A childlike understanding

Tuesday of the First Week of Advent
Gospel: Lk 10:21-24
https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/120225.cfm

To see and know God is to go past our own certitudes and understandings. As we age, we develop our own theories about reality. We develop an understanding of how things work, causes and effect, and judgments about the world and others from our experiences. While this is natural and a good thing that keeps us safe, it also has a negative side that can lead to presumptions, prejudice, and false value judgments. We eventually develop certitude in our theories that create our worldview. 

The longer we hold our worldview, the more we have to lose by changing it. When we get challenged, we can easily fall trap to confirmation bias, anchoring bias, sunk cost fallacy, gambler’s fallacy, and false causes to name a few. We put these biases and fallacies in place to protect our egos from being wrong. This happens to us on a personal, group, and societal level. With social media, we have echo chambers that reinforce these views and polarize us into different groups bound to others by similar worldviews, biases, and fallacies while excluding others who don’t belong. 

God is always seeking to transform us and see beyond our presumptions and our limited views. If we make a significant change, we risk our ego being shattered. Oftentimes it takes great suffering or great love for us to be willing to change. But when we are young, we are more open to change. We are still moldable and have become less rigid in our ways and our practices. We are open to new experiences and take them in with new eyes. This is why Jesus calls us to be more childlike. He is challenging us to see with eyes that are not tainted by our preconceptions and false conclusions. Don’t worry, we’re in good company with the likes of prophets and kings who similarly faced these limitations, but God desires more for us. God wants us to fully see beyond our limited views.