"Grow Up? For old people isn't it a little too late? For young people isn't it a little too early? I do not think so. Never too late, never too early, to grow up, to be holy. We have already tasted it after all — tasted the kindness of the Lord, Peter says. That is a haunting thought. I believe you can see it in our eyes sometimes. Just the way you can see something more than animal in animals' eyes, I think you can sometimes see something more than human in human eyes, even yours and mine. I think we belong to holiness even though we cannot believe it exists anywhere let alone in ourselves. That is why everybody left that crowded shopping mall theater in such unearthly silence. It is why it is hard not to be haunted by that famous photograph of the only things that Gandhi owned at the time of his death: his glasses and his watch, his sandals, a bowl and spoon, a book of songs. What does any of us own to match such riches as that?

"Children that we are, even you and I, who have given up so little, know in our hearts not only that is it more blessed to give than to receive but that it is also more fun — the kind of holy fun that wells up like tears in the eyes of saints, the kind of blessed fun in which we lose ourselves and at the same time begin to find ourselves, to grow up into the selves we were created to become.

"When Henry James, of all people, was saying goodbye once to his young nephew Billy, his brother William's son, he said something that the boy never forgot. And of all the labyrinthine and impenetrably subtle things that the most labyrinthine and impenetrable old romancer could have said, what he did say was this: 'There are three things that are important human life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind.'

"Be kind because although kindness is not by a long shot the same thing as holiness, kindness is one of the doors that holiness enters the world through, enters us through — not just gently kind but sometimes fiercely kind.

"Be kind enough to yourselves not just to play it safe with your lives for your own sakes but to spend at least part of your lives like drunken sailors — for God's sake, if you believe in God, for the world's sake, if you believe in the world — and thus to come alive truly.

"Be kind enough to listen, beneath all the words they speak, for that usually unspoken hunger for holiness which I believe is part of even the unlikeliest of us because by listening to it and cherishing it maybe we can help bring it to birth both in them and in ourselves.

"Be kind to this nation of ours by remembering that New Haven, New Hope, Shalom, are the names not just of our oldest towns but of our holiest dreams which most of the time are threatened by the madness of no enemy without as dangerously as they are threatened by our own madness within.

" 'You have tasted of the kindness of the Lord,' Peter wrote in his letter, and ultimately that, of course, is the kindness, the holiness, the sainthood and sanity, we are all of us called to. So that by God's grace we may 'grow up to salvation' at last.

"The way the light falls through the windows. The sounds our silence makes when we come together like this. The sense we have of each other's presence. The feeling in the air that one way or another we are all of us here to give each other our love, and to give God our love. This kind moment itself is a door that holiness enters through. May it enter you. May it enter me. To the world's saving."

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