Suffer the Children to Come, But Beware

The rodent herself might have felt disappointed with this form of resurrection. I would have.

On the other hand, the children were thrilled and fascinated that there was a mouse at all, or ants, or dust, or that they had eyes to see them and fingers to touch them. Exceptional things happened all the time.

Neither I nor my students lingered long enough to learn where the ant-animated rat, the ant-operated rat puppet, was going. Not to the hospital. Not home. That rat was venturing into the unknown.

Reaching their nest with this burden, would the ants dismantle their roof like friends of the paralyzed man and belay the rat into Jesus' presence? More like the Trojans dismantling their city gates to accommodate the Greeks' oversized gift.

This rat lingers in my mind's pocket like a worn charm, past many rat lifetimes, set apart. Is it an icon? A symbol? A trace?

Children take great interest in death and injury. We go through a lot of Band-Aids. In general use they may imply facile fix, but in my business, Band-Aids are spiritual equipment, able to restore wholeness and validate crucial experience. As children collect crucial experience, they make sense of it in their representations of the world, in successive approximations. In stories.

Like the fir poles in Seattle, our stories are our spiritual technology. Religion and the stories we tell ourselves about the true world and about our true selves are our puppets. They say for us the unsayable and they enter territory we fear. Rescue workers and containment engineers send tiny robots, like prayers, into collapsed buildings and Fukushima hot zones. So do we with our best approximations, our stories of experience and yearning.

On Radiolab, I heard the ant expert Deborah Gordon tell of watching two ants as they tugged a twig back and forth, first one way, then the other, for months. "One of them is pulling one way because the stick feels like something that needs to be pulled and the other also feels that the stick needs to be pulled. And they just pull." She goes on: "Individually, they're totally incompetent; as colonies, they do great things."

I found myself identifying with these two ants tugging a twig back and forth. They are like two Wikipedia authors rewriting each other's edits. They are like theologians.

Spirituality is a lifelong project exploring mortality, love, and meaning. But we feel ill equipped.

One of my students arrived from overseas just as kindergarten started. He spoke no English, but splashed in where he could, watchful for clues and embracing new friends. At song time, his incomprehensible but full-throated approximations of our songs were as spiritual as any hymn.

"Kids Say the Darndest Things" was a feature on a TV show I liked to watch when I was a child. Art Linkletter would get them to say things that were funny and cute because kids are, basically, incompetent and grown-ups are sentimental.

Sentimentality aside, children are charming and have important things to teach us, but not always at the same time. Children can be as mean and dim as adults. If they seem more spiritual, it's because their disguises are inept.

Children's approximations of the world are more approximate than ours because they are earlier drafts. Children's spirituality is as serious and high-stakes as grown-ups' is, but draws on less experience. No less excruciating, just shorter. Using our accumulating experience and the stories we tell ourselves about it, we probe the transcendent. And it probes us.

Suffer the children to come, but beware. They are strange. They will dismantle your walls, infiltrate your theology, and reanimate your desiccated heart.