I was sitting during our service of Forgiveness Vespers. I’m getting older and I was tired. The senior priest was leading the service and I was sitting quietly, steeling myself for the “Rite of Forgiveness” (where everyone forgives everyone) that was to follow. It takes time to do this when there are hundreds of people involved. As I sat, a mother with two toddlers stood by. One toddler crawled up beside me and began to examine my beard with great interest. I felt like the grandfather that I am (delight). The innocence of children stands in sharp contrast to the composite character of adults. We are children ourselves locked in a body (and soul), marked by its many wounds, bound with habits and neuroses. The presence of children serves to remind me that we didn’t start out this way.
The Rite of Mutual Forgiveness, where one person says to another, “Forgive me,” and hears, “I forgive, and God forgives. Forgive me” (or something to that effect) takes place on the Sunday before Great Lent (since it’s Vespers, it’s technically Monday). It is a slow, time-consuming exercise that takes Orthodox faithful into emotional territory that is often neglected in our culture. Forgiveness is needed by all.
But then there are the children. Describing their innocence, Christ said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven” (Matt. 18:10).
Some part of me thought that it would be appropriate to line the little children up and for the adults to make a common prostration before them, begging for their forgiveness for what we have collectively made of our world – though, in truth, it would be all the generations who have gone before them joining in that common act of contrition. If we are honest, then we will also acknowledge that when our life is done, we will not have changed things. The struggle with evil will continue until the End.
Nevertheless, I see the children among us as a sign of the hope that abides. Though there are things about evil that can be cumulative (it adds up), in general, this is not the case. Were it otherwise, the sum total would have long ago crushed us out of existence. Were the world to be suddenly destroyed in a nuclear disaster, it would not be a cumulative exercise, but a singular exercise of stupidity – the work of a few.
But with every child born, with each new generation, there is something of a collective forgiveness, innocence returns among us as a treasure about whose keeping Christ Himself warns us. Still, we cause them to stumble.
I have been thinking long and hard about the child I once was, though much of it is hard to recover. It is probably a musing that comes with my age. I believe that our souls are ageless in their being. Though we incur wounds and distortions, that which was given to us in the beginning remains an inheritance. This “child-like” soul is a treasure of which we are stewards. Like the stewards in the parable, we invest it, or hide it, and give an account when God comes to receive it again to Himself. It is our life.
That the child we once were resides within us can easily be seen in experience of memory. Though we might live eight, nine or more decades, it is the first decade that stays with us more than all. Indeed, our childhood is probably the strongest, most formative memory that we have. The love of father and mother (or their absence or disfigurement), as well as our early experience of siblings, whisper to us to the very end of our days. I remember my paternal grandfather, calling for his mother as he himself was dying. She had herself been dead for over 50 years – nevertheless, she was there.
There are a few icons in the Church picturing the soul being received by Christ. Most prominent among these is the icon of the Dormition of the Theotokos (the death of the Virgin Mary). In it, her soul is portrayed as a little child. There is something profoundly instinctive in this.
As we forgive others, and seek forgiveness, we do well to remember their childhood (and our own). It is such purity that we seek in these encounters, a longing to be restored to our own innocence, even as we restore it to others.
May God receive us all, children that we are, in His heavenly kingdom!
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