I asked one day to a child:

«How do you like the Priest to be?».

«I like him smiling and good."

 

«If you won't convert yourself and won't become as these children, you won't enter the kingdom of the skies» (Mt 18,3). 

«…… their Angels in the sky always see the face of My Father who is in the skies» (Mt 18,10). The verbum Dei is the embodied Christ and the verbum Christi is the innocent through which the word of the Divine Teacher comes to each of us, expressed in ways and different similes, but always sincere, simple, loyal, deep, endless. We need to come back to children to be as them, smiling and good. 

What a splendid answer: first smiling, and then good. Goodness doesn't exist without smile. 

The smile is the communication of the grace, it is the mirror of life, it is

the encouragement to live well, to suffer well, to accept well, to die well.  It is the thought of a blessed eternity, it is the certainty not to be alone, it is the communion, communicated with the most spontaneous mean, easier, surer, more profitable. Priest, smile and you’ll be good. If you don't succeed in smiling it is because you are not good, it is because you are still busy a lot of walk before reaching the goodness; it is because you are complicated, shaken, sad, radically dissatisfied, dissatisfied.

Seriousness doesn't mean contrariety to the smile. It is not necessary the mouth to smile, but a Priest's eyes in grace are not able not to smile. 

It is to them that the baby looks, and observes the way with which he looks at him, almost trying to scrutinize his thought, his way of acting and living; in his attitudes he studies him, and decides whether to listen to him or to leave to lose him.

The science of Christ for the most part reaches the man through the channels of the very little way: innocence. If the children don't look for you, you have to reflect: you have to make a deep examination of conscience and convert yourself, if you want to earn the kingdom of the skies. «Let the children come to Me» (Mc 10,14). «Who welcomes in My name one such child as this, welcomes Me» (Mt 18,5).

And here a little boy that says: «I have greeted a Priest, he has turned on the other side and he has not stopped». The little boy continued: «It is all right that he is Priest, but I have also been baptized!». Priest you are, and you have to be such. The gift that you have received is sacred, and really for this you have to welcome what it goes out of the mouth of God.

«If anyone should cause one of these little ones to lose his faith in me, it would be better for him to have a large millstone tied round  his neck and be drowned in the deep sea”(Mt 18,6).

The small ones easily scandalize themselves. Smile and you will walk sure through  the flowers and the wild beast. Also the wild beast become tame to the smile of a man in grace.

Jesus talked with the small, even if He was a great one, even if Teacher He was called. The great ones then who are? They are those people who know how to make themselves small as the small ones.

 

Mother Providence