SUNDAY JANUARY 14, 2018
Have you ever felt like nobody? / Just a tiny speck of air. / When everyone’s around you, / And you are just not there.” This was written by a 9-year-old girl: probably an ordinary one, who had not been turned by adults into a little doll. We forget the smallness of childhood. To imagine it you would have to think of the world peopled by giants fifteen feet tall! Smallness, helplessness, ignorance of what is going on, being bossed by everyone – even by strangers.... The Son of Man was once a child. He was a child at a time before children were idealized. Children, in the idealized sense, are a modern invention; they were invented, some say, by William Blake in the 19th century. Before that time, they were just incomplete adults, who had to be shaped by adults as you would shape clay. The Son of Man chose to be as near to nothing as a human being could be – in order to share our nature to the very depths.
