The Selfish Giant

Children and the gift of life | The Word in the Wild, Proper 20, Year B

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“Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’” —Mark 9:36-37

Not long ago I read a story by Oscar Wilde about a selfish giant. The giant had a garden, full of flowers and beautiful trees, and each day, as the town’s children passed by, they would play in the garden, delighting in it. The giant had been away for many years, but upon returning, he was dismayed to find that his garden had become a playground. He yelled at the children to get out and built a wall around its borders.

Winter came, snow covered the ground and the last of the fall flowers faded. The children no longer had anywhere to play—the streets were too busy, the ground too rocky. They would pass by the garden and say to one another, “how happy we were there.”

When spring arrived, all around the garden flowers began to blossom and trees began to bud. But not inside the walls. There, snow blanketed the ground and the trees were bare. The cold stayed all summer and fall and through the winter again and the giant mourned the loss of his flowers, the silence of the birds.

In the spring, the children tired of having nowhere to play, snuck into the garden through a small hole in the wall. The giant woke from his winter sleep and looked out to see flowers in the trees and each one with a child sitting in it. He was so glad for the flowers that he wasn’t angry at the children for trespassing. He realized that they were what had brought life to the garden. But in one corner of it was still winter. The tree there was bare and a little boy was standing beneath it, too small to reach the branches. The giant went to the boy and gently lifted him up. The tree immediately blossomed into flower and the whole garden was fully alive again.

When I read this fable, I heard a resonance with our Gospel for this Sunday, for it too is a story about giants and children; about what really brings life into the world. In the Gospel, Jesus and his disciples have begun the journey to Jerusalem. They know that this is it; that the messianic moment for Jesus to claim his crown has come. But as much as Jesus tries to tell them that his crown will be made of thorns and his coronation throne will be a cross, the disciples just don’t get it. Their imaginations are captive to the kingdoms made up of palaces and protected by armies, the reign of tyrants who act like giants. And so, in their excitement about the coming victory, they’re beginning to wonder where they’ll land after the revolution is over. What cabinet positions will they have in Christ’s reign? Who will sit on his right hand and on his left?

We can imagine Jesus walking quietly with them, hearing their conversation in the background. He doesn’t interrupt, but when they come to a stopping place he asks them a question. “What were you arguing about back there?” There’s an embarrassed silence; some shuffling around, they didn’t realize he’d heard all of that. We can imagine his smile as Jesus gives them a key lesson of the Gospel: Those who want to be greatest in God’s reign must become the servants of all. He takes a child, someone not very useful for the purposes of power, and puts her in their midst. Here’s how you’ll know your successful in God’s reign, he says. When you welcome a child like this, you’re welcoming me, you’re welcoming God.

The world of earthly power has no room for children. Jesus knows this well, for his birth came when Caesar demanded a census, a tool for taxes and building armies, and there was no room in the inn. The world that has no room for children is one that has no room for life. As Thomas Merton writes, “We live in the time of no room…The time when everyone is obsessed with lack of time, lack of space, with saving time, conquering space, projecting into time and space the anguish produced within them by the technological furies of size, volume, quantity, speed, number, price, power and acceleration.” This is a world that has no room for children and their play. It has no time for their meandering walks, their lingering awe, their restless movement. And so we discipline them into the curricula of competition that will land them in the best schools that will in turn get them the best jobs. We assure ourselves that we are concerned by their welfare by supporting the institutions and industries of their care. We do this because, as

L. M. Sacasas

has noted, ours is a world where children are not integrated into our lives but are “logistical problems to be solved.”

It is into this world that Christ comes. He arrives as a child with all the children who have no room. “Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited,” writes Merton. Like the children breaking through the giant’s wall, life makes space in the margins, breaking through the borders despite our best efforts. And in this breaking through, Merton writes that the place of Christ, “is with those others for whom there is no room. His is the place with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied the status of persons… With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in this world.”

If we want to welcome Christ, receiving the great joy of his Gospel, our work is to make space for the ones for whom the world has no room at all. This begins when we embrace the children in our midst. This is not an embrace of children as objects for the working out of our adult anxieties and ambitions. Instead it is the slow work of listening, bending down, freely playing until the earth blossoms with life. The journey we must make is from selfish giants to gentle ones. And in our slowing, our opening, our gentle listening we may also discover the child within us who maybe grew up too fast because there was no room for children. We may learn again to be children of God embraced by the sufficiency of his love.

In his book on Christian meditation, James Finley, a student of Merton, offers an imaginative exercise in making room for children. I invite you to engage in this exercise yourself.

Imagine you are climbing a mountain. Below you is the valley, and you realize it is the place where you grew up, a place where you experienced the pain of exclusion, the pain of there being no room for children. You are trying to get away from that valley, ascending the mountain to be with God. But just as you come around the corner of the trail, and you can see the summit right before you, you hear a child crying down below. You realize that even though you want to go up, you must go down to help the hurting child. Listening, your follow the cries until you find yourself back in the valley, the place of your own painful memories. You open the door to your home and there a child is huddled in the corner. It is your own wounded child-self. You sit down next to the child and put your arms around it. Then, suddenly realize that you are at the summit of the mountain, you have reached the top and your are now with God in fullness! You feel God’s embrace and your heart is overwhelmed with love and compassion. Looking out from the mountain, you see the many valleys of the world below.

But again you hear the cries of a child and so again you must go down. The child is still there in the valley, crying in the corner, and you reach out to embrace it with all of the love you have received at the summit. And just as you put your arms around the child it turns into your mother, your father, your sister and brother. The child turns into the difficult co-worker, the annoying neighbor, the politician who fills you with rage. You now see the child as all those you pass on the street. Empowered by God’s love you embrace all of these people who hold within them a wounded child, a child for whom the world had no room; and carrying God’s love, God’s embrace, you make room for them, because you know that God has made room for you.