The other day I went sailing for the first time. A friend who accompanied me on my brief sojourn on the Chesapeake remarked that I was like a little boy as I took in the experience. It’s a phrase that also came up repeatedly when various journalists offered fond recollections of Tim Russert. Time after time they said that Tim was like a little kid, full of wonder before the world. Perhaps there is no higher compliment one could give. It takes me back to a passage from Chesterton:
A child kicks his leg rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always so “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun; and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon. I may not be an automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of mking them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence, it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. (Orthodoxy, 84).
Tim Russert has gone on to the life of eternal youth and wonder. May we heed the words of Matthew 18:3, that we might follow him there.