TRULY, I SAY TO YOU, UNLESS YOU TURN AND BECOME LIKE CHILDREN, YOU WILL NEVER ENTER THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN. —MATTHEW 18:3
The first quality that strikes one when one looks into the eyes of a child is its innocence: its lovely inability to lie or wear a mask or pretend to be anything other than what it is. In this the child is exactly like the rest of Nature. A dog is a dog; a rose, a rose; a star, a star; everything is quite simply what it is. Only the adult human being is able to be one thing and pretend to be another.
When grown-ups punish a child for telling the truth, for revealing what it thinks and feels, the child learns to dissemble and its innocence is destroyed. Soon it will join the ranks of the numberless people who say helplessly, “I do not know who I am,” for, having hidden the truth about themselves for so long from others, they end up by hiding it from themselves.
How much of the innocence of childhood do you still retain, is there anyone today in whose presence you can be simply and totally yourself, as nakedly open and innocent as a child?
There is another more subtle way in which the innocence of childhood is lost: when the child is infected by the desire to become somebody.
Contemplate the crowds of people who are striving might and main to become, not what Nature intended them to be—musicians, cooks, mechanics, carpenters, gardeners, inventors— but somebody: to become successful, famous, powerful; to become something that will bring, not quiet self-fulfillment, but self- glorification, self-expansion.
You are looking at people who have lost their innocence because they have chosen not to be themselves but to promote themselves, to show off, even if it be only in their own eyes.
Look at your daily life. Is there a single thought, word or action untainted by the desire to become somebody, even if all you seek to become is a spiritual success or a saint unknown to anyone except yourself?
The child, like the innocent animal, surrenders to its nature to be and become quite simply what it is.
Adults who have preserved their innocence also surrender like the child to the impulse of Nature or Destiny without a thought to become somebody or to impress others; but, unlike the child, they rely, not on instinct, but on ceaseless awareness of everything in them and around them; that awareness shields them from evil and brings about the growth that was intended for them by Nature, not designed by their ambitious egos.
Adapted from Anthony De Mello,
The Way to Love: The Last Meditations of Anthony De Mello
