Throughout Lent I have been sharing with you thoughts on how to assist the children in the Atrium in growing towards true freedom in that space. This growth, however, does not just apply to the Atrium; it is intended to help form the child for all of life. This is a big work! It is a work that will continue into and throughout adulthood, as we who have experienced it well know. Yet it is also a gift to know our weaknesses and difficulties in living freely because this is part of how we know of our great need for our Good Shepherd and can stand in awe of His goodness to us. Gianna Gobbi, in Listening to God with Children, writes on page 94 in this way: "We are dealing with a freedom which is understood as liberation of the potentiality of the person and, therefore, as obedience to a vital impulse which is presupposed to be toward the positive. This important capacity for freedom requires respect, and, at the same time, it requires appropriate assistance, so that freedom can be a conquest and not merely a free gift. Moreover we could say that the real value of freedom lies in the fact that it is a conquest, a conquest involving response to and claiming of what is good and right."
This is the freedom God desires for all of us and each of us, adults and children alike. May this Octave of Easter be a time of living freely and rejoicing in this great gift which He has so beautifully modeled for us and offered to us, walking alongside us and even carrying us on the way!