Let the Little Children Come to Me

The Promise of Spiritual Childhood

When the teenage girl Marie Francoise-Thérèse Martin became a nun in the Carmelite monastery in Lisieux, France, she took the name “Thérèse of the Child Jesus.” As I’ve written about, the French saint the world knows today as Thérèse of Lisieux suffered greatly as a child, struck by both illness and the grief of her mother’s early death. Why did she show such devotion to the infant Jesus that she would develop a “little way” to God of spiritual childhood? And what does “spiritual childhood” mean, anyway?  

I did not have a very happy childhood. My younger years are full of memories of carefree summer days spent playing basketball on the cracked concrete of the Maple Rapids, Michigan court or exploring expansive fields at the Kresge farm. By the time my teenage years arrived, though, I sank into a depression that lasted, unabated, for ten years. The reasons for my ensnarement by the noonday demon are complex, more than I’m ready to write about. It took the combination of therapy, medication, and alternative healing modalities to pave the way for a joyful life carved out of my pain.

That experience of feeling utterly alone has never left me. Strangely enough, though, even in my aloneness, I knew that I was not alone. Waves of doubt crashed through me as I surfed the deconstruction of my childhood beliefs—but through despair, I knew that a great and universal Love surrounded me. I can’t explain how I knew this. I just knew, and I held onto that knowledge for dear life. I also read and prayed with Bible verses that promised initiation into that deeper Love that I knew had not abandoned me, even as I felt abandoned. I’ve known many people who suffered depression and did not experience such paradoxical certitude. It’s a gift that I’ve received in hindsight, but in the moment, it was only a hideous and hard grace. I would’ve happily traded in such a spiritual sense for the touchstones of youth like a girlfriend or friends that did not bully.

There are several Bible verses that I recited in those years with a child’s desperate plea. I longed to be welcomed as a child of God and to call God my loving parent. The apostle Paul wrote, “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God…You received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba, Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God” (Romans 8:14­­-16). I hoped it could be true that God would call me child. I dreamed that I could nestle up to God as a tender Father, instead of fleeing a Divine Dictator’s wrath.

Perhaps Thérèse’s tragic childhood buckled her knees to pray to the Divine Parent as a vulnerable child. I wouldn’t call my childhood tragic, but my knees still buckled. As I’ve been writing about during Lent, the vulnerability of Thérèse’s “little way” is the vulnerability of a child completely dependent on grace, who knows she is not in control and who has surrendered to Love’s power. And isn’t that both the place we most want to be while at the same time the place we most fear?

Photo by MI PHAM on Unsplash

In Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s gospel, Jesus tells his kid-avoidant disciples to “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it” (Luke 18:15–17). Jesus firmly welcomes children, but this is more than a command to create kid-friendly churches (which Christians have a hard enough time doing). Jesus holds up kids as model exemplars of what it means to be a disciple and to enter God’s realm of Love—and in front of the adult disciples, no less! The kids are the ones who get it, and the way I read the verse is that their entry into the realm of Divine Love has everything to do with receiving it. They know that there is nothing they can do to earn, bribe, win or otherwise achieve their way into the realm of God. They haven’t yet traded in the humility of childhood dependency for the adult illusion of self-sufficiency.

Jesus insists upon a status reversal. Children were not valued in the ancient Greco-Roman world. They did not have a positive identity in themselves; they were simply “not adults,” as biblical scholar Joel B. Green puts it. Given the staggeringly high infant mortality rate (28%, according to this book), childhood became “liminal, vulnerable, dependent, and in some ways skirting the boundaries of human existence.” Unlike the rich man Jesus sends away as a failed follower in the passage immediately following this one (Luke 18:18–30), Jesus welcomes the children who have nothing and of whom nothing is expected.

I experience the welcome to receive Love like a little child as a relieving posture for prayer. But it’s more than that. It’s an invitation to an identity that my soul knows is true. The child is both exemplar and archetype, a stirring glimpse of what can be, especially for those with traumatic or otherwise stunted childhoods. Carl Jung wrote about the child image as a universal archetype of wholeness that somehow holds our dreams for the future. Thérèse wrapped herself in her monastic name “of the Child Jesus,” devoting herself to the child Jesus while embracing the little way of a child herself. When I groaned in desperation with the words of the apostle Paul, I prayed for the possibility of healing intimacy that I imagined a divinely adopted son could enjoy. Adopted child became the promise of who I am in God. Even with depression’s cloudy force bearing down, I knew it was only a gift I could receive.  

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