Quasimodo geniti infants, rationabiles, sine dolo, lac concupiscite, Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
As newborn infants, thoughtful, without guile, desire milk. Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.
While it is not difficult to think of newborn babies as innocent and without guile (sine dolo), it is not as common to characterize them as "thoughtful" (rationabiles) but that is indeed the most accurate way to describe the little folks, and their habit of intellectual activity seems to be what the psalmist is asking us to emulate.
Newborn infants are totally helpless, and their every need must be carefully attended to by a competent and mature person. However, despite their fragility and apparent passivity, they are immersed in a most urgent and prodigious task: learning as much as they can about the environment around them.
Maria Montessori, in her groundbreaking book The Absorbent Mind, describes "the great work of a child" which is to observe, analyze, record and imitate the complex activities of the human beings with whom they are in contact:
There is, so to speak, in every child a painstaking teacher, so skillful that he obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one can teach them anything! Not only this, but if at a later age the child has to learn another language, no expert help will enable him to speak it with the same perfection as he does his first.
So there must be a special psychic force at work, helping the little child to develop. And this not only for language; for at two he can recognize all the persons and things around him. If we consider this, it becomes ever clearer that the child does an impressive work of inner formation. All that we ourselves are has been made by the child, by the child we were in the first two years of our lives.
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