Reflections of an Adult Child

When I was a little boy I believed in magic. I was 7 or 8 years old when I read Madeline L’Engel’s A Wrinkle in Time. I was 10 years old when I read Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. I had a most vivid imagination and played with my best friend Barry Lloyd in a make-believe world almost every day. Every tree was a fortress, every wild place a new planet. The world was fraught with possibilities. Raised Roman Catholic, I had a world view that included both saints and sinners, angels and demons, this world and the other world.

I lost my imagination when I became a Protestant, a born again Christian at 18. When I began studying theology just after high school, my Fundamentalist teachers made sure that I only ever approached life in a consistent logical and rational manner. And for three decades after that the world I inhabited was two dimensional. Imagination equaled speculation, foolishness and was a childish activity. This became reinforced for me by a critical approach to scripture which removed all mystery and wonder. I didn’t know it but I was becoming an intellectual paraplegic.

When Jesus said that in order to enter into the reign of his Papa one had to become like a little child, I had no idea what that meant. I heard preachers say that children are humble, thus to be humble was childlike and enabled one to enter the kingdom. Really? I can’t say I have ever met a humble child. Some said that children were not intellectual, and that to refuse to be intellectual was the basis for entering the kingdom. Really? I was an intellectual child. I loved reading in my Encyclopedia Britannica all the time. I have often pondered this saying of Jesus, wondering what he meant by using this analogy.

In 2002 I began a journey of learning how to become a child again, this time a child of the earth. For the past twelve years I have learned to wander the creation, explore her mystery and wonder and now at 57 years of age I feel like that ‘born again’ child Jesus talked about.

Tis true I know reams about theology, church history and the Bible. It is all there, in my brain, sorted and filed away for good use. Yep, I can say I have tons of knowledge at my disposal, my memory can often recall not only where I read something but the page number as well. Tolkien and L’Engle were 7,000 books ago, but today I resonate more with them than with everything I have read since.

Why is this?

I met one of the ancient ones. Well, I have never met Grandfather in the flesh, but I have followed his path. Grandfather was an ancient Lipan Apache medicine man who wandered the Americas from 1900 to the late 1950’s collecting all manner of ancient lore regarding survival skills and spiritual paths from every aboriginal elder and shaman he could find. From Alaska to Argentina, from California to the Amazon rain forest, like an anthropologist, Grandfather sought the ancient ways. These were skills that had been 10,000 years in the making, skills that would produce the finest horticulturists the earth has ever known: the Native Americans. I have told this part of my journey in Walking with Grandfather.

I have walked the Jesus path for most of my life. I will leave it or forsake it. I have discovered, for myself at any rate, that Jesus’ path is not an exclusive path but often dovetails with the paths of others. So it is that learning to walk with Grandfather has helped me to learn more about Jesus than the thousands of books I have read about Jesus.

I don’t regret reading these books. I still buy them and read them. The Gospels are the textbook of my life. I am crazy in love with them. Paul’s letters run a close second. But nothing can replace my day to day walking with Jesus along an ancient path where mystery and wonder are commonplace.

What does it mean for me to be as a little child? As I look at children and ask what it is about children that I have rediscovered in myself at this older age, I think I have discovered two essential things: trust and imagination.

A little child trusts the adults in the world around them. A child looks to the adults around them to care for them, to nurture them, to help them, to play with them. They have no other way of existing except in trust. This is why teaching a child not to trust is the worst thing we can do to them. Trust holds a primary place in the development of a child’s psychology. Destroy their ability to trust, teach them to be suspicious and wary and you will produce an adult that is a cynic.

A little child is also full of imagination. They don’t see the world around them as adults do. Where adults see probabilities, children see possibilities. Adults ask “why me?”, whereas children just ask “why?” Children are still open to the future, whereas adults tend to fear it.

If I am now called a theologian, and sometimes a scholar (neither of which I feel), I am really nothing more than a little boy in a 57 year old body. I wake every day with a sense of wonder and excitement. I look forward to life’s challenges and dreams. And I fear nothing. Not dragons or Ebola or orcs or terrorists. I am in my Papa’s hands. Death does not have the last word in my world. Life reigns. I hear life in the birdsong, I feel it in the wind, I see billions of years of life every night when I gaze upon the stars. For me, Life Wins. Life will always win. I am quite content to be a child who has simply read a lot of books.