When God was young

TODAY we celebrate the feast of the Holy Child Jesus or “Santo Niño” whose image looks like a miniature Christ the King. The baroque period that pictured God and the saints as powerful and other worldly, must have been the origin of this way of depicting the Holy Child. Sometimes I wonder: “How did Jesus really look like as a child?”

Actually, there exist today some manuscripts, like “The Infancy Gospel of James,” “The Infancy Gospel of Thomas,” and the “First Gospel of the Infancy of Jesus Christ,” that provide information about Jesus’ childhood. But the Church does not give credence to these so-called “gospels” because they were written about 200 years after Jesus’ death. Some of these contain obviously invented stories, sometimes presenting Jesus as a naughty, vindictive, and small superman who used his awesome powers to get what he wanted.

Perhaps, none of Jesus’ contemporaries wrote about His childhood because He must have lived like any ordinary child, doing things that hardly attracted attention. St. Luke writes: “Jesus went down to Nazareth with his parents and was subject to them. And He grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” (Luke 2:5152). Such a laconic description of His youth says very little about the child Jesus.

I would like to think that, being God, He must have spent His childhood learning what it means to be a human being — what makes us jump for excitement, scream in fear, or cry in our pillows at night. Vulnerable to sickness, sorrow, trials, problems, and other unwanted but necessary components of human life, He must have learned the hard way why joy cannot be appreciated without pain; why, despite our basic goodness, we commit unspeakable crimes against one another; and why forgiveness is more powerful than vengeance.

Above all, like any ordinary child, He must have played and laughed. He must have seen, heard, smelled, tasted, and felt what Gerard Manley Hopkins describes as “the dearest freshness deep down things.” He must have listened and paid attention like one who has not yet learned to limit his gaze on what is practical, functional, or useful. He must have experienced everything with a sense of wonder and reverence.

Perhaps a Santo Niño without the crown and other medieval trappings of royalty and power would make his image more appealing to us. Seeing God as an ordinary child, embellished with nothing but simplicity, humility, and loving acceptance of His frail humanity, can make us sing with Adele: “You look like a movie; you sound like a song. My God, you remind me of when we were young.” Indeed, the Santo Niño must remind us of the virtues that we give up by growing up.

Let us pray that we, who were initiated too early by the electronic media to the troubles of this world, always looking for a work to do, a problem to solve, a button to push, a video game to play, a text message to send or read, and a selfie to like or to share, may somehow learn to revive our sense of wonder and surprise, to retrieve the grandeur and dignity of being human, and to recognize the divine Child imprinted in our souls — too real for tears, hatred, and violence to eradicate.