Sacred land

A friend hosted her teenage son's birthday party at her house. At some point during the evening, one of the guests had too much to drink and ended up vomiting in a bathroom. Several adults cleaned him up a bit, left him sleeping in a room and called his parents to let them know that the boy was not well.

On the other side there was a short silence and then an immediate, almost relieved response:

-Oh, yes... I knew it. He must have had some bad food.

My friend was both amused and puzzled. Because we are not talking about naïve parents. They are intelligent, reasonable adults, perfectly aware of the world in which their children live. They have listened to endless conversations about teenage alcohol, they have gone to lectures, they have read emails from school. And yet, they preferred another version of the story; a less uncomfortable version. 

The scene gives a little laugh because we all recognize the mechanism. There are things that we sense, but we prefer not to look at them head on. And it's not just with alcohol.

The mechanism of denial

It also happens when a teacher tries to show us something uncomfortable about our child and, before we finish listening, we start inwardly defending him or her. It happens when a teenage girl changes groups over and over again and we conclude too quickly that “they are jealous of her”. It happens when we see a girl consumed by grades, obsessed with weight or unhealthily focused on social approval, and we reduce everything to perfectionism, insecurity or “pressure of this generation”, as if it were enough to name the things to have understood them.

We live by looking at the visible because the visible is reassuring. Grades can be measured; medals are easily displayed. Performance allows for quick comparisons, and happy photos on Instagram help build the impression that all is well.

The heart does not tolerate being looked upon lightly.

And yet Christianity has always insisted on just that. Christ returns again and again to the heart: that mysterious and inaccessible place where a person decides what he or she loves, what he or she is afraid of, how much he or she needs the approval of others to feel valuable, how much he or she is willing to give up to belong and what kind of bonds he or she ends up building. 

The true value of a person

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

It seems no coincidence that the Gospel insists so much on this, precisely in a culture obsessed with the visible. Because when one lives looking only at the superficial, one ends up leaving the child quite alone precisely in the place where he most needs company.

And that's where the important thing is at stake: not in school grades or on the sports podium. Nor only in the university he will manage to get into or in that Instagram account where he always seems happy and surrounded by friends.

Go there. With immense affection and respect, because the ground you are treading on is sacred ground. Go there to see what is really going on in that heart: what things excite it and what things paralyze it. What kind of approval it desperately needs. How afraid it is of being left out. What pain he's trying to hide behind an obsession with performance or a perfect body. How capable he is of sustaining a friendship, sacrificing for another, or acknowledging a mistake without breaking down.

And also - because it's not all about detecting injuries - look out to marvel.

Connections in everyday moments

Peering into a child's heart rarely happens in big, planned conversations. It happens many times in side moments: in the car, late at night, while doing the dishes, when the teenager says something seemingly small and the adult resists the immediate temptation to correct, explain or reassure.

Through many years of teaching and tutoring teenagers, I have rarely encountered young people convinced that their parents are deeply proud of them because they struggle to do the right thing, because they are honest, because they try to be loyal to their friends, or because they had the humility to admit a fault.

On the other hand, they are usually quite clear about when they take pride in their grades, in a sporting triumph or in those visible achievements that any adult can comment on in front of others.

The look of real acceptance

And it's not about parents being frivolous or bad. Something sadder is often the case: we ourselves have learned to measure our worth that way. We too live exhausted lives trying to prove that we deserve love through performance, control or success.

Perhaps that is why it is so hard for us to believe - truly - that God does not love us primarily for our triumphs. That what moves his heart is something else: the real, fragile and sometimes quite messy hearts of his children.

One of the most decisive things a child learns at home is precisely what aspects of himself arouse love, joy, admiration or hope in those who love him. Children end up intuiting with great precision which things excite their parents and which hardly deserve attention. They quickly discover whether love seems to expand with success and retract with failure, or whether there is something more stable underneath it all.

Children learn how God looks from how they are looked at at home. They learn slowly - and long before they understand intellectually - whether love depends on meeting certain expectations or whether it can remain even when awkwardness, slowness or failure appear. 

Embracing imperfection

Perhaps an important part of educating consists in giving up the impeccable, brilliant, balanced and always successful child to meet this other one: more vulnerable, more contradictory, sometimes difficult, but infinitely worthy of being loved. 

In the small duel of embracing the real son and not only the imagined son, something very similar to the heart of Christ appears.

A love that is neither blind nor naive, but merciful. A love capable of looking at the truth without withdrawing its closeness. A magnanimous love, which does not reduce the person to his worst moment nor to his best performance.

Perhaps this is, deep down, to accompany a child's heart: to enter there gently enough to teach him - very slowly - to love and also to let himself be loved.