From Dr. Thurow:
As I crossed the breezeway this week I looked down from the window to see a fire truck parked below. Concerned and then curious, I looked closer and saw two long lines of ridiculously tiny and excited children filing up to be lifted into the interior by fully uniformed firemen. There was such delight in the children and such gentleness in the firemen. What a beautiful thing it is to delight so simply and artlessly in heroism, what a calling to be a protector of the innocent, and how easily we forget the majesty of innocence, itself!
How often we blunder through our self-absorbed lives forgetting those little eyes upon us, forgetting even those little children we ourselves once were, not respecting or loving even ourselves as we ought. Dostoevsky in The Brothers Karamazov warns us to always guard our faces lest something as simple as the expression on the face of a man thinking uncharitable thoughts stick forever in the memory and imagination of an innocent child we do not know, but who sees us as we walk heedlessly by. He warns that such a seed may grow one day into sorrow and despair and we would never know. When called to account for others, even strangers, even the least amongst us, Dostoevsky reminds us that we must never answer as did Cain: “I am not my brother’s keeper”. Christ makes this clear in word and in action.
But there is also a peculiar power that God has placed in innocense. Flannery O’Conner, the great Catholic short-story writer, has an amazing and terribly sad story that features the power of incense to break through our jaded prejudices and sinful habits (“All That Rises Must Converge”). The very young, seen with open eyes, are majestic in their innocence. How easily they produce selfless love and bring out the best in us if we let them! We do not ask their party affiliation, their economic status, their religion, or their race. We do not care if they are strangers. A beautiful thing hidden within our own heart springs up at the mere sight of a child and we become, for a moment, better than we have decided to make ourselves. Have you ever seen a normally-dignified adult playing with a child? Even the tone of voice often changes, the gestures, the posture, and the eyes. Children transform us for the better or, perhaps, restore in us a little of that gentleness and wonder with which we were originally created. It gives me such hope to be told that God calls us His children. Could He actually see us, amidst all our very grown-up failure and malfeasance, in the same way that we see our own children? But perhaps the better question to ask would be, what if we, ourselves, could see everyone whom we meet, from the teller at the counter to our next-door neighbor to the homeless man on the corner, in that same light? How careful and gentle we would be; how good we would be.
September 26, 2025