Except ye see signs and wonders

Highlight at church yesterday: a small boy, age four or so, crawling ever so deftly and silently out of the front rows, and getting all the way to the edge of the proscenium, and then getting both arms and one leg up on the ceremonial ledge, before he was hauled back to base, giggling so infectiously that everyone in the front rows and the celebrant started laughing too. Even the piano player was snickering, and she is usually the soul of stern decorum.

That the perambulator had, I kid you not, a bright blue Mohawk haircut, and was wearing blue pajamas with black cowboy boots, added to the pleasure of the moment, because you hardly ever see anyone at church wearing pajamas with cowboy boots, not to mention such a rakish haircut. But it was his giggle that got to me, and has stayed with me happily this morning. His giggles were utterly and completely and totally artless. They were not wry comments, or default ner­vous tics, or conscious efforts to deflate tension, or even the evidence of skepticism suddenly flushed out into the open, as giggles sometimes are. No: they were pure merriment, and they pealed, they rang, they chimed, they pierced the moment and peeled away the normal for an instant, and everyone burst out laughing, and I am fascinated and moved by this, and wish to explore it a bit with you, because isn’t his giggling somehow a more naked holy thing than a church service? Isn’t it? Somehow, in ways that are hard to articulate?

Let the children come unto me, for of such is the kingdom of heaven, Jesus said that, he spoke that clear and adamant and inarguable, with none to gainsay him, and very rarely indeed, I would guess, did he say something he was not sure of with every fiber of his inexplicable being. Of children is heaven, in children is heaven, to be like children is heaven, what could that most mysterious Arab Jew mean by this?