By Wayne Allensworth
Verily, I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the kingdom of God
as a little child, he shall not enter therein
— Mark 10:15
My grandchildren remind me of Jesus’ comments about the faith of little children. To be sure, Proverbs told us to raise our children properly, that they should not depart from the way. But I believe that Christ was referring to something innate in the nature of a child. It’s a subject I’ve broached before. All a child’s experiences are wrought with wonder. With awe, even. As I watch them play, I see the light in their eyes that so often leaves us as we grow older. In our worldly concerns, we forget just how miraculous the tiniest expression of creation really is. Pill bugs are magical to them. They watch them curl up and the sense of seeing something magical is there every time. Butterflies flicker across the yard and the kids chase them to watch those colorful, delicate wings flapping in the air.
And I try to remember what that was like, when every time was a first. Our toddler grandchild has learned to walk and delights in it. She has now mastered crawling up the stairs. She attempts to speak to us, and has a few words, but still relies on sign language. Her smile is as expressive as her cries of dismay. Emotion and experience. Pure experience, without the chatter of our over stimulated post-modern lives. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn once noted that modern man’s malady was the result of forgetting God. And losing the faith of a child, in which God abides. What they see is far more than most of us can see any longer, as we shift to a narrow, task driven focus in our lives, and lose sight of the broad horizons that call to us. That sense of longing that in our daily routine we can’t place and try to fill with that which cannot replace the eternal, the divine.
If we are to rekindle the faith of a child, that sense of wonder and enchantment, we must see the world with old and new eyes. Old as from childhood. New, in that in a technological society, we are blind, seeing the world as simply a series of problems to solve, resources to exploit, and profit to be had. By living such a way, we can become lifeless, as dead in spirit as the dead matter we imagine composes the cosmos.
The visionary poet, artist, and philosopher William Blake sought the rekindling of the imagination, which he saw as emanating from the Logos, the creative source of all. In imagination there was the possibility of the revival of what Blake called our “second sight,” a way of seeing that was three dimensional, not the flat plane of a materialist mindset. That capacity for second sight is in us at birth. Professional atheists sometimes claim that parents are to blame for the ills of the world. They brainwash their children with religion, instilling the precepts of an old way that we, as our own gods, can replace and improve upon. Whatever the many flaws of institutional churches, recent history does not support that claim. But fanatics of whatever stripe are loath to cut themselves adrift from the ideological moorings that give them a sense of importance and meaning, even in a world that so many of them deny has any meaning or purpose.
They couldn’t be farther off target. For children have an innate, untaught religious sense. Research, as if we needed studies to prove it, shows just that. Iain McGilchrist’s groundbreaking work on the brain hemispheres, for instance, refutes materialism. In his magisterial two-volume The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, McGilchrist cites a vast array of research to support his contention that consciousness — mind — precedes matter and is the source of the material world. And consciousness is innate in the cosmos at every level of being. The creation and constant recreation of the world is an unfolding of something innate, something relational, in the reality that we perceive and is in us. McGilchrist takes on the “brainwashing” claim of militant atheists. Citing the work of researchers David Hay and Rebecca Nye, among others, McGilchrist wrote that “religious experience exists across the life span, from childhood onwards.” The “intuitive theism” of children appears to be independent of culture and environment, including the religious or non-religious outlook of parents. Even children whose parents are atheists have religious experiences, and their religious sense can persist even without reinforcement. McGilchrist quotes Hay on the “relational consciousness” of children:
“[Relational consciousness is an] altered state of awareness as compared with other kinds of consciousness, more intense, more serious, and more valued; and the experience of being in a relationship—with other people, with the environment, and with God, and in an important sense, in touch with oneself. “
It appears that the truth about children’s religious sense is the direct opposite of the thesis that they are “forced” to think in such terms: “Rather, they naturally thought in such terms until they were taught that it was not considered smart to do so, and an alienated, atomistic, inanimate world was imposed on them at school.” “Smart,” this is, in a culture that has adopted materialism as its credo since the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. The research on the subject indicates — again, it’s no surprise to many of us — that though culture obviously shapes religious experience, “it is not obvious that it generates it.” “Religious experience” is defined here as an experience of a transcendent God or divine realm. What’s more, even in the officially atheist Soviet Union, religious experience of this kind was not uncommon.
“Many people,” wrote McGilchrist, “experience moments of transcendence when the world seems to be more alive and to be transformed: when there is a strong subjective sense of being in the closest touch with something much bigger than oneself that one had hitherto somewhat removed.” Dr. Tobin Hart, author ofThe Secret Spiritual World of Children, has written that “My chief desire is to show that what is most mysterious and most exalted is also that which, strangely enough, turns out to be most ordinary and nearest to hand … and that we know far more than we are usually aware of knowing, in large part because we labor to forget what is laid out before us in every moment.” Yes, we do, unlike children, whose pure experience enables them, as Blake wrote, “To see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower; hold infinity in the palm of your hand, and eternity in an hour.” The sunrise is not a mere round disk of fire, but “an innumerable company of the heavenly host, crying ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty.’”
To break out of our stupor, we must take Blake’s imaginative road, rejecting the stilted techno-language of today and the defeated, dead view of our world. Awe can be expressed only in the language of art, of dance, metaphor, poetry, parable, and song, music perhaps best of all. Music that can awaken in us once more the pure experience of children — the faith of a child.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood. For thirty-two years, he worked as an analyst and Russia area expert in the US intelligence community.
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