I had just read Peter Kreeft’s impeccable logic on the uniqueness of Christianity at http://www.integratedcatholiclife.org/2012/07/dr-kreeft-the-uniqueness-of-christianity/ when I read Joseph’s post, “Becoming As Little Children.” And I was struck again by the different avenues of knowing. Kreeft in his beautiful lucidity answers the claim that Christianity is (merely) one faith among many. His logic is intellectually flawless. Joseph watches a man tattooed all over with many gang symbols, building sand castles at the beach with his children. It struck me that I was reading the same essay by different authors. Kreeft explicates the truth via the intellect; Joseph, via the spirit.

In these days of focusing on the journey and not the destination, we are people who declare the works of our hands, the multiple credal constructs of our own design, to be paramount, to be, in fact, all the “reality” there is. But, though they are etched in ink and highly visible, they are really only sand castles.

Christ repeatedly admonished the scribes and Pharisees about their knee-jerk rule-ridden reflex to condemn prostitutes and sinners, and other outcasts of one kind or another—who, he said, would reach the kingdom of Heaven before them. Their rules were also sand castles.

And Joseph, marked only with the single invisible Sign of the Cross on his heart, is able to see in the tattooed gangster, not an outcast, but a brother, for they were both sharing the same “secret of happiness” that Wilde’s Selfish Giant learns, in becoming as little children. Why? How can he know that? Because that one (not many, but one) unique Sign he wears also tells him there are many sand castles, but one tide.