“It is the little ones who heal us,” said Father Leonard, from out of the blue. I had been confessing some now-forgotten sin when out came this
treasure from the store-room of his heart. It came to me some days later that the face of God must have something in it of
the face of a child. This would explain why Jesus said, “In heaven their
angels always behold the face of my Father who is in heaven.” (Matt.
18.10) That is, the faces of the angels’ appointed little ones, untainted
as yet by actual sin, are so many little faces of God, so much like the face of
the Infant Jesus.When the Pharisees asked the adult Jesus why He hung around with the likes of us, He answered, “Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” (Lk 5:31) Our spiritual forefathers understood the preciousness of each human life, and thus the infinite value of healing. How appalled they would have been to breathe the putrid ambience of our brave new world where slithery phrases like ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘women’s reproductive rights’ mean the wholesale murdering of babies in their mothers’ wombs, and—horror unspeakable—the slaughtering of babies while they are being born, and even after having emerged alive into our world: murdered by the very ‘physicians’ who should be delivering those newborn healers into their mothers’ loving arms.
How infuriated our forebears would have been by the hissing sound of those three slithery words—‘Freedom of Choice’—that deny both freedom and choice to the little boys and girls being butchered by so-called physicians. And how it must wrench the guardian angels to see their own tiny, Godlike charges torn out of the womb with steel pincers piece by piece, limb by limb, tiny hands and feet and torso, and, most wrenching of all, the tiny bleeding head with its tortured face of God frozen in eternal agony. How bitterly the guardians must weep to see us slaughter their helpless little ones, those tiny healers, as if infanticide really were the merest expression of ‘women’s reproductive rights’.
If only we could hear the angels gasp, or feel the rain of tears they shower over every butchered child, but perhaps we are too far gone, too ‘experienced’, too hardened of heart: perhaps our calluses are long since grown too thick for us to hear or feel such holy pain. We are so desperately in need of love, of innocence, of healing.
How very sick indeed our world will be when we have finally slaughtered all the little ones.
