One of my favorite approaches to prayer begins with, “God, You Yourself exist as a community…” Furthermore, the language we use for the Trinity (Parent/Child/Spirit) can be interpreted not just as any community, but an intergenerational one. Today’s Psalm reminds us that God delights in intergenerational relationships: “May you see your children’s children.” This is a beautiful blessing, uplifting the very human experience of having intimate relationships with our elders. The Church has a long way to go in building intentionally inclusive, diverse community re: gender and sexual identities, racial identity, ability diversity, and more. But today’s readings invite us also to consider that our God of intergenerational community calls us to age diversity in our experience of Church. In fact, perhaps being with young people may be an unexpected pathway to helping heal our trauma and divisions.

In my experience with EMDR therapy, a trauma treatment for rewiring the brain into healthful patterns, I’ve learned the value of getting “out of my head and into my body.” The incarnation shows us that embodiment is a sacred thing, and that our physical bodies are a valid way in which we encounter the sacred around us. This seems to be Jesus’s approach in today’s Gospel, which finds its origins in our First Reading. The Pharisees engage Jesus in a ping pong match of intellectual engagement about the legality of marriages. (Does that sound familiar?) Even after a Q&A with the Pharisees in public, the disciples doubled down on their intellectual engagement as “Back in the house again, the disciples questioned Jesus once more about this.” In the midst of the heady back-and-forth about what makes a marriage legal and ethical, “People were bringing their children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples scolded them for this.” Jesus becomes indignant, drops the debate, embraces the children and lays his hands on them. 

Jesus’ (safe/consenting) embrace with young people becomes his priority. For Jesus, entering into an embodied human encounter is more valuable than philosophizing about human encounter. God absolutely can speak to us through our intellects. But therapy has also taught me that ruminating on the same thought repeatedly, convinced that the more we think about it the more likely we are to come to an “answer,” is actually a symptom of trauma. Are the disciples asking their follow-up questions with a pure heart, or are they so shaken by the Pharisees’ assertion of the law that they are ruminating on it, trying to make sense of what is perhaps a traumatic, white-knuckle grip the law has held on them? In either case, Jesus invites them to set down their intellectualizing and be present to the people in front of them.

How many of us have been traumatized by hearing the Church’s philosophical and theological teachings about marriage and family that seem completely out of touch with the lived reality of the loving, life-giving relationships around us? What do we do when our own ruminating about how (or whether) to be in the Church as queer or LGBTQ+ allied people leaves us white-knuckle gripping our faith? One path of liberation, as witnessed by Jesus, may be to set down the dialogue to embrace the person in front of us. After all, catechesis is one form of encounter with Christ, but so is welcome/belonging. Can we as a Church value these things more equally?

Fr. Richard Rohr promotes an approach to embodied faith that integrates action and contemplation, so that our brains and bodies are perpetually integrating. Rohr reflects on religious trauma, “Could this be what…the church meant by ‘original sin’ – not something we did, but the effects of something done to us? I believe it is. It’s no wonder Jesus teaches so much about forgiveness, and practices so much healing touch and talk” (Center for Action and Contemplation Daily Reflection, June 19 2024). He goes on to quote psychotherapist Resmaa Menakem, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending our Hearts and Bodies, who says: “We need to join in that collective action [for liberation] with settled bodies…Bringing a settled body to any situation encourages the bodies around you to settle as well. Bringing an unsettled body to that same situation encourages other bodies to become anxious, nervous, or angry” (My Grandmother’s Hands, 238, as quoted in CAC Daily Reflection June 19, 2024).

Our prayerful work in contemplation is to seek interior freedom, to loosen the white-knuckle grip. Ignatian spirituality teaches that one path out of a spiral of desolation is to serve someone else in need. Hard conversations are going to be hard, maybe even traumatic, but we can allow our contemplative practice to settle our bodies. And we can allow ourselves to be embraced, even literally, by the person who comes to us seeking care. If we as a Church get more out of our heads and into our bodies, we will be more equipped to hold the tension of hard questions while also unabashedly embracing the childlike person in front of us. We need them as much as they need us.

Little Hearts was a ministry run out of Sacred Heart Parish in Erie, PA from 2022-2024. It was a social ministry founded to connect young families to one another. The purpose of LH wasn’t to evangelize via intellectual-focused catechesis; rather, it was to provide an encounter with Christ by helping families experience welcome and belonging. Whereas liturgical spaces are often set up primarily to meet the needs of adults, Little Hearts was established to center the needs of children under age 10 and their families. 

In three years, LH welcomed 58 unique family participants from 10 Catholic parishes, three other denominations, and over a dozen families without any faith community affiliation. For more information about Little Hearts, contact the author.

Contemporary artist and iconographer Brother Mickey McGrath created a characteristically joyful, colorful image for his 2016 Christmas card, “Jesus has a sleepover with his grandparents.” The sweet details of his bunny slippers (an Easter allusion) and his two stuffed animals, a lion and a lamb, remind us of who the Christ child is. At the same time, we can prayerfully imagine that Jesus the toddler sat on his grandparents’ laps, listened to their stories, interrupted his Shabbat family dinner with an inconvenient bathroom need, and had a tantrum when he got overtired at bedtime. 

The incarnation of the Christ as a human is perhaps the most compelling reason of all that we should allow ourselves to see the face of God in the young people around us. After all, if the Kingdom of God belongs to those such as them, then we should be desiring those encounters knowing they have something to teach us.