Gifts of Children

Martha Hodges - 2006-11-29

(Preceded by reading: “The Summer You Learned to Swim” by Michael Simms, for Lea)

“And I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me.”

If you are a parent – or a teacher – you understand that this is a difficult kind of love. You are the only kind of lover who, if you do your job right – if you love unselfishly – must refrain from pursuing the object of your love. You let go, after you have taught the child to float, after you have reassured both your child and yourself that she has the means to stay afloat in this world and not go under – then you must stand and wait for her to swim to you. What a demanding discipline is the love of a parent or teacher for a child! What a paradox when the measure of your success is to watch your child – the center of your concern, the source of your pain and your delight – walk, swim, fly away from you. No longer dependent on you, no longer your little satellite, caught within your gravitational pull – but an independent being, off to form new attachments, ones that supersede her attachment to you.

This lesson in letting go is part of the spiritual discipline of parenthood. To love without possessing is to transcend the self – the objective of all the world’s religions. But that’s just a piece of this strenuous curriculum. Spending time with a child will, if you’re willing to learn, teach you all kinds of things that you didn’t even know you needed to learn, or re-learn. Things like how to look – really look – at a bug. How to notice all the details about it and not care so much about what it’s doing on your kitchen table. Things like how to ask for what you want without making the other person guess. Things like how to be purely and completely happy or sad, to experience emotions unselfconsciously, with a passion that we adults go to great lengths to reclaim. How to “hiccup with joy” as it says in my favorite line of the poem we began with. How to “think outside the box.” Way outside the box.

These are gifts of the spirit, by which I mean not only that they are of mysterious origin, but that they are gifts that teach us to live more consciously and authentically, more attuned to what we deem to be of ultimate worth. Gifts of the spirit that make us want to be better people, happier people, more generous and centered. More awake, as the Buddhists would put it. And here’s the wonderful thing: the gifts of spirit that children have to offer us are available not just to parents, but to any grown-up willing to accept the challenge – willing to sign on for instruction by the small Zen masters that are our children.

I’ll tell you how this worked for me. I’ll begin with a confession. I used to be scared to death of children. This was a reasonable enough holdover from the days when I was one. As you may have heard me say before, I wasn’t a popular kid. I was a strange kid, old for my age, terrible at sports, a teachers’ pet. A kid who tried too hard, overly sensitive, self-conscious and self-critical from an early age. I was also a considerate kid, shy, polite and – well, I’ll just say it – nicer than most kids. This made me an easy mark for other children with fewer scruples. I grew up with a kind of “Lord of the Flies” understanding of other children. If you didn’t watch out and stay out of their way, other children would make fun of you or use you in ways you would not enjoy. Even as a young adult, I remained suspicious of children, half expecting them to say something mean like the kid in the old mouthwash commercial who tells the old lady that she smells funny. I loved babies, loved holding them and watching them, but figured, once they learned to talk, watch out!

I knew that I must be missing something – how else to explain that the rest of the world seemed to be gaga over kids? I also realized that my own life was sadly lacking in play and thought I might have something to learn about that – better late than never – and so I set about overcoming my shyness with children.

I started out with the littlest ones, the least scary ones. I signed up to teach the pre-K Sunday school at church. This was an excellent choice – one I highly recommend to anyone who suffers a bit from child phobia. (That’s called “pedophobia” by the way, defined as “an abnormal and persistent fear of babies and children.” As opposed, I guess, to the “normal and persistent fear of babies and children.” I‘m exaggerating a bit, of course. My fear was not abnormal, but perfectly reasonable, considering everything!)

Be that as it may, teaching Sunday school did the trick. It’s pretty hard to be afraid or shy around a three year-old who’s clambering into your lap to hear a story. Then I moved on to the fourth grade. I had the great good luck to be co-teaching with a woman, the mother of one of the rambunctious nine year-old boys in the class, whose laid-back approach to following the curriculum and to child-rearing in general provided me with a role model of how to relax and enjoy just being with the kids and appreciate them for who they are. I came to love how funny these kids were, how deep, and how ready to engage in genuine conversation about things that mattered to them.

The final step in my rehabilitation came when my closest friend adopted a baby girl from China. Chunmei is now ten and she is a miraculous child. As is any child you love and who loves you back, unconditionally. She has taught me so much. And she is why I’m talking to you today about the gifts of children.

In a remarkable book by a Harvard professor of philosophy, Gareth Matthews, called “The Philosophy of Childhood,” the author proposes a different way of looking at children. Theories of child development, with their successive stages of maturation, he says, encourage us to think of children as proto-adults. As developmentally deficient because they are supposed to lack the reasoning abilities, creativity, moral development and sensibilities of adults, who are the real human beings, the finished products. If adults are the epitome of humanness, children are, in this view, less than fully human. This pervasive way of looking at children leads adults to sentimentalize children, to condescend to them and about them, to cute-sify them, to underestimate them and, ultimately, to dismiss them.

Matthews confirms what we have all noticed if we’ve spent any time with children. Children ask deep philosophical questions about the origin of life, about death and God and justice. Children are authentic philosophers, in other words, in ways that few adults are. As we “mature” we often brush our questions aside as irrelevant to daily living, or dismiss them as simply unanswerable, or, most commonly, adopt ready-made answers supplied by teachers, parents, and religious authorities. Children are able to consider questions such as, “Why is that man living in a cardboard box?” that many adults prefer not to ask. What’s more, they are ready to do something for him. They are unencumbered by complex theories of society’s ills. They have yet to become overwhelmed, hopeless or cynical. Their response to suffering is direct and personal. If adults retained this clarity and immediacy in the way we respond to the world, there would be no people living in cardboard boxes, but, alas, we do not. Of course, our greater experience of life has taught us that the solutions are not simple, but along the way, we seem to have lost something that underlies any kind of social reform – a sense of what is fair – a sense that any six year-old can reawaken in us if we allow ourselves to listen to them. Matthews argues that, not only are children natural philosophers, they are also capable of moral reasoning to an astonishing degree they are seldom given credit for. “Why is life unfair?” is a question about morality and ethics, about human nature, about free will, about justice, about purpose, about God. And, fortunately, for us, it’s okay with children if we don’t have all the answers.

Children teach us to ask the important questions and, for this, they deserve our respect, Matthews concludes. We ought to view them, not as incomplete adults, but as fully functional human beings. Functional in a way that is different from us as adults, but complete and admirable at each stage of their development. They lack the life experience of adults and the vocabulary to talk about what they do experience, but this does not make them less able thinkers. If we can accept this truth about children, we can accept the spiritual instruction they offer us, without condescension or sentimentality.

For example: Children do not insist that something must be visible in order to be believable. They are comfortable with mystery, comfortable with the imagination. This is a gift – an openness to other dimensions of thought, feeling and experience that reminds us of our limitations – that reminds us of the limitations of pure rationality. Spirituality – that relationship with the transcendent, that awareness of what sustains us – does not eschew rationality by any means. But neither does it banish emotion, intuitive knowledge and sensory experience to a lesser, lower category of knowing. Children remind us to stay open to these other dimensions, this other kind of wisdom. As the Rabbi Sandy Sasso said in a recent edition of the NPR program “Speaking of Faith,” “Children open windows for us or can crawl through windows we can’t crawl through, and they open part of our life that maybe has been dormant for a long time.” What do these windows open onto? The part of life that is imagination, full and immediate participation in the present moment, and acceptance of the unknowable, to name a few things. These windows that the Rabbi is talking about are windows into the spirit and the spiritual life.

By asking questions, telling us stories, asking us to interpret the world to them, children remind us of what’s important, what we believe, what is true. This is the role of the religious teacher, the spiritual guide.

I do not want to fall into the easy and ultimately dismissive cliché that children are models of innocence and sources of unadulterated joy. Children are capable of manipulation, too. They know how to hurt us and will not hesitate to use that knowledge if sufficiently provoked. They do have that “Lord of the Flies” potential – no doubt about it. But so do we adults. In that respect, they are no different from us – no better, no worse.

But this fact remains: Children bring a freshness to our lives. They show us how to think beyond categories, because they don’t yet possess those categories. Their perspectives challenge our own and their easy access to the world of mystery, imagination and feeling forces us to reclaim those parts of ourselves if we would follow them on their inner adventures, if we would follow them through those windows that Rabbi Sasso speaks of.

To live among children, in a way that is respectful and loving – to listen to them, watch them and engage with them in the most honest way we can – is to live spiritually.

Listen again to these final lines from the poem “Learning to Swim.”

And I dove in too, trying new things.
I tried not giving advice. I tried waking early to pray. I tried
not rising in anger. Watching you I grew stronger—
your courage washed away my fear.

All day I worked hard thinking of you.
In the evening I walked the long hill home.
You were at the top, waving your small arms,
pittering down the slope to me and I lifted you high
so high to the moon. That summer all the world
was soul and water, light glancing off peaks.
You learned the turtle, the cannonball, the froggy, and the flutter
And I learned to stand and wait for you to swim to me.

We are blessed with many children in this congregation – and as of today, one more. Let us dive in, trying new things in this world of soul and water and light, made miraculous and holy once again by our children.