Main news for 22 June 2026

Childlike naivete can at times be very sincere, especially when it concerns one's relationship with God. Here is a typical episode: a girl of about four is walking with her mother, who is scolding her for bad behavior. The girl wants to say something in reply, but holds back. Her mother insists: "Well, say it, say what you think!" The girl brushes it off: "Later, in the underpass!" They both come to the pedestrian underpass and go underground. There the girl declares to her mother: "You are nasty!" Her mother is surprised: "Why couldn't you say that to me up above?" The girl answers: "Up above God will hear!"

The four-year-old girl's answer would be amusing and naive, if we ourselves were not so much like her when it comes to our relationship with God. The fall, this distancing of the human being from God, does not begin by chance with a person trying to hide from Him, hiding in order to conceal sin. Perhaps not because of fear of punishment, but because one does not want to admit one's own failure either to oneself or to Him.

Deep down, the overwhelming majority of us believers would like God never to see our sins. We would like Him to be near and look at us when, as it appears to us, we are good and ready to meet Him: for example, during prayer or when we are doing something good. But it is better to sin somewhere in a dark corner, in an underpass, in the desert, in the forest - in short, far away from altars and churches.

It appears to us that if God is far away, then He neither sees nor knows, and that in this respect He is like us: after all, we too know little or nothing at all about those who are far from us at a given moment. With God everything is different, and through His prophet He reminds us of this. His nearness does not mean that He learns something new about us that He did not know before; it means that we have come into the center of His attention, have somehow drawn that attention, and now He is going to intervene directly in our life, to enter it in order to change something in it.

And here, quite naturally, we want to look better than we really are. But God does not need us to "look" like anything; He needs us simply to be. To be as we are, and to let Him into our life as it is, so that we may give Him the chance to make it, with our participation of course, what it ought to be according to His design and plan.