remembering

‘We have all read in scientific books and indeed in all romances, the story of a man who has forgotten his name. This man walks about the streets and can see and appreciate everything; only he cannot remember who he is.
Well, every man is that man in the story. Every man has forgotten who he is. One may understand the cosmos but never the ego; the self is more distant than any star. Thou shalt love the Lord thy God but thou shalt not know thyself. We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are.’*
There’s something dark happening in a society where the ones Jesus said—most emphatically—are citizens of heaven, are screaming at us. Maybe these children who are behaving so dysfunctionally know something we don’t? Perhaps they don’t want to be well adjusted members of a dysfunctional society that’s determined to bend our humanity out of shape.
Could it be true that we have forgotten what we are and the children are behaving so ‘badly’ because they still remember what we are and are violently opposed to our blind walking towards an abyss? Are they the canaries in the coal mine of the 21st Century?

‘Yet You have said, “I know you by name.” (Exodus 33:12)

* From the reading for August 13 in A Year With GK Chesterton by Kevin Belmonte, editor