Children serve as spiritual teachers

	Tom Rinkoski

Now that I am a grandfather I can easily afford to romanticize parenting. Before parenting, I was concerned about "What is the meaning of life?" As a parent, I was more concerned with "How can I get a shower today?" or in my more altruistic moments, "How much sleep did you get last night?" I miss being squeezed in the same room as kids during this time of the year.

Children have been and still are my best spiritual guides. That is why I am happy to be teaching religious education again. (My secret is that I am learning more than I am teaching!)

Advent
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In his book, Wherever You Go There You Are, Jon Kabat-Zinn compares children to "live-in Zen Masters" and raising them to an "18-year meditation retreat." Next to my wife, it has been my children who have led me most to question my own nature, and to deepen my appreciation for life's mysteries and ironies.

My wife Theresa tells of talking to our first child, Marie, who had energetically passed the 3-year-old marker. At the time of this conversation, the conspicuously pregnant Theresa was explaining how Jesus is inside us. Marie, looking at Theresa's pregnancy, asked, "Is Jesus playing with the baby in there then?"

As children face the story of Christmas I am reminded how Jesus said, "Unless we become like these little ones we will not enter the kingdom of heaven." So, when I hear a child crying in church or in the store, I actually hear someone asking, "Are you sure?" reminding me to check the reality of my perceptions. In the questions posed to me by children, I am reminded of how much I don't know and have yet to learn. Maybe that's how Jesus wants me to face Christmas.

My grandson and grandaughter's rapid growth is a painful reminder of the impermanence of this life. Each time I get a chance to see them so much has changed from the last trip. How come such impermanence seems so depressing to most adults and isn't the least distressing to any child? I think too many of us older folk have trouble letting go of the familiar and adventing into new learning.

This Christmas, based on what I have learned from the children who surround me, I am going to try not to separate things into "spiritual" and "non-spiritual" categories. As a Catholic, I am adept at categorizing and measuring sacred and secular.

The spiritual would include attending Mass, meditation, being in church buildings and prayer. The non-spiritual would include things like housekeeping, preparing Christmas cookies, decorating the Christmas tree, writing cards, and changing diapers.

My spiritual teachers are inviting me to see the sacred in the ordinary. This Advent will be a place of practice. Despite the maelstrom of chaos and disorder, my home will become a retreat house, and if I get particularly adept, so will the shopping mall.

We Packerlandians already have made watching the Packers a spiritual experience, so it should be no difficult task to convert even the most consumer approaches of the mall into places to touch God. This is your homework. Instead of going out into the world burdened and with a pre-ordained chip on your shoulder, go out into northeast Wisconsin to see Christmas in every person you meet today. It doesn't matter if you live in Green Bay or Appleton, or lakeside in Kewaunee, or inside at Waupaca. Look for God being born in your midst!

(Rinkoski is parish Director of Religious Education at St. Augustine Church and Student Center in Gainesville, Fla. His e-mail address is tomrinkoski@yahoo.com.)