Today is April fools and it is no foolish point that I would like to discuss. The only foolish thing is my failed attempt to bring out this next point, and given the nature of it, failure is inevitable, hence so is my foolishness.  I am the April fool.

Spring is coming soon.  It was the sign of resurrection.  And this brings me to the point I want to make.  The potentiality is even more profound than what I mentioned last week.  Last week I noted a mysterious indwelling in the child who has become by absorbing the created world in which he or she lives. Notice however that this potentiality does not have any intrinsic limit.  There are no natural boundaries to it.  One could say it is potentially infinite, but for too many that stirs a merely mathematical notion, and what I am seeing is much more than that.  This potentiality is alive, dynamic, and moving. It is not along for the ride, though it is in for a ride.  The child is actively searching and finding and self-correcting.  But how far does this go? Again, there is no intrinsic limit.  Time and culture and health are limits, but these though they condition the life of the child do not define the child’s potentiality.

So where does that leave us?  It leaves us in a grand unknown.  Though each child may add a bit for the next generation, and the next for the next, there is never an exhaustion of the human spirit and what it can become.  In fact, what great philosophers and theologians have discovered (some of them anyway) is that nothing with limits can exhaust the human spirit.  In fact, the word exhaust is a misnomer.  Instead, the right word is fulfills.  Exhaust sounds “tired” or worn out. Fulfilled is better because it does involve a kind of rest, but a rest with total joy.  We have sought and found our answer, our destiny, our beloved — all of which are mini examples of fulfillment.  The grand fulfillment would be a total and comprehensive rest with total and comprehensive joy.  By the way, this is what Catholics mean by the beatific vision — a vision that is the great mystery of the universe.

Thus, we are now in a position to express with a few inadequate words this more mysterious meaning of the potentiality of the child. It will be some kind of grand fulfillment that provides the child’s limitless potentiality with rest and joy that has no bounds. 

Since this boundless heart of the child is real, the child already begins to experience it from the beginning. Montessori saw this inner thirst instinctively.  She not only saw how the child’s being grows when feed with an indwelling of the finite, but she also saw that this growth with the small things was a path into this deeper mystery of all that exists.  When the child is on that path, the child finds a deep interior peace. 

The Fall of Adam and Eve of course has left this in a mess. More on that later so that it does not detract from the profound mystery that is the highlight of this fools day.   We need to be fools for a boundless mystery.  And as I have been shown, that mystery is Christ.