Growing Up

There was a quote by Chili Davis that is memorable: “Growing old is mandatory; growing up is optional.” This truth of not escaping our human physical death is ever before us. We have resorted to a “youth culture” in America wishing to avoid reality for as long a possible. What we are called as Christians and what we have some control of is the level that we “grow up.” The great Christian spiritual masters tell us over and over again that it is not through “sophisticated values” in this world that Christ brings us to spiritual maturity, but He teaches us His perspective by “being like children,” in the middle of an adult world. We as children are called to be “wise as a serpent and gentile as a dove,” and asked to remember that “the last will be first.” It is only after learning to be His child that He will help us “grow up” in a way considered “foolish” to others. Our Church just might benefit by having more wise children and less tactical adults peering out from their glasses. Because it is a child that continues to depend and be more open to His Father’s leading.

Christ turns this world and ours upside down, He can because He is the only one that can make it right again. A few questions: Is our souls as Christians maturing in His childness, becoming more open to Him and others? Do we spiritually look more like Christ now than yesterday? This growth can only happen if our priorities are a maturing within humanity that is only found in being a little Christ. The Christian song writer and singer Rich Mullins once described this process as “growing young.”

John Paul II has renewed a wonderful conversation in the Church in His “Theology of the Body.” He reminds Christian children that we are not Gnostics that reject a spirituality of the physical in our search, for we are taught to embrace our physical growth through the context of the soul within the body. Our human fragility reveals the soul, not being trapped in the body, but called to proclaim from the body the reality of the soul.

Lucifer hates this fact that Christ’s children have the ability to physically multiply and these children can grow up: disciples. One of the greatest fears evil has is that these measly children will believe their Father and wish to grow up to be just like Him, some might, with His help learn how to rule. One of the last things Rich Mullins said on earth was, “look, I look like Jesus.” Now this is a child’s soul living dangerously and what Christ calls growing up.