Receiving the child, not the wicked

“I think that is what James meant when he wrote about a wisdom that comes from above. It is a way of looking at life and at our strengths and weaknesses that sees possibilities beyond what we think we are capable of.”

“Yes, we know that the Lord is calling us, but, given all the distractions, all too often we don’t understand exactly what it is he means. And instead of welcoming one of these little ones – the child, the poor, the sick, the refugee, the prisoner – we debate how great we are.”

“Jesus taught the disciples about being servant leaders. Living our faith as Christians is not about hierarchy or power, but service to our brothers and sisters.”

“This gospel passage asks of us that we begin to rethink our attitude to many people, and it should lead us to ponder all the more deeply what Jesus is doing when he becomes last of all and servant of all on the cross”

“And that’s what our Christian vocation is about. It’s allowing Jesus to call us into his crazy world of death=glory, weak=strong, leader=servant, child=God.”

“Maybe life is about something completely different than the rat race for honors”

“Who are the others we are called to love in deeds and words as much as Jesus is seen to love here?”

“What is the point of your life therefore? To be who God intends you to be.”

“The vocation to service belongs to the Church as a whole and to every member of the Church. In other words, the Christian vocation is an apostolate of bearing witness to Christ through loving, humble service.”

“It is in serving each other and seeing each other as ‘family’ that we are not only vindicated in our trust in God but in fact become the hands, the arms, the very heart of an all-loving, all-merciful Father”

“We have the tools to change the world, with our faith, the graces that Christ have given us – but what do we do with it?”

“It is in serving, in being like and welcoming little children, and in peacemaking that we will find the wisdom to reap a harvest of justice and take the prophetic role in creation needed for a planet we have helped lead to the brink of ecological and moral collapse”

“Jesus shows us a God who is with the contemptible, who triumphs in the resurrection through rejection, humiliation and death. God’s greatness is shown in service and humility; above all it is shown in a little child.”

“So the Readings this Sunday are calling us to discard our usual standards for judging success in this world, and adopt a radically supernatural outlook on life”

“When Jesus takes a vulnerable child and embraces it in the midst of his disciples, he is not saying that the most vulnerable among us are worth more than we are, but he is saying that our standing in his eyes is tied to the way we treat the least among us”

“For us to love others without self-interest is not easy but love is oddly reciprocal. The more we give, the more we have to give.”

“We know that as we listen to Jesus all our lives talk to us about the Paschal Mystery, we're preoccupied with who's getting ahead...so keep this image before you: Jesus with his arms around this little child, that's what the kingdom of God is about”

“What Jesus does, remarkably, is he puts a child in the center of attention. In this beautiful gesture he shows us, it seems to me, the wonderfully upside down world we're meant to inhabit, the world that represents the overturning of original sin”

“Be like a child willing to be commanded, willing to surrender to the now, and the great now is God's mission, which is to forget your ego and so to allow his love to surge through you into the world”

“You want to destroy yourself? Cling to your warring emotions, they will devour you. You want to save yourself? Hook those passions on to the infinite purposes of God”