The Child Model
July 8, 2009
Let The Children Come To Me
Fr. Romano Guardini, A Reading Selection from The Lord
Following the rancor over who will sit on the left and right hand of Jesus in Heaven, Jesus replies with a demonstration that in Mark’s text is rendered with great precision: the Lord fetches a child, leads it into their midst and seating himself, puts his arm around it: Look, you wrangling, self-interested grown-ups here is the opposite of the lot of you! This child can teach you how to evaluate and behave! God’s kingdom is not like the world’s, where some command and some obey, where there are quick ones and slow ones, astute and stupid, those who succeed and those who fail. There it is the contrary!
Jesus’ jubilant words upon his apostles’ return from their wonderfully fruitful mission suggests this same idea of complete revaluation: “I praise thee, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou didst hide these things from the wise and the prudent, and didst reveal them to little ones” (Matthew 11:25-26). St. Paul is later to reiterate the same idea in his first Corinthian epistle: “For consider your own call, brethren; that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble. But the foolish things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the ‘wise,’ and the weak things of the world has God chosen to put to shame the strong” (1:27)…
What does Jesus mean when he sets up the child as a model? If we read the texts carefully, we see in them three distinct ideas.
One of them is in the words: “And whoever receives one such little child for my sake, receives me.” To receive means to accept, to make room for, to respect. Unconsciously we reserve such regard only for the person who is able to prove himself, who accomplishes something, is useful and important. The child can prove nothing. It is only a beginning, has not yet accomplished anything; it is still only a hope. The child cannot force the adult to take it seriously. Real people are the grown-ups; the child counts only as a fraction. This opinion is not to be found solely among stern realists and egotists, but also — indeed often to a greater extent — among affectionate, motherly or pedagogic types; the form it takes here is that of excessive protectiveness.
The usual attitude of the adult toward the child is one of either friendly or unfriendly disregard all too evident in the forced, playful tone which he feels obliged to assume toward the young one. To this Jesus says: You do not receive the child because it cannot enforce respect. For you it is unimportant. But let me tell you, wherever there is something defenseless, there am I! A divine chivalry protects that which is unable to protect itself and declares: I stand behind it!
And then the final thought: “Amen I say to you, unless you turn and become like little children you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” This then the prerequisite of heaven: child-likeness.
Yet what terrible abuse the word has suffered! What sentimental silliness, oppressiveness, what human and religious mediocrity have fed upon it! What weakness and dependency have excused themselves as “childlike”! What inability to associate with independent and mature people has referred itself to this adjective! It is high time to look closer at this word of the Lord!
What is it that the child has which the adult in Jesus eyes so sadly lacks? What norm is this by which one’s very suitability for heaven is measured? Certainly not childish charm; that would be a lyricism, something Jesus had nothing to do with. Innocence perhaps? But the child is not innocent. The Bible is much too realistic to call a child innocent. It knows human nature, and that even the one-day-old infant is a carrier of evil. And the small child? Already it contains all the ingredients of wrong-doing — to be sure, mainly dormant, though often astonishingly awake and active. No serious pedagogue can claim that children are innocent. The “innocent child” is an invention of grown-ups eager to stake a sentimental claim to the vanished purity of their own childhood.
If neither its charm nor its purity, what is it then that Jesus praises in the child? Apparently the exact opposite of the chief (and negative) characteristic of maturity. The grownup seeks security, and in the process, becomes sly and hard. He is afraid, and fear abases. The child, on the other hand, does not yet have the instinct of self-preservation — at least not nearly so strongly; he lives in a world of unruffled trust. This attitude is no credit to him, for it springs from ignorance rather than virtue; nevertheless, it is there, and engenders an unconscious courage toward existence.
The adult has aims toward which he selects and applies his talents. He sees everything with an eye to its usefulness, thereby rendering everything unfree. He has intentions, and nothing so hampers existence, altering it for the worse, as these, which trammel action and falsify vision. The child has no intentions. (This is, of course, exaggerated; of course it has intentions too, as well as fear and everything else that grown-ups have, for it begins to grow up with its first breath.) Strictly speaking, the child too desires this and that; but for Jesus’ purpose here, which is to illustrate an idea rather than demonstrate psychology, it is correct to say: the child meets reality as it is with simple acceptance. Therefore in his presence things can move freely; he permits them to be themselves.
In the adult there is much unnaturalness. He does not leave life alone, but constantly tries to improve it. The result is what is known as culture and has many precious values, but values bought with artificiality and distortion. Between man and man, heart and heart, person and thing, everywhere loom intermediates, shutting out reality. Everywhere considerations, precautions break life’s spontaneous élan. This, that and the other natural reaction “is simply not done”; the phrase stands at every walk of life, an invulnerable policeman, guarding it from itself.
The child is completely natural. It says what it thinks — often to the embarrassment of the adults — and shows what it feels; hence it is considered ill-mannered. Manners, for the most part, conceal feelings rather than cultivate selflessness, understanding and love. The good manners of adults are heavy with dishonesty and guilt. By contrast, the child is simple and candid. This is due to no virtue on its part, but to the fact that it does not yet feel the inhibitions that make it so difficult for the adult to be honest. The child’s honesty is untried, but it is there, a living reprimand.
The adult is self-centered; he is constantly examining, testing, judging himself. Herein lies the earnestness of life, which consists of a feeling of responsibility, conscious living. The immediacy of things and people is broken in the grown-up world, for the adult is constantly projecting himself between them and him. The child does not reflect. His life moves outside himself. He is open to the world and everything in it. Unconsciously he stands straight and looks straight at things as they really are. Then comes the change; gradually his open doors close upon a room of reflection and self-assertion of which he is the center.
In the child’s attitude toward life lies his humility: as Jesus says, he does not count himself for much. He does not drag his small ego into the foreground; his consciousness brims with objects, people, events — not himself. Thus his world is dominated by reality: that which is and really counts. The grown-ups’ world is cluttered with unrealities: with formalities and illusions and substitutes, intermediaries and trivialities all taken with tremendous seriousness. The child, accustomed to dealing directly with things as they are, is surprised and confused by the hardness and narrowness he confronts in his elders.
Naturally here too we must guard against exaggeration. We must not substitute the romantic notion of childish innocence with a new romanticism. Nevertheless, roughly speaking, this is what Christ means by childlike; this is the attitude of heart whose lack he so deplores in adults.
Because the child is natural, open, without intentions or fear of failing to assert itself, it is receptive to the great, revolutionary ideas in Christ’s teaching of the kingdom. The same teaching is met with reserve by the maturer listener. His cleverness condemns it as impossible; his caution warns him of the consequences; his self-esteem is soon up in arms; his hard grasp cannot let go. He has encysted himself in artificialities, and fearful for his brittle little world, he prefers not to understand. Fear has made his eyes blind, his ears deaf, his heart dull; as Jesus would say, he is over-mature.
The Jewish people, the Pharisees and Scribes and high priests, how ‘grown-up’ they are! The whole heritage of sin with its harshness and distortion looms at us. How old they are! Their memory reaches back more than one and a half millennia, back to Abraham — a historical consciousness not many nations can boast. Their Wisdom is both divine gifr and fruit of long human experience; knowledge, cleverness, correctness. They examine, weigh, differentiate, doubt; and when the Promised One comes and prophecy is fulfilled their long history about to be crowned, they cling to the past with its human traditions, entrench themselves behind the Law and the temple, are sly, hard, blind — and their great hour passes them by. God’s Messiah must perish at the hands of those who ‘protect’ his law. From his blood springs young Christianity and Judaism remains prisoner of its hope in the coming of One who has already come!
The child is young. It has the simplicity of eye and heart which welcomes all that is new and great and salutary; it sees it for what is, goes straight to it and enters in. This simplicity, naturalis christianitas, is the childlikeness to which the parable refers. Jesus means nothing sentimental or touching; neither sweet defenselessness nor gentle malleability. What he values is the child’s clarity of vision; ability to look up and out, to feel and accept reality without ulterior motives. Fundamentally, the attitude of the child is precisely the attitude suggested by the word “believer”: the natural attitude of a faith which is open to all that comes from God and ready to accept the consequences. In other words, something great and holy, and clearly not to be had for the asking. Not for nothing does the text read: “…unless you turn and become as little children…” unless you outgrow maturity, turn back to the beginning and build from the ground up…This is a long and difficult process.
The spiritual childhood Jesus means emanates from God’s fatherhood. Everything comes to the child from its father and mother is related somehow to them. They are everywhere, the origin, measure and order of all things. The adult soon distances himself from his parents; in their place stands the world, irreverent, disinterested or hostile. Once the parents have gone, everything becomes homeless. For the child of God a fatherly Someone is again omnipresent; to be sure, he must not be distorted to a super-projection of a earthly father, but must remain who he is, as he has revealed himself: God our Father and Lord Jesus Christ who helps us to accomplish his will.
The childlike mind is the one that sees the heavenly Father in everything that comes into his life. To do this requires a great effort: wisdom must be sucked from the naked continuation of cause and effect; love from the accidental. To do this sincerely is difficult. It is the “victory that overcomes the world” of which St. John speaks. To become a child in Christ’s sense is to reach Christian maturity.
Benedict XVI says that the Our Father does not project a human image onto heaven but shows us from heaven — from Jesus — what we human beings can and should be like. The figure of Jesus is the mirror in which we come to know who God is and what he is like: through the Son we find the Father….Through him and only through him, do we come to know the Father. And in this way the criterion of true fatherliness is made clear.
We are not ready-made children of God from the start, but we are meant to become so increasingly by growing more and more deeply in communion with Jesus. Our sonship turns out to be identical with following Christ. To name God as Father thus becomes a summons to us: to live as a “child,” a son or a daughter. “All that is mine is thine” [John 17:10] and the father says the same thing to the elder brother of the prodigal Son [Luke15:31]. The word “Father” is an invitation to live from our awareness of this reality. Hence, too, the delusion of false emancipation, which marked the beginning of mankind’s history of sin, is overcome. Adam, heeding the words of the serpent, wants to become God himself and to shed his need for God. We see to be God’s child is not a matter of dependency, but rather of standing in the relation of love that sustains man’s existence and gives it meaning and grandeur.
