The Mystery of Children
Mike Mason, Excerpts from The Mystery of Children
Mark 9:33-37 . . . They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who among them was the greatest. Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.” He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”
Mike Mason . . . As my daughter has been the catalyst for my own growth in childlikeness, I believe everyone needs a similar relationship. On our own we are nothing; all light shines through relationships. We cannot obey Jesus’ word to become childlike without loving an actual child. He or she will be our guide into this forgotten land.
Mike Mason . . . Children hallow small things. A child is a priest of the ordinary, fulfilling a sacred office that absolutely no one else can fill. The simplest gesture, the ephemeral moment, the commonest object all become precious beyond words when touched, noticed, lived by one’s own dear child. Just to watch a child at this work of exploring every detail of some perfectly ordinary physical object––this is an act of contemplation, which itself has a sanctifying effect upon the observer. After Heather has finished with a ball or a ribbon, I’ll often pick it up myself and try to see what she saw in it.
I’m reminded of the period after I first became a Christian, when the physical world took on an intense fascination for me. After all, I had new eyes with which to see it. Shapes, colors, textures, the simplest objects––a leaf, a cup, a raindrop––everything seemed to shine with a holy glow, as if somehow both brand-new and more ancient than the universe. If I’d been a painter I would have gone wild. But I didn’t go wild; instead the scales crept slowly back over my eyes until I was captured again by the shadowy mundane. Now I need a child to teach me once more how magical the world is, how everything that exists is charged with an overpowering enchantment, as if some very great artist had just moments before finished making it and departed from the room.
Mike Mason . . . We adults think young children require an enormous amount of energy and attention, but we feel this only because we ourselves have grown so fond of independence. Children charm us back into a proper balance of interdependence. While children pour their lives into ours without a thought, we grumble at having to return the favor. But children have it right: People thrive by lavishing attention upon one another. In other words, children expose our idols. Every time we think of a child as “interrupting” or “interfering with” our lives, it’s because we have erected an idol in the place where love alone ought to reign. Ironically, our idol may be some task we think we are performing for the sake of our children, only to find that we have exchanged the God of living relationships for an isolating god of our own devising. For me the beginning of childlike faith was when God became so big that I could no longer think complex theological thoughts about Him, but could only mumble and muse, stammer and sigh. I was learning the alphabet of praise.
Mike Mason . . . When I became a Christian, it was not by means of rational analysis but rather by falling on my knees and giving my life to Christ in an act that was beyond my comprehension. I did not choose Christ, He chose me. All I did was respond to His amazing call and presence. I was caught up in a story with a spellbinding hero. In that moment I relinquished control of my personal history and became a character in His story. I became a child once more, born again.
Mike Mason . . . One morning as I sat down for my quiet time, feeling dull and heavy, I was anticipating a long session of prayer in order to work my way out of this hole. I happened to be sitting beside a bookshelf filled with picture books of Heather’s, mostly ones we hadn’t read for a long time. On impulse I picked one off the shelf that I couldn’t remember seeing before. Entitled The Child’s Book of Psalms, it was a short selection of well-known psalm verses illustrated with simple line drawings.
It was a decidedly plain book, homely and unattractive. Why I was drawn to it I do not know. But as I opened it and began to read, something happened. Immediately my dull mood was transformed to one of lightness, wonder, joy and praise. The change was so sudden and sweeping that I knew beyond question it was the Lord’s hand alone and no virtue of mine that had rescued me from the pit. The portions of Psalms quoted in the book were old standards that I knew well. Yet as I read these familiar verses, they leaped to life. The words seemed filled with tremendous goodness and pure light.
In a few moments that small book transformed my view of the Bible—and of the world. Not since I had first accepted Scripture as God’s Word had I experienced such a foundational shift in my understanding. Something like cobwebs fell from my eyes; layers of dust were swept from the coils of my brain. My twentieth-century skepticism collapsed like a house of cards, as if it were the quaintest and most absurd of antiquated sophistries. I felt like some new kind of being, a sort of amalgam of adult and child, having an adult’s consciousness but a child’s vivid senses, unquestioning trust, and limitless imagination.
If I had to pick one word to encapsulate this change, it would be wonder. Suddenly the Bible seemed a wondrous book full of marvelous words for banishing all evil. Suddenly the world it described was a shining, mystical world, the home not of malls and newspapers and automobiles but of angels, beautiful gardens, and rivers of living water. There were enemies, yes, and darkness and pitfalls, but so pure and radiant was the power in this book that every obstacle could be readily overcome with a word, with a song, or with some secret weapon.
Mike Mason . . . While many believers have regular experiences of spontaneous praise and wonder, how hard it is to express these in words! Is this because our wonder tends to be fleeting rather than an ingrained habit of soul? Why not live, as Rabbi Abraham Heschel exhorted, with an attitude of “radical amazement”? He wrote, “Awareness of the divine begins with wonder. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”
Sometimes I’ll look at a tree, or at a cloud or a stream, and I’ll think, “This is enough. If nothing else happened in my life except that I saw this one beautiful thing, still I would be compelled to fall on my face in worship of my awesome Creator. Just to have seen this, just to know this one moment, is far beyond anything I could have dreamed.”
Mike Mason . . . The psalms, if we let them, have the capacity to restore us to a world of wonders, to the first blush of our original love affair with life and its Maker. Just to be alive for one day on this planet is already to be as rich and lucky and loved as it is possible to be, and everything is more mysterious and wonderful than anyone can say or even think.
Mike Mason . . . Christianity is no religion for pompous adults. It is a children’s faith, a faith of children, by children, for children. Hang out with kids and stop taking yourself so seriously. Let children into your heart—let them disrupt your schedule, mess up your house, tussle your hair, transform your life beyond recognition—and you’ll find yourself enjoying life more and filling up with love for all people.