Show him the money
Just two years and seven months and already the boy shows signs of being precocious. I suppose any grandfather would say that of his grandchild, and by this token I may be forgiven for being lavish in my assessment of the boy.
As often as we can, the wife and I meet up with the child and his mom, the last during the visit of his father (our son), who slipped out of his residency in the capital to be with his wife and boy for a few days.
We got together at a coffee shop, where, from the get-go, the boy’s parents found themselves waging a losing battle to keep him still. He would push chairs, creep under the table, thrust his toy cars to race across any surface. Embrace was the only physical punishment we allowed ourselves to inflict on him, and none of it was so determined that it did not relax at the threat of tears. But when the boy’s mother opened the iPad, all movement stopped. The tablet contained all the commandments that he obeyed.
There he would look at the animals that meowed or mooed or barked upon touch, or sing with the animate alphabet or numbers. (Truth to tell, I half-expected to see Rimbaud’s vowels on the iPad screen, too.)
Naturally, we were all amused, none more so than the wife, the boy’s grandmother, who was particularly moved by the boy’s ability to speak in complete sentences and to ask real questions—Where are we? Why not?—to which we with our meager philosophies could not give real answers.
At this stage, the wife looked for something in her bag. I saw on her face, not the exasperation at the loss of such as a key, but joy, the joy—soon I learned—of having a brainy grandson. Because from the anarchy in her sack she fished out a bill, of a somewhat crisp denomination, and gave it to the boy.
The boy’s mother remarked, with a mother’s knowledge, that the child had no idea what money was. This did not deter the wife because really the amount was not for the boy to spend but for his parents in his behalf. But we were baffled to hear the boy suddenly tell us to our face, as he waved the gift—”I have money.”
What was going on in his mind when he said that? I am certain, however, that from observation he knew that paper of a particular appearance was called money, but not that it was used for paying or a similar transaction. He was still innocent in the ways of commerce.
Which state of affairs will probably change as he grows older. The world will conspire against his innocence. I pray that he will not go the way of the horde, to whom nothing is true unless it has cash value, who, as it were, put their mouth where the money is.
It was this kind of people that Jesus drove out of the temple, those that, John writes, were there selling cattle, sheep and doves, and exchanging money. Jesus “made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple courts, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, ‘Get these out of here! Stop turning my Father’s house into a market!'”
But in time, with proper instruction and constant practice and, of course, God’s grace, the boy might just turn out to be a man with his heart in the right position, not curved in upon itself—incurvatus in se, said St. Augustine, referring to a life lived solely for oneself and not a bit for God and others.
Or else, because the man obsessed with money is full of fears, it will need the force of God’s grace to drive away the merchants of avarice from his heart, from the temple courts there that have been reserved for peace.
And who knows that, if now the boy says, “I have the money,” later he might add, “But the money does not have me.”
