1 Peter 2:1-3
So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander. Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord.
In the film “Citizen Kane”, a wealthy man dies and his last words are “Rosebud”. A reporter spends the rest of the film puzzling over these strange dying words and sifting through the debris of Kane’s life as a newspaper mogul, financial magnate and political colossus. In the end, we discover that “Rosebud” was the name of his sled when he was a boy. The whole towering superstructure of wealth and power he built over his life was a vast Babylonian attempt to recapture something of the youthful joy he knew in that simple hour.
We live in world that is continually making Kane’s tragic mistake. It is filled with all sort of strategies for attaining the easy life of “youthfulness” and enormous numbers of these strategies depend on “all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander”. This is why rich people immersed in the cult of youth with its face lifts, perpetual fads and refusal to grow up seldom look happy and their children (if they have any) so often look baffled and bitter. As a wise man said, “You can never get enough of what you don’t really want.” St. Peter reminds us that the desire for youth is not bad, but that the way to seek it is to seek it is not by trying to stay physically young, but by seeking the simple truths of the gospel and, above all, by not refusing to grow up. People who try to stay young get old. People who embrace growing up stay young. It is another corollary of something Peter’s Master said: “Whoever would save his life will lose it; and whoever loses his life for my sake and the gospel’s will save it” (Mark 8:35).
