Of Faith and Childlikeness

K and I were taking a walk late in the afternoon around the Episcopal Seminary campus in Austin last week, and we came upon two little girls who, outside their parents apartment in the driveway, had arranged a bed spread, pillows, stuffed animals, two dolls,a lamp, a table with a pitcher and two cups on it, two chairs beside; the worn chalky lines of an expired game of hop-scotch close by; the girls’ hair long-escaped from the clasps and ribbons affixed by their mother earlier in the day. I asked them, “So girls, are you going to spend the night outside?” “Oh no sir,” they said with youthful authority, “We are just playing.” On the way home on Sunday morning several days later we were listening to the National Public Radio production called Speaking of Faith. I never get to hear this excellent broadcast because I am otherwise occupied Sunday mornings. The host, Krista Tippet, was interviewing the renowned child psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Coles about his vast experience studying the inner lives of children. What he had to say was astounding.

Children, he said, are far better models for us adults than we for them when it comes to spirituality. The older we get the more rational and rigid we become as we are conditioned by a culture that desperately seeks certainty. Children on the other hand are open to possibility; their imaginations always at the ready; and moreover, he said, children are passionate about discovery. They will go to great lengths and sometimes at great peril just to learn about the way of things; what things mean; why things are the way they are. Children are seekers par excellence. It is how we’re all supposed to be.

All of us in the human family are created to make meaning of things. We are all discoverers. Our lives are predisposed to make meaning, not just for ourselves but for the sake of the world we serve. Jesus’ counter cultural admonition to come into his fellowship as a child now takes on new meaning. We are as Christian folk to be about discovery, and that means we must be open to newness and possibility; we must be imaginative, ardent, courageous and passionate to seek to know and to share…the way children do. In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth…in seven joy filled days, God created them…to which God must surely say…I’m just playing.