Adults tend to want to convince themselves that spiritual maturity can only arise with increasing age and experience. In most cases this may well be so, especially in the middle of a two thousand year long Age (such as the Age of Pisces), when energies are most homogeneous and stable. However, human history has always generated major and numerous exceptions to the rule - children and young adults whose spiritual giftings, obvious from an early age, have alienated them from their peers and community at large.

Strange though it may initially seem, spiritually mature adults do not necessarily produce spiritually gifted children, though their children will obviously have been given something precious, a home life and parenting based on sound spiritual principles.

Conversely, spiritually gifted children are most often born into homes where, at very best, they come into contact with adults who don’t understand them or their needs but attempt to support them in every way they can, and at very worst struggle to survive their childhood and young adulthood in the midst of misunderstanding or deliberate cruelty.

Take Jesus of Nazareth. Regardless of the various ways we may choose to interpret his life, death, person and purpose, there is no doubt that he was a profoundly spiritually gifted child. It appears just as evident that Jesus’ parents and the adults of his own immediate community had no way of really comprehending that fact, even though Mary and Joseph, after consecrating their firstborn infant son at the temple in Jerusalem, had heard the prophetic insights of Simeon and Anna.

Luke’s gospel not only says the very young child was ‘filled with wisdom’. It also paints a very vivid picture of Jesus at age twelve. Jesus’ extended family had come to Jerusalem for Passover, as they did every year. At the end of the feast they had joined the crowds travelling north from Jerusalem. It wasn’t till they went to bed down for the night that they realised Jesus was missing. After searching for him among their accompanying relatives and friends his worried (and probably increasingly irate) parents had rushed back to Jerusalem. Eventually, three days later they had found Jesus in the temple, listening to the teachers, asking questions, astounding everyone who heard him with his understanding and his answers. Confronted by their parental concern, his response was, “Why were you searching for me? Didn’t you understand that I had to be in my Father’s house and about my Father’s business?”

Luke says, “But they did not understand what he was saying to them. Then he went to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them….. and grew in wisdom and stature…” (Luke 2.50-52)