The Entrance into the Temple

 

This is one of my favorite feasts. I like it for how odd it is to our American Protestant sensibilities, the beauty of promises, and that the spiritual experiences of children are immortalized so. 

It is hard for us in America to conceive of this feast. We like to think of spiritual experiences as primarily mental, not experiential. We want to say that only with understanding can know God.  I was brought up Roman Catholic and still have bits of that whole "age of reason" nonsense they've adopted bouncing in my head. That, of course, isn't helped by the whole "Prayer of Conversion" stuff Protestants do. The Theotokos was three when she ran into the Holy of Holies. That sure makes me uncomfortable! That's something for me to work on! Discomfort is not a bad thing, but a sign I have something to work out.

I've always had a bit of a problem with the whole "promise to God" thing, the ancients did. How do you know it's actually God who did what He did? We promise all sorts of desperate things when in rabbit holes, how do we know that it was actually God who intervened? But this feast does assure that God, indeed, did hear you. He was the one Who made sure you got through whatever it  was. That promise was real. And it's up to you how real you want that to be, I suppose, but the Entrance into the Temple certainly has an opinion on what you're supposed to do with that promise.

But the ultimate lesson, I think, is in validating the spiritual experiences of the young. The only difference between an adult and a child that matters is power. We understand God just as well as adults as we did when we were children. And all of us have had some moment of peace or encounter with goodness that helped define who we were, as children. I've met people who've had these experiences, but learned to discount them. The world doesn't work that way, no one is that good, nothing is that good, that was a lie, a flight of fancy, etc. This Feast says otherwise. Definitively. 

God is with us, even as children, before we're able to understand in a way that us wise and rational adults think of as understanding.  No matter how uncomfortable it may make us to acknowledge that fact, no matter how we want to say that promises made under stress are still promises, no matter how we want to forget the wonderful things that God may have done to us because it's painful to acknowledge them, it is still true. God is with us.

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