A Child of God

A friend wrote to me yesterday something along these lines:  "______keeps telling me that I am a child of God.  When will I be an adult of God?"

And my immediate answer was, "O no, baby; you don't want to be an adult of God.  The entire bible is our human story from the delight of Paradise to adulthood (the Tree of Knowledge, or Experience, of Good and Evil), and the painful journey back to paradise as a "child of God."

The problem for most of us is that we get stuck along the way in our "adulthood" and can never find our way back into the kingdom of heaven that belongs to the children in us. 

Let me approach this through the realm of psychology, which studies our "inner man:"

The two-year-old comes bursting into the world of signs [meaning] like a child on Christmas morning.  There are goodies everywhere.  For him, signifying the signified is like unwrapping a git.

[Note:  I am taking all of this from Walker Percy's Lost in the Cosmos, a book which studies man as "the only creature which is ashamed of itself and which seeks cover in a myriad of disguises...the only organism which tells lies."  The problem with Percy's book, fascinating as it is, is that one needs to study it with a kind of "second language," known only to linguists and "semioticists."]

Anyway, Percy and the semioticists -- the people who study "language as signs of meaning" are studying the development of the child as a pattern laid out in Genesis 2-4 or 5, with the story of Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and beyond.  Again, it is a fascinating study:  The story of Adam in Paradise is that of the two-year old, discovering and naming his world with utter delight -- light,
 tiger, baby, etc.  When we read to children, we say, "What does the tiger say?"  We are helping the child discover and "name" his world.  What a joy!  We can all remember the utter joy of Helen Keller when she discovered that water had a name and that she could name it.  Wow!  That discovery opened to her the world of signs (language) and of meaning.  After that, she was no stranger to her world; she could "name" it and "own" it. 

What about the four-year-old?  By now, he should be a sovereign and native resident of his world, concelebrant with his family, at home in Eden....The typical four-year-old tends to be rather a joy.  His enthusiasm, his exuberance, his willingness to go more than halfway to meet others in a spirit of fun are all extremely refreshing...He is basically highly positive, enthusiastic, appreciative.  This makes him fun to be with, an engaging, amusing, ever-challenging friend.  You have to be on your toes to keep up with spirited, fanciful, four, but at least you have an even chance of success...With other children, things as a rule go rather well.  Fours enjoy each other; they appreciate the challenge that other children offer.  This is an age at which children interest and admire each other most....(Louise Bates Ames et al., The Gesell Institute's Child from One to Six (New York: Harper and row, 1979)

Here is the point in the story of Genesis where Adam moves from naming and claiming his world for himself to where he meets Eve, the "other," his partner with whom he will share his known world.  He has discovered that naming and claiming the world is not enough; he is lonely.  He needs another's eyes to see the world he knows, and he needs to see the world through her eyes.  He needs to look into her eyes and see the world within her.  He needs more than the physical world; he needs the world of spirit, of connectiveness -- that is what he is made for. 

The four year old is a concelebrant of the world and even of his own peers.

The seven-year-old?  Something has happened in the interval.
More aware of and withdrawn into the self...seems to be in "another world."....self-conscious about his own body.  Sensitive about exposing body.  does not like to be touched...modest about toileting...protects self by withdrawal.  May be unwilling to expose knowledge, for fear of being laughed at or criticized...apt to expect too much of self (Arnold Gesell and Frances Ilg: The Child From Five to Ten (New York: Harper and Row, 1946). 

Now we are up to Adam and Eve no longer as concelebrants and sharers of Paradise, but as ashamed, covering themselves and hiding from one another and from God.  Paradise is no longer a shared world, where God and Man enjoy being together, but a place of alienation, of separate worlds that cannot be bridged.  The rest of the bible is our story of the journey back to Paradise.

When we read Scripture, we tend to focus on "what happened."  The Hebrew writers knew that "what happened" translates into "what happens."  All literature, including the Bible, portrays universal human experience and does not go out of date.  In the bible, we see ourselves in the characters, who become paradigms of the human condition.  So the bible communicates by indirectness, by example rather than by precept.  The result is memorability, affective power, and truthfulness to lived experience.  This places a greater emphasis on the reader's ability to be receptive to human experience and meaning.

The ultimate question here is, "Do we want to be stuck eating from the Tree of [our] Experience (Knowledge) of Good and Evil," or do we want to return to Paradise as (now knowledgable, but wiser) concelebrants of God, one another, and the world around us?  As long as we are determined to cover ourselves with fig leaves and blame one another for our own failures, we will remain cast out of Paradise, as "adults" in an alien world.  Can we recover our precious four-year-old selves, dancing and singing before God:  Ah! At last! This is bone of my bone, and flesh of my flesh, and we are one!