I used to turn on the news on my kitchen TV every day at four o’clock when I started to cook supper.* It was, I thought, a way of catching up with the world, of finding out what was going on, but I discovered too often that I had to stop and lag behind where I actually was just in order to find out where the world was, and I grew weary of listening to people’s political opinions of what was going on. Speculation having replaced reporting some time long ago, the news channel has pretty much lost any real value.

I remembered a news broadcast made on Christmas Eve (I think) back in 1980 (I think). Roger Mudd, a major news anchorman of the time reported the evening news from the Eternal City on some pronouncement or other made by Caesar, comments made by this or that senator, the quashing of some uprising someplace in the empire, etc.—all well researched and all major news events of the day, and toward the close of the broadcast, he reported on a minor phenomenon discovered by court astronomers of an unusually bright light that appeared in the night sky in a little village in the southern part of a province known as Judea.  It was very well done. Since then, attempts have been made to replicate the original broadcast, but none have been so successful. The message was very clear.

That memory prompted me to turn off the airhead “reporting” of false news and to switch over to EWTN for the children’s shows that start at four o’clock instead. So, now I must confess: I don’t read learned theologians much any more; I watch EWTN for Kids instead. Much more straightforward, lucid, insightful, much easier to understand, and way more fun. I have my favorites, of course (all kids do, you know), and there are some I don’t enjoy much, but on the whole, I’ve found it far more informative than four o’clock news. I get the rosary for kids, even the stations of the Cross, and, of course, stories. I think my favorite is the friar who tells the parables to his friends—a little girl, a frog, and a mouse, who are always able to see the relationship of the parable to an event in their own lives. Children are so much more intelligent than grown-ups, you know. Children always understand the stories. Like fiction-writers, they know that facts are undulating chimaera, deceptive, untrustworthy, and always changing.

Recently, I spent a little time in the presence of a child who does not know how to not trust, or how to deceive, because she has not yet had a need to protect herself —but she will. Life does that. She will learn deception and distrust. God will forgive her. I forgive her/myself and maybe that’s the beginning of the childhood that is the secret desire of us all. Even way, way back in my BC days, I knew that I wanted to grow up into childhood. And as GKC can verify, the truth is just about always paradoxical, so, yes, maybe you have to get old in order to become young.

*Explanation: Most old people eat supper (or dinner, if you prefer) much earlier than other people. The reason for that is not biological, or sociological, or whatever. It’s simply that in retirement, we no longer have a fixed lunchtime, so we tend to graze or snack instead of eating lunch. Ergo, by 3:30 or 4:00, we’re hungry.