Fr Hugh O’Donnell is a poet and ministers with the Salesian community in the parish of Sean McDermott Street in Dublin. He shares the following reflection with us, entitled ‘Frankie’:
My friend, Paddy Griffin, has sent me a forty second video of his two week old grandson. I realise it is the eve of the Feast of the Epiphany, the twelfth day of Christmas by which time the wise ones will have arrived at a manger in Bethlehem.
It strikes me now that these travellers were not necessarily wise to start with but wised-up as they made their journey; ‘and such a long journey: the ways deep and the weather sharp, the very dead of winter’ as T.S. Eliot imagined it. It seems more likely that they came into true wisdom upon seeing the baby in a derelict place among animals and animal smells.
For it is the baby who is wise in his wonder, coming to terms with being outside his mother’s cosy body with a first knowing that puts to shame what we call wise, a frailty that humbles what we consider strong.
To realise your kinship with a baby is to become wise; is to be made blind by unconditional love as the baby looks at you with the eyes of God and you are restored to your first innocence as the beloved child you are.
When moments of infancy are revealed to us in creation – sunrise, snowdrop, larva or lamb -are we not also returned to a forgotten way of seeing, our eyes refreshed as when we emerge from time spent in an art gallery to a world of vibrant colour, a world washed clean of all our craving.