In recent years, childishness has been the dominant fashion in Canada. We obsess about marginal issues that make us feel good, while nasty regimes around the world laugh at our moral pretentiousness and undermine the institutions we have so painstakingly created.
Children, as child psychologist Mary O’Kane reminds us, have an innate tendency to engage in magical thinking. They often believe that if they wish hard enough for something to happen, it will. They find it difficult to tell the difference between fantasy and reality and will accept totally improbable explanations for events.
But when Saint Paul calls on us to put away childish things, he is inviting us to see the world as it really is, not as we wish it was. Life is hard. It is an illusion to think it can, or even should, be care-free, easy, effortless and painless, and that unpleasant things can simply be wished away.
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