The often overlooked wisdom of children

Recently a dear mentor shared some stories of her current work exploring how the particular gifts of children’s sense of the spiritual world might inform a sustainable response to the climate crisis (specifically, the innate ability of children to empathize with non-human aspects of creation). In the days following our conversation, I found myself pondering what other qualities of children might hold overlooked wisdom we adults could apply to the broken aspects of our world.

This pondering has shaped much of my experience of Lent, this season that so articulates and illuminates what is broken in Creation. This year I’ve found myself thinking about brokenness, sin, and repentance in the context of being an American-citizen-Episcopal-priest-queer-woman-millennial in an (already fraught) election year. As I listen to the discourse surging around me, I’ve become ever more convinced that humanity’s increasing polarization is our biggest sin, the way that we are the most far from God. As I’ve contemplated this, I realized that the children I serve offer a unique and much needed response to polarization and its consequences: the joy and necessity of interdependence.

American society doesn’t typically value interdependence, emphasizing instead the importance of autonomy and self-sufficiency. From a young age we are encouraged to look out for ourselves rather than prioritizing the common good. Our society’s emphasis on the power of the individual (exemplified in the myriad self-help books, programs, and shows) turns us inward in our search for meaning rather than looking to community as we seek to understand ourselves and the world. Our national holiday is literally called Independence Day; that may seem glib, but I truly believe that the American thirst for liberty and posterity has been engrained in our DNA before the Revolution began. We are independent individuals before anything else.

Children, though, manifestly are not independent—and what’s more, they revel in needing: needing their parents, needing a meal to be served to them, needing friendship, needing stimulation and play. Children have not yet learned to turn to themselves for help because they literally cannot help themselves in certain ways. What’s more, children’s dependence allows them to see the ways that others (adults and kids alike) also need help, and they are fabulously nonchalant about creating opportunities to help others and to be cared for in return. I suspect that children, more than anyone else in the church that I serve, truly understand Paul’s idea of the body of Christ. Paul says,

“For the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would be the sense of hearing? If the whole body were an ear, where would be the sense of smell?”
—1 Corinthians 12:14-17

The wisdom of children allows them to see their limitedness—the way that they are an ear and therefore cannot be an elbow—as something to rejoice in. Where an adult who has been socialized to the individuality of secular society may take Paul’s passage as a commentary on what is lacking in themselves, children somehow are able to see—through the grace of God, through the holy wisdom they brought into the world—that only together can we fully experience the good that God is bringing about. They understand that we cannot see it alone.

This Lent I am aware of the ways our tender society is broken, but I am also becoming aware of the bright spots of possibility where God is preparing for restoration, resurrection, and new life. Most of all, I believe more than ever that this restoration will only happen if we join God in the work, together, this whole one body made up of so many disparate, complementary, needy, beautiful parts.