28). And the angel told her in very simple words that God was going to become man, to assume our nature, to become one of us, and to show us in flesh and blood what God looks like ; and that she to whom the angel spoke was to be His mother. Report declares that this little Jewish girl was greatly astonished, as well she might be; but being, though poor, a little thoroughbred of the Royal House of David, she spoke back to the angel with quiet dignity, and asked : "How shall this be done, because I know not man?" {Luke 1:34). And the angel went on to explain that there was to be, for a child's sake and for a child's reason, a most exquisite and divine 22 WE AEE THE CHILDREN OF GOD delicacy in the birth of Jesus. By the power of sheer love, untouched by man, God was to make her fruitful ! And Mary—for that was the little virgin’s name—bowed her head and said: ‘'Be it done to me according to thy word” {Luke 1:38). And so was the Divine In- carnation achieved. And nine months later, there is more report of a small deserted stable in Bethlehem, in Judea — the Southern province of Palestine, this time—^where this young maid and mother had been obliged to go for the sake of a political require- ment; and there in that stable her child was born. And there in that stable God was laid as a baby, en- throned in our flesh and released into our world. That’s all of the story I have time enough to give tonight, my dear listeners, though there’s much more of it, as many of you know. But let me stop with what I have so briefly said, and let me explain why I have prefaced each sentence of this story with the phrase “re- port has it.” Because I wish first to inquire from some of my listeners who may disbelieve it, “Wouldn’t you like it to have been true!” Don’t you think it would have been nice of God to have so loved us as to take our nature as His own, abide in it, breathe our air and eat our food. suffer our sufferings and sleep our sleep? Would it not indicate that we are not quite as forgotten by our Creator as we seem to be in some of our darker moments? Would we not have extra reason to be proud of our human race if we knew that one of our little girls was so loved by God that He, Who is motherless in eternity, should have chosen her to be His Mother in time? Are you provincial enough to have a distaste for our Emmanuel —our God-with-us—because His mother was a Jew? Are not the Jews members of our human race, with bodies and souls and minds and hearts, and a power to know and suffer and love the same, iden- tically the same, as ourselves? If you have a daughter of your own, would it not comfort you to take her in your arms this evening and tell her the story of the Incarnation in some simple words. Words like these which Thomas Butler, the poet, has used in his address to a child: There was a little girl like you. With eyes as big and bright and true. She loved to laugh and play and run The same as you or anyone. And in the April of the year When all the long-lost flowers appear. An angel came to her one day And said to put her dolls away. THE MOTHER OF GOD 23 She meekly bowed her little head To what the blessed angel said, And swift as the flying of a dove, She changed from child to mother love. Such was the incident of Mary and the angel. The love was Di- vine. The little mother was human. And the child was God. This is Christianity ! Now don't tell me, dear listeners, that it doesn't make any difference whether this story is true or not. One who starts tampering with truth that way will soon get his mind out of order. Say the story of the Incarnation is true or it is not true; but do not say it does not make any difference. It may not make much difference in the way you run your business, wind your watch, smoke your cigar, or butter your bread. But it makes a tre- mendous difference in the way you think; and all the difference in the world in the way you pray! Was Jesus God, or was He not? If He was not, then we may well despair. For we have been cheated by an im- postor whom God has allowed to claim His prerogatives and assume His name. '‘All power is given to me in heaven and in earth" {Matt, 28:18). Does anyone but God talk that way? “Before Abraham was made, I am" (John 8:58). Does that sound like the statement of just another nice man? “I abjure thee," Jesus was asked, “that thou tell us if thou be the Christ the Son of God" (Matt. 26:63). And He replied : “Thou hast said it" (Matt. 26:64). And the answer was called a blasphemy ; for blasphemy it was, or else—^the truth ! Everyone knows Jesus was a nice man. But nice men do not give us a real Bethlehem, a real Calvary, or a real Redemption. Nice men are as impotent to promise us a Kingdom that is not of this world as they are to settle the affairs of this one. Furthermore, nice men do not tell lies, when they are asked, point- blank, the truth. If Jesus was not God, then in the name of holiness and truth we have been cheated by God so insidiously that we can never return to Him again in prayer and confidence or ever expect another Revelation. The Pagans will go on building up their ancestral religions, their race wor- ship, their hoary divinities, on the ruins of our Revelation, but I prom- ise them that our Revelation will haunt them for all the rest of his- tory; for our Revelation and our Religion is the one that thought God was good enough to become a child for love of us, before it was discovered that the child was a lie. Report has it—that Jesus, Mary's child was God ; and don't you worry, the report is true. It is nineteen 24 WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF GOD hundred years since the report be- gan and the report is still holding on. For a lie gets swamped out, usually with the years, and al- ways with the centuries. But the truth lasts. ‘‘There was a little girl like you’’ —if any father or mother is holding their own little daughter in arms tonight while I am speaking, let me say to her the whole of Thomas Butler’s poem. It is interlaced with a refrain which runs “0 dulcis, o pia, peullula Maria.” Maria means Mary, for that was God’s mother’s name. You know Ave Maria: Hail Mary! Well, “0 dulcis, o pia, puellula Maria” means “0 sweet, o holy, o little child Mary.” And so, here’s the way the whole poem goes. There was a little girl like you With eyes as big and bright and true. She loved to laugh and play and run The same as you or anyone. O dulcis, 0 pia, puellula Maria, And in the April of the year When all the long-lost flowers appear. An angel came to her one day And said to put her dolls away. She meekly bowed her little head To what the blessed angel said. And swift as the flying of a dove She changed from child to mother love. O dulcis, 0 pia, puellula Maria, Thus as the years go by for you. You’ll change as children all must do. Love with its burden, love with woe. Will come as it came long long ago To dulcis et pia, puellula Maria, But lest your little heart be torn With sorrow’s ache and sorrow’s thorn. Teach it to love and ever stand Close to the touch of the little hand Of dulcis, et pia, puellula Maria, And when you’re old and gray and lone She’ll come to claim you for her own. Take you to Heaven out of pain. Make you a little girl, ever again . . . Who will? God’s Mother will! For she was God’s Mother. The angel told her she was going to be, and Jesus, her little Child, proved that the angel told^the truth . . . O beautiful as the moon, chosen as the sun, terrible as an army in array! You are the Queen of An- gels! You are the Mother and the Queen of men. You originated on this little planet of ours, pertain to our race, and are related to us not by the angelic ties of love and thought, but by the very fibres of flesh and blood. You are still a woman, even in this awful majestic status bestowed on you by God. You are the Mother of Divine Grace, powerful in your THE MOTHER OF GOD 25 intercession. You are not God, but you are the Gate to God, the Gate of Heaven. You are under- standing, marvelously simple and unsuspicious, tender towards us poor sinners in our meannesses and mistakes. You take each of us by the hand when we die, and lead us to the Beatific Vision. For the ra- in which God redeemed the world, was begotten in your womb. You are God’s Mother! And you are Our Lady 1 Prayer In Time Of War THE PURPOSE OF THE CATHOLIC HOUR (Extract from the address of the late Patrick Cardinal Hayes at the inaugural program of the Catholic Hour in the studio of the National Broadcasting Company, New York City, March 2, 1930.) Our congratulations and our gratitude are extended to the National Council of Catholic Men and its officials, and to all who, by their financial support, have made it possible to use this offer of the National Broadcasting Company. The heavy expense of managing and financing a weekly program, its musical numbers, its speakers, the subsequent answering of inquiries, must be met. . . . This radio hour is for all the people of the United States. To our fellow-citizens, in this word of dedication, we wish to express a cordial greeting and, indeed, congratulations. For this radio hour is one of service to America, which certainly will listen in interestedly, and even sympathetically, I am sure, to the voice of the ancient Church with its historic background of all the centuries of the Christian era, and with its own notable contribution to the discovery, explora- tion, foundation and growth of our glorious country. . . . Thus to voice before a vast public the Catholic Church is no light task. Our prayers will be with those who have that task in hand. We feel certain that it will have both the good will and the good wishes of the great majority of our countrymen. Surely, there is no true lover of our Country who does not eagerly hope for a less worldly, a less material, and a more spiritual standard among our people. With good will, with kindness and with Christ-like sympa- thy for all, this work is inaugurated. So may it continue. So may it be fulfilled. This word of dedication voices, there- fore, the hope that this radio hour may serve to make known, to explain with the charity of Christ, our faith, which we love even as we love Christ Himself. May it serve to make better understood that faith as it really is—a light revealing the pathway to heaven: a strength, and a power divine through Christ; pardoning our sins, elevating, consecrating our common every-day duties and joys, bringing not only justice but gladness and peace to our searching and ques- tioning hearts. 104 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS In 41 States, the District of Columbia, and Hawaii Alabama Birmingham WBRC 960 kc Mobile WALA 1410 kc Arizona Phoenix KTAR 620 kc Safford KGLU 1450 kc Tucson KVOA 1290 kc Yuma KYUM 1240 kc Arkansas Little Rock KARK 920 kc California Bakersfield KERN 1410 kc Fresno KMJ 580 kc Los Angeles KECA 790 kc Sacramento KFBK 1530 kc San Francisco KPO 680 kc Stockton KWG 1230 kc Colorado Denver KOA 850 kc Connecticut Hartford WTIC* 1080 kc District of Columbia Washington WRC 980 kc Florida Jacksonville WJAX 930 kc Lakeland WLAK 1340 kc Miami WIOD 610 kc Pensacola WCOA 1370 kc Tampa WFLA-WSUN 1970-620 kc Georgia Atlanta .WSB 750 kc Savannah WSAV 1340 kc Idaho Boise KIDO 1380 kc Pocatello KSEI 930 kc Twin Falls KTFI 1270 kc Illinois Chicago WMAQ 670 kc Indiana Fort Wayne WGL 1450 kc Terre Haute WBOW 1230 kc Kansas Wichita KANS 1240 kc Kentucky Louisville WAVE* 970 kc Louisiana New Orleans WSMB* 1350 kc Shreveport KTBS 1480 kc Maryland Baltimore WBAL 1090 kc Massachusetts Boston WBZ* 1030 kc Springfield WBZA* 1030 kc Michigan Detroit WWJ* 950 kc Minnesota Duluth-Superior ...WEBC 1320 kc Mankato KYSM 1230 kc Minneapolis-St. Paul KSTP 1500 kc Rochester KROC 1340 kc St. Cloud KFAM 1450 kc Mississippi Jackson WJDX 1300 kc Missouri Kansas City WDAF 610 kc Springfield KGBX 1260 kc Saint Louis KSD* 550 kc Montana Billings KGHL 790 kc Bozeman KRBM 1450 kc Butte KGIR 1370 kc Helena KPFA 1240 kc Nebraska Omaha WOW 590 kc Nevada Reno KOH 630 kc New Hampshire Manchester WFEA 1370 kc New Mexico Albuaueraue KOB 1030 kc 104 CATHOLIC HOUR STATIONS In 41 States^ the District of Columbia^ and Hawaii New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon /Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin HAWAII Short Wave Buffalo WBEN 930 kc New York WEAF 660 kc Schenectady WGY 810 kc Asheville WISE 1230 kc Charlotte WSOC* 1240 kc Raleigh ..WPTF 680 kc Winston-Salem WSJS 600 kc Bismarck KFYR 550 kc Fargo WDAY 970 kc Cincinnati WSAI 1360 kc Cleveland WTAM 1100 kc Columbus WCOL 1230 kc Dayton WING 1410 kc Lima WLOK 1240 kc Springfield WIZE 1340 kc Zanesville WHIZ 1240 kc Oklahoma City WKY 930 kc Tulsa KVOO 1170 kc Medford KMED 1440 kc Portland KEX 1190 kc Allentown WSAN 1470 kc Altoona WFBG 1340 kc Johnstown WJAC 1400 kc Philadelphia KYW 1060 kc Pittsburgh KDKA 1020 kc Reading WRAW 1340 kc Wilkes-Barre WBRE 1340 kc Providence WJAR 920 kc Charleston WTMA 1250 kc Columbia WIS 560 kc Florence WOLS 1230 kc Greenville WFBC 1330 kc Sioux Falls KSOO-KELO 1140-1230 kc Kingsport WKPT 1400 kc Nashville WSM 650 kc Amarillo KGNC 1440 kc Beaumont * KFDM 560 kc El Paso KTSM 1380 kc Fort Worth KGKO 570 kc Houston KPRC 950 kc San Antonio WOAI 1200 kc Weslaco KRGV 1290 kc Norfolk WTAR* 790 kc Richmond WMBG 1380 kc Seattle KJR 1000 kc Spokane KHQ 590 kc Charleston WGKV 1490 kc Madison WIBA 1310 kc Honolulu KGU 760 kc Schenectady WGEO 9.53 me (Revised as of April, 1942) Delayed Broadcast CATHOLIC HOUR RADIO ADDRESSES IN PAMPHLET FORM Prices Subject to change without notice. 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