“Then I was beside him, like a master worker; and I was daily his delight, rejoicing before him always, rejoicing in his inhabited world and delighting in the human race.”   (Proverbs 8:30-31)

                  My four-year-old niece is in my arms, her wispy blonde hair floating above her head like spider webs adrift the fall wind. We are jumping on a discarded box-spring mattress near a pond on the backside of a spillway dam. A giggle bursts from her lungs. “Again!!” This time, we are astronauts on the surface of the moon.
                  Later, back at my folk’s, I am leading the same niece and her sister on a series of important lessons entitled “how to be a horse.” We graze on carpet, scratch our backs by gyrating on the floor, and kick our legs wildly behind us. This is followed by an extremely practical series of activities that involve being catapulted onto a cloud of pillows on the couch, capped off with a game of tackle-the-person-holding-the-football in the living room.
                  On my way back to the parish for Mass, I flip on the blinker to merge onto the highway. Yet my soul bounces as upon a mattress, skips like a yearling colt. The sound of the stereo and the road humming quietly beneath the car carry me off to the wilderness that I had backpacked a few months before. That day, I had wandered off of the marked trails and explored ravines, maneuvered over boulders, and tiptoed in and out of caves and coves. I marveled at rock formations, red and orange colors leaping off the walls to my left and right, accented by the new, lime-green growth of berried bushes and bristling blades of grass. A voice, like a whisper, had bubbled like a spring within me: “I know you. I delight in you.” I lay upon a pillow of sand and looked up at the sky: yearning, longing, a child playing before his Father. From my lungs had burst a prayer of gratitude like a giggle.
                  Now in the sacristy, having donned the sacred vestments for Mass, I reach into my shirt pocket for a prayer book. It had fallen out during carpet horse training and my niece returned it as I headed out the door. I open it to the preparatory prayers for Mass. On the front page, a stick figure of a man scribbled by her four-year-old hand, his arms outstretched to the sky.
                  With the image of the stick-figure priest in my mind, I process down the main aisle of the church to the Holy of Holies. There, I will “play the divinely ordained game of the liturgy in liberty and beauty and holy joy before God.” I will raise my arms in thanksgiving and praise. The arms of an uncle. The arms of a son. The arms of the Son before his Father.

 (cf. Romano Guardini, The Spirit of the Liturgy, 72)