There’s a girl of about 9 or 10 named “Clara” with whom I often share a pew at the parish where I attend daily Mass. She’s a sweet kid, tall for her age, inquisitive, and accustomed in cold weather to wearing a knitted cap with little ears that gives her the appearance of a bear cub. She’s a real trooper, too, when it comes to praying at so early an hour each morning surrounded by the 15 or 20 adult worshipers who otherwise fill our day chapel. She seems to know the parts of the liturgy by heart and prays with an earnestness that’s truly disarming. Her dad, who stands close beside her, trusts her to strike up conversations with me and others in the room as if we were old friends.
Clara reminds me of myself as a kid, full of words and wonder and happier to sit at the adult table on most occasions than trade pleasantries with children her own age. I welcome our spontaneous chats, which fill me with nostalgia for the days when my kids were small and carried an unmistakable whiff of heaven all their own. When she asks me a question, I know it’s to make sense of a world that is still somewhat new to her and full of mystery.
On a recent morning, Clara wanted to know about the prayerbook I carry into the pew with me; the gold-embossed cover and colorful ribbons likely caught her attention. “Is that like a mini-Bible?” she asked.
“Well, in a way,” I responded. “It’s called a missal, but not like the kind that flies through the sky. Its name comes from the Latin word missa, from which we get the word Mass. It reminds us that we’re sent from church (commissioned) different from the way we arrived.”
“There are lots of things in this book,” I added, my unshakable teacher instinct kicking in, “including enough scripture to ponder each day to last three years.”
“Neat,” Clara said, while taking a closer look at the missal’s cross-shaped zipper tab.
Part of what makes an exchange like the one I describe so rare these days is the dramatic clamp down our culture has made on the interactions between adults and children. Gone is the surrogate parenting once practiced in communities throughout this country, when older residents kept close watch on the street lives of children other than their own and made an artform of shooing troublemakers or lovestruck teens from places where they didn’t belong. City kids in the 1940s through ’60s, especially, could be said to have had not one mom but dozens of them, each as dedicated to preserving order in a neighborhood as any beat cop.
An elderly woman in my own childhood neighborhood, for instance, was known to throw pails of water at any group of youngsters playing too close to her property. Another made a habit of phoning kids’ mothers should she spy them doing anything mischievous. There was no need, back then, for electronic eyes in the form of surveillance cameras on homes and businesses to keep the peace. The eyes of local mothers did the job.
This picture persists today in those places where extended families live together and people show respect to old folks and grade-schoolers alike. Generally, however, except in the case, say, of teachers, coaches, dentists, and doctors, it’s become impossible in the United States for adults to attract anything but suspicion by associating too closely with a child not related to them by birth or blood.
We’ve succeeded in privatizing child-rearing as we have nearly every other activity traditionally considered essential to sustaining a healthy society. “It takes a village to raise a child,” we’ve grown fond of saying since the 1990s, but we appear generally not to trust any villager other than ourselves to do the job.
It’s not lost on me that my early-morning exchanges with Clara could produce a vague sense of apprehension among our fellow Mass goers. We belong, after all, to a religious body rocked by headline-filling accounts of child sexual abuse by clergymen at all levels of leadership. Catholics nowadays are rightly reluctant to allow the children within their care to associate too closely with the priests who pastor them—and their distrust extends to adult laypeople in any position of parish authority.
My job as the parish coordinator of adult education in our own parish is a matter of record, and I am careful about what I say or do in my young pewmate’s presence. I make a point of protecting myself from suspicion of the least bit of impropriety, for example, by speaking with her only when her dad is at her side and closely monitoring our conversations.
All this being said, Clara’s trusting way offers me a chance to disprove the skeptics and scoffers within my church and society at large. Not every adult is out to use a child’s natural instinct for making friends, regardless of age, as a pretext for lurid behavior. Nor can those who regard themselves as Christian easily dismiss the way Jesus himself welcomed children.
“Suffer the little children to come unto me,” Jesus insists in the King James Version of the Gospel of Mark, “for such is the kingdom of God” (10:14). “Verily I say unto you,” he continues, “whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God as a little child . . . shall not enter therein” (10:15).
This well-known scripture passage challenges readers to consider the extent to which the experience of religious faith comes down to a matter of trust. Trust that even the youngest of us recognize in our bones the presence of something transcendent. Trust in the insights that come by way of a supple heart as much as a discerning mind. Trust in divine love to draw all creation “unto itself” rather than rebuff its desire to be close to its creator.
“Neat,” I’m tempted to think.
Likewise, what my little friend Clara reminds me—a man of advanced middle age, jaded by the accumulation of years and as susceptible to cynicism as the next guy—is that such an attitude of trust is yet achievable. It’s fitting that her unspoken ministry to me should happen in the pew of a church, a furnishing that takes its name from the Old French, puye, meaning an elevated place. Indeed, her presence beside me is a kind of sacrament that elevates my soul.
Fitting, too, is that she shares her combined innocence and inquisitiveness with me in the early hours of the morning, when the day itself seems most youthful, like a child, and full of important lessons to teach me should I simply open myself to receiving them.
This article also appears in the March 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 3, pages 21-22). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
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