From Lisa, thinking of the O'Brians

December 28, 2009 Feast of the Holy Innocents

Had those little boys grown to manhood, God alone knows what their individual destinies would have been. But whatever they might have been, they would certainly be long forgotten. They would have no part in us now, no comfort for our sorrow, no redeeming for our sin, no beauty for the lifting of our hearts, no lesson to sustain our hope. Their Eternity would not have been as it is, the purest joy that God, even God, can give, unimaginable, unending delight in God.
Baptized in blood, those little children were among the first comers to heaven. Fittingly, they with their tiny King are the founders of the Kingdom of Children. We celebrate their feast with joy; it is the most lyrical of the year. They reach down their small hands to comfort every father or mother bereaved of a child. They are the first to have proved that the Passion of Christ can be lived in a tiny span of little ones. They are the forerunners of the magnificent sanctity of our generation, the "spiritual childhood" of St. Therese. The tears that dried on their faces two thousand years ago in Jerusalem have the redeeming power of Christ's tears today. Each one of those infants is the first Christ Child of the Incarnation, the first of the first generation to call the Mother of God Blessed.
Herod ordered the children to be killed because he was afraid that any one of them might be Christ.
Any Child might be Christ!--the fear of Herod is the fear of every tyrant, the hope of every Christian, and the most significan fact of the modern world.

(The Passion of the Infant Christ pp. 95-97)