While He was reclining at the table with them, He took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus – and He disappeared from their sight. Luke 24:30-31
“Human beings are made for communion. If there’s no communion; we close up on ourselves; we are unable to communicate; to to enter into the flow of life. It is as if there is no irrigation, no circulation of life. A child abandoned at birth closes up in sadness and depression and becomes incapable of reacting or communicating. For a child, this communion is vital, the to and fro of love, wherein each one gives and receives. Sometimes I hear psychologists say that children are incapable of loving and that love only grows and deepens later as we grow in our gift of self and become more generous and altruistic.
But children do love, though not with a love that is generosity, only with a love that is trust, a love which is a communion of hearts. Trust is already a gift of self. We adults have often grown in generosity but have lost this basic trust – a trust in God, a trust in others, a trust in ourselves. We have been hurt or manipulated in the past and are afraid of being hurt again if we put too much trust in others.
Instead we put up our defense mechanisms and become independent and self-sufficient. Children are not self-sufficient. They need others to cover them up at night if they are cold. They are dependent on others for everything and can only cry out in their need. Their cry is in itself a sign of trust; trust that someone will come and answer their cry, that someone is there who wants them to be well and happy.
When a mother hears her child’s cry she knows how to interpret it – whether it is a sign that he is hungry or frightened or in pain – because she loves and knows her child. We…have to learn how to interpret the cry of our people especially when they are non verbal; their only language is their facial expression, their gesture or sometimes their violence. We need to understand what they are asking for, who they are refusing, and where there is pain.”
Jean Vanier in Befriending the Stranger (New York: Paulist Press, 2005) 118-119.
Does your generosity include trust?
Vanier keenly notes that we as adults tend to lose that childlike trust and dependence, exchanging it for defense mechanisms and independence because we have been burned in the past. We think we know better, and so we actually isolate ourselves from the very communion we and others need most. We become blind to Christ who is with us and at work around us.
Do you know how to interpret the cries of the people around you? And why does this matter?
To live, give, serve, and love friend and stranger, enemy or neighbor, we must drop our defense mechanisms, abandon independence that isolates us, and embrace trust in God and others. If we do this, we will experience communion with God and others. And our eyes will be opened to recognize Jesus who is with us and at work around us and through us.