I got the chance to be with my baby boy for a long time today. I haven’t spent that much time alone with him since he was born about ten weeks ago. I went to pray with him in an Abbey Church. It is a special thing when an Abbey Church somehow intermingles with your day’s events. I was slightly weary from many hours of caring for him alone, of trying to provide with bottles what my wife does in her sleep. At first I wished he would sleep through, that I could pray in silence. But soon his cries began to echo through the stone church, and I was struck with thoughts of our infant Lord as he lay there in the tabernacle.

Our Lord would cry to ask his Mother for  milk just as any baby does, and his human infancy echoes in an eternity of Divine love. He is always an infant, always a young boy, a young man, and finally a grown man who would die for each of us. What does it mean though that he would cry? It means that he is hungry, that he became one of us, helpless, weak, begging for help from those he hopes will love him. It means that he thirsts not just for mother’s milk but for the milk that only Mother Church can give to him, the souls of the just, of those who love him as he loves them, of those willing to accept this screaming child. Our Lord asks us to hold him and to feed him, to keep trying to give oneself to him through all the failure inherent in the weakness and sin that he took upon himself for our sake. He is a screaming child, screaming for the souls that are being taken from him through sin. He is a beaten, bruised, and bloody man. He is tortured and yet says “I thirst” for you who have done this to me.

Until we seek to feed him even as he feeds us, with the bread of eternal life, until we offer back to him what he gives to us without considering the price, he will come to us crying, hoping, screaming for milk. He will come to us beaten, bloody, bruised, asking for us to feed him. He will come to us with cries echoing in a Church of stony hearts, and the harder our hearts become with sin the more his cries echo in the emptiness of our inner being. Let us seek to comfort him, no matter the cost, let us live to see him still, happy, smiling, and cooing with delight that he has found his Mother’s face.