The Wisdom and Faith of Children

Bede’s Blog has gotten into this before (here, here and here). But the last three Sunday School sessions are prompting me to get into it again. It bears repeating: Children get it–the big stuff, the hard stuff–better than adults.

The past three Sundays, we’ve discussed with the kids three crucial teachings of Jesus: love your enemies; be a peacemaker; and don’t judge others, judge yourself. Adults have such trouble discussing these fundamental tenets of Jesus’ teaching and, indeed, the Christian faith. Bring up these ideas with adults and most of the discussion will be taken up with all the various instances in which such injunctions cannot or should not apply. Adults do all they can to wriggle away from these fairly simple and crucial Christian teachings. (I’m reminded of two bumper stickers; one: When Jesus said, ‘Love your enemies,’ I think he meant, ‘Don’t Kill Them; and another: an image of a B-1 Bomber with the words, Peace The Old Fashioned Way).

Kids wrestle with these questions all the time, moment to moment, day in and day out, and much less cynically than do adults. They know not to judge their fellows, but rather to worry about their own behavior. If someone hits them, they know to use words in response and/or to walk away, though they admit they don’t always do so–and they know that failing is their responsibility, not their attacker’s.

They know not to write off others as “bad” simply because they do something wrong or harmful or mean to them, but to give them another chance and find a way to sympathize with them, recognizing their own penchant to do the wrong thing. They sometimes get into fights with others but still return to play with those others, always imagining they can be friends, even if they sometimes fight. They know to encourage those in a fight not just to stop fighting but to “play nice,” that is: to love those they might otherwise call an enemy.

They are believers in the power of love, peacemaking and resisting judgment. And, possibly most important, they accept the messiness of life–with its unanswerable questions coupled with the need to keep asking them. “Why?” they ask. And even though they rarely get an acceptable answer, they keep asking. Why do we put people in prison? Why do we bomb other countries? Why do we have so much more than them?

I was reminded of all this today when I read this blog post by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Here’s my favorite passage:

The most fearsome damage wreaked upon my parents by their concept of “adulthood”, was the idea that being “adult” meant that you were finished – that “maturity” marked the place where you declared yourself done, needing to go no further.

This was displayed most clearly in the matter of religion, where I would try to talk about a question I had, and my parents would smile and say:  “Only children ask questions like that; when you’re adult, you know that it’s pointless to argue about it.”  They actually said that outright!

To ask questions was a manifestation of earnest, childish enthusiasm, earning a smile and a pat on the head.  An adult knew better than to waste effort on pointless things.

We never really know our parents; we only know the face of our parents that they turn to us, their children.  I don’t know if my parents ever thought about the child-adult dichotomy when they weren’t talking to me.

But this is what I think my parents were thinking:  If they had tried to answer a question as children, and then given up as adults – a quite common pattern in their religious decay – they labeled “mature” the place and act of giving up, by way of consolation.  They’d asked the question as children and stopped asking as adults – and the story they told themselves about that was that only children asked that question, and now they had succeeded into the sage maturity of knowing not to argue.

To this very day, I constantly remind myself that, no matter what I do in this world, I will doubtlessly be considered an infant by the standards of future intergalactic civilization, and so there is no point in pretending to be a grown-up.  I try to maintain a mental picture of myself as someone who is not mature, so that I can go on maturing.