I make it no secret on this blog that I think contemplative life has to have a place for children. I also make it no secret that I consider Aaron Cardinal Lustiger and Charles Cardinal Journet to be two steady theological signposts for the contemporary world, particularly applicable for contemplative life thrown into the world.

This post takes a bit of each of these two themes.

I’m a teacher. It’s true that I teach people who are adults, because I teach students in graduate school and the final years of their undergraduate degree. But I don’t think it’s possible to teach adults without understanding children. How could Iteach someone and not understand, at least inchoately, where they’d been?

For that matter, I don’t think it’s possible to live the Gifts of the Holy Spirit and be without an understanding of humanity in its early stages, live a contemplative life, be a Christian… Jesus had a very strong sense of the importance of childhood. This is non-negotiable. It’s in the Gospel. It’s a constant. Children, seemingly “useless” for now, stand exactly for what reflective life is: life of the spirit.

So how do all these themes come together? We are often reminded that we should have faith like a child’s. Well, what is a child’s faith like? Charles Journet writes,

Little children are not surprised at the mysteries of Christianity. For them, the universe is made of wonders. That God came in a crèche to save us: what difficulty is there in that? When the time will come to make them feel what a mystery is, and that the Incarnation is one of them, we’ll ask them first, ‘Is God happy?’ And, right afterwards, ‘Jesus on the Cross, was he God? Was he happy?’ They will experience at that moment, in their own manner, the saving and decisive shock of mystery. And we’ll say to them, for big people too, the mystery doesn’t get cleared away.

That’s the right way to talk to children: as if they are intelligent but inexperienced adults, but adults who understand better than adults and are less likely to make an idiotic mistake. In that vein, Jean-Marie Lustiger, thinking on the age at which he started to ask metaphysical and “big” questions, adds,

To play the fool [bêtifier, act below the capacities of reason, speak ineptly] with children of seven years old is a stupidity of adults. That’s the age when we start to ask the most serious of questions. Adults must answer, even if they must recognize their ignorance. Never ever say to a child, “That’s not for someone of your age; you’ll understand later…”

He is right. We’ve been children. Unless we forgot, we know.

If we disagreed with what either Charles Journet or Aaron Lustiger said here, how could we treat children with love and respect, while holding onto the content of our faith? How could we see Jesus in them, little as they are but searching and thinking? It would be impossible. Utterly impossible. The whole edifice of contemplation in the mud would collapse. Everything would be frustrated. To understand adults, we have to understand children. To understand children, we have to know that adults are no more valuable in all the important things. To understand children, we have to, at least obscurely, see Jesus (understand him? perhaps a little, but only a little, because we are weak and stupid!).

A child who is taught not to be a child (that is, taught not to ask questions and to sometimes be afraid of the answers) will never grow up to be an adult. If I can’t be a child, I can’t be an adult. That’s it. That’s true. Do you disagree? Well, if we try to live any contradictory human “wisdom” in our life, we put an obstacle in the way of the Holy Spirit. My opinion is that, but for exceptional cases, it’s an insurmountable obstacle and the spiritual life would fail. Yes, that’s harsh. I admit to it. But then again, how can someone not have a harsh opinion of behaviour that wrongs children?

Children are our equals, or our betters, in the important things. If they weren’t, how could we see Jesus in or behind them? That’s the crux of the problem. And that has to bear out in the way we talk and reason, too.

^^