Boy general, boy bishop
[ by Charles Cameron — children raised to high office, not a bad idea ]
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The Make-A-Wish Foundation, with the help of Camp Pendleton, recently treated a young boy suffering from retinoblastoma – “a rare cancer of the eye” — to a day of Marine exercises. Brig. Gen. Vincent A. Coglianese temporarily assigned him the rank of general.
Which reminds me..
Hereford Cathedral’s account of the ceremony of the making of a boy bishop gives us a clue to the theology behind that medieval ceremony, recently revived:
This annual ceremony is a successor to a service that developed sometime in the thirteenth century. The climax of the ceremony takes place during the singing of the canticle Magnificat. As the choir sings the words He hath put down the mighty from their seat, the Boy Bishop displaces the Bishop of Hereford from his episcopal chair. This dramatic moment is charged with spiritual meaning.
An equally dramatic moment is recorded in the Gospels, when our Lord was asked by his disciples, who is the greatest in the kingdom of God? Much to their surprise Jesus gave them a memorable lesson, which still haunts the human imagination. Jesus took a little child ‘and set him in the midst of them’ (Matthew XVIII, 2). Deep in Christianity there has always been the teaching that children are nothing less than the measure of our humanity, and that no one will enter the kingdom of God ahead of them. This child-centred teaching about membership of God’s kingdom always comes as an affront to adult pride and invites grown-ups to think new thoughts and adopt new perspectives. Very appropriately, in one of the few surviving sermons preached by a Boy Bishop during the middle ages, the choice of text was ‘Except you will be converted, and made like unto little children, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’
