Something I have often heard a couple
say when their first child arrives is this: ‘Nothing could
have prepared us for this!’ I have heard it so often that it
makes me smile and I don’t doubt that it is true. It usually
seems to be the man who says it. I suspect that women are
better prepared for a child than men, especially considering they
have already carried the child for 9 months, which must be a wonderful but difficult thing. In fact I have the greatest respect for
every couple or single parent I know who are trying to raise a
child or children. While the children bring great joy, they
also require 100% sacrifice. Apparently professional thieves don’t usually bother targeting homes with
children because they know there won’t be much there in the line of
money or jewellery, since it is all spent on providing for the
children!
Although it is a big sacrifice, it is
also a wonderful sacrifice, one which our parents made for us and I’m
sure you cannot know what it involves unless you have been through
it. Apart from the financial strain and worry of trying to
provide the best for your children, there is also the emotional
strain of hoping you will parent them properly and raise them to have
a good chance in life too. As we all know too, parents never stop
worrying about their children even when they are grown up with their
own families. I suppose it is part of the vocation.
The strange thing is that although people have been raising children
since the beginning of the human race, it seems that each parent
still has to learn from scratch. I guess each generation has to
learn for itself.
Today we have the
feast of the presentation of Jesus in the Temple, where Mary and
Joseph come to the Temple to dedicate their child to God, which was
required of them by the Jewish law. It wasn’t required that
this be done in the temple in Jerusalem—any synagogue was
sufficient—but they wanted to do it this way. No doubt they wanted to do the very best thing for their child, like all parents. So the Son of
God is presented to the Father in heaven by Mary and Joseph. At
the same time the Father is presenting his Son to the human race.
As with so many events in the life of
Jesus, various signs accompanied this event. This time the old
man Simeon takes the child and recognises that this baby is the
chosen one of God for whom all the people have been waiting for centuries.
How could he tell this baby from any other one? Because the
Spirit had told him when to go to the Temple and that the baby he
would see would be God’s anointed one, the Christ (which means
‘anointed’). The prophetess Anna also recognises the infant
Jesus as the chosen one of God and they both give thanks to God for
being allowed to witness this wonderful thing: God coming among us.
Like any other parents I’m sure Mary
and Joseph went through all kinds of stresses and strains in trying
to raise Jesus, worrying about whether they would be able to provide
for him and teach him the Jewish faith properly. No doubt they
also had all kinds of hopes for him as to what he would become when
he grew up, after all the angel Gabriel had told Mary that he would
be great and would be called Son of the Most High. But also
like so many parents Mary and Joseph were faced with all kinds of
unexplained things, like today’s event in the temple, then when
Jesus goes missing for three days. Later when Jesus is publicly
preaching it says at one point his family came to take charge of
him because 'they thought he had taken leave of his senses!' And
finally what must Mary have gone through seeing her own son arrested,
tortured and executed in such a brutal way? Many of her hopes
and dreams for Jesus must have been turned on their head along the
way. And yet all of these events had their place. The
most horrible event of all turned out to be the one that saved the
human race from eternal death, opening the way to heaven for us.
Maybe these things are also a reminder
to us that what can seem to us to be terrible changes, or ‘everything
going wrong’, are not necessarily so. What seem to be
disasters can be seen in a different way with the eyes of faith.
There is so much we don’t understand about a person’s life, but
perhaps we don’t need to understand. Maybe that can also help
us to be open to the many unexpected changes that take place along
the way, both for ourselves and others. We have a part to play
in our children’s journey, an important part, but it is only a
part. It is not for us to decide how someone’s life should
be. Ultimately we are all in God's hands.
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