Unless you change and become like little children you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.
Ron Rolheiser, OMI
THE HEART OF A CHILD
How can we do that? How do we unlearn sophistication, undo the fact that we are adults?
Part of our quandary, I believe, comes from how we think of the heart of a child. When we picture the heart of a child we almost automatically think of innocence. A child’s heart is stunningly innocent.
Childhood is naturally outgrown and adulthood brings with it a bewildering complexity in life in general and in sexuality in particular that is not yet inside the heart of a child. And we don’t choose this. For an adult, life cannot be simple and much of the natural innocence of a child is lost in that fact.
So what does Jesus have in mind when he holds up the heart of a child as an ideal?
The quality of heart, seen in a child, that Jesus most challenges us to imitate is that of acknowledging powerlessness and helplessness. A child is powerless. It cannot provide for itself, feed itself, or take care of itself. A child knows dependence, knows that life comes from beyond itself, that it is not self-providing and self-sufficient.
But we tend to forget this as adults. The adult heart, at least during those years when we are healthy and strong, likes to believe itself to be self-providing, self-sufficient, able to take care of itself: I can provide for myself. The adult heart tends to live the illusion of self-sufficiency and that false notion is at the root of much of the pseudo-sophistication and lack of empathy that isolates us from others.
We have a choice: We can do this process deliberately, on purpose (so to speak), or we can fiercely guard our strength and sense of self-sufficiency and wait for nature, God, and circumstance to do it for us.
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