Children can teach adults about God. They can help an adult know and see God. They can even put an adult in touch with God. Sometimes I think this happens to me when I look into the eyes of a baby I know, and ask the question: What do children mean? I begin to see how children reflect God’s Wildness and Freedom and Courage and Authenticity.
Many children are sweet and pleasant and fit every stereotype of childhood. It is easy to see these children as gifts from God. I think such children reflect little of God because of their innocence. Even at their worst, in their grumpiest moods or when they whine and manipulate and lie, and when every cliché about the innocence of children is furthest from the truth, the child before you is showing you God.
Even the street-wise child you hear about in other cities – the child-thief who stands wide-eyed and “innocent” or trapped and angry – is God’s gift to us, and he also reflects God. It is in the willfulness and wildness of childhood that children reflect the divine, and not in their innocence.
God is not innocent.
I do not mean that God is guilty, but God is not innocent.
Can you look at everything around you – the complexities, the extremes, and the passions, the beauty and wildness – and then call God innocent? Can you feel the pain and anguish of your own love? Can you tolerate your own blessings and disappointments and then say God is innocent? I do not believe so.
And all children reflect God – not just the children’s choirs with their matching robes, forgotten words, and unsure harmonies – but also children who are criminals, or who, for whatever sociological reasons, are more like wild animals than they are human. Lost children reflect God as much as so called found children. Sometimes I think it is the lost children who are found, and the cherubs in our churches (the “found” children) who are the ones to be pitied.
It is children in churches who have so much to lose at the hands of people who can talk about God, but would typically fail to recognize God, if God surfaced in their morning tea. It is these children who stand to have God’s excitement deleted and replaced with a set of be nices parading as faith.
Children embody the wildness and the passion and the joys and the pain of God’s Godness. When they sleep and dream, or suckle and feed and search for warmth and comfort – be it at home in western wealth with a loving parent, or homeless on the streets of eastern Europe – God’s determination is reflected.
God lives in every suffering child, and hungers with every cramped stomach. God is in the children who are down and out as well as with the “churched” children who are thought of as saved.
Thank you, cherubs, in church choirs for your squirmy, untamed movements and your loud and predictable answers to the pastors’ questions. May you have the courage of your nature and press close to God’s Wild Heart. Resist the prison of meaningless tradition awaiting you. Its door beckons every time a condition is placed on God’s Love, or every time you are told there is more to do to make God love you. Every time you are told that somehow God’s love for you is your responsibility or that you can do something to make God love you more than God already does, run from such lies.
Thank you, street children, for your wildness, your lostness and your search for love. The lakes and the city fountains are yours in summer with the ice and the snow and the bite, also yours, following quickly behind.
Thank you to the baby I know, for your peace and sure gaze when you look at me, eye-to-eye, as certain as one man can ever look into the face of another. Thank you for falling asleep so readily upon my shoulder, your chest against my heart, somehow reviving me, connecting me to the place you so recently left.
