The kids, how they grow

This past week was a whirlwind of milestones for my son. On Monday he tested in his Kenpo Karate class, earning his blue belt and therein also a promotion to the next class. This will be the last class before he has to decide whether to pursue his black belt – it seems entirely too soon for that but at the same time I see the progress he’s made and can see how it could happen that soon. On Wednesday we were back at the Karate studio for their promotion night where he for the first time worked out in front of the studio’s founder and was presented his belt. Makes one feel downright old, it does.

The biggest day, however, was still to come. Just yesterday along with about thirty of his classmates he received the Body and Blood of our Risen Savior for the first time. It has been so wonderful to see him take the path I never had the chance to as a child, to grow up always knowing of the love and care his Eternal Father has for him and growing to understand the extent to which that love was willing to go for him. There are some, and at one point I was one of them, who would argue that children of his age are too young to understand what, or rather Whom, they are receiving. Having gone through this and quite honestly interrogated him myself (yes, to be honest I would have not allowed him to go through with the Sacrament if I did not find him properly prepared – to me there’s no such thing with the Eucharist as “keeping with the schedule”) I can now properly and honestly attribute that to a severe case of adult convert myopic vision. I find myself having been guilty of that very arrogance of so many of the elite who thought the simple could never understand the Mass or its mysteries. Yet here is this young child who probably would struggle to spell transubstantiation showing a most pure and true grasp of what and Who is going on. It reminds me that the path from the heart to the head is much smoother than from the head to the heart; it indeed may be the only one where going up is faster than going down. I have so far to go…