The Children’s Temple

Children pick up stones.

They picked them up in cave-dwelling times.

And in the future if you take them to the moon they will pick them up there.

Smooth and broken, shiny and plain, pebbles tell children to pick them up.

In Japan and Africa children pick up all sorts of rocks.

On Irish coasts below crumbling castles and from the glimmering streams of America’s high Sierras little fingers select and pluck.

Children put these treasures in pockets and on shelves.

They migrate to the corners of drawers and roll around in cars.

Kids ask grown-ups to help carry the load when hands are full.

Grown-ups build houses to live in, buildings to work in where they make rules and laws and money.

And they make buildings to appreciate God – Temples, Cathedrals, Mosques and monasteries.

And sometimes grown-ups fight and even knock each other’s buildings down or say that their God is better than someone else’s God.

But children just pick up stones, quietly building a Temple all their own.

The Temple hovers between all the stones, enveloping the world in sacred spirit.

Little fingers know what they are doing even if their owners don’t exactly know.

Soon even fingers forget until one day a child hands us a little rock or piece of gravel and maybe we begin to know again.

Namaste, Bruce