Become as Children

"Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven." -- Matthew 18:3 (NASB, emphasis mine)

A man with the entire history of the ideas of philosophy incarnated on his actually infinite bookshelf without the gospels could never, in all his extraction from such texts, arrive at the shocking and eternally beautiful maxim Jesus holds: become as children. Children! If anything the world would force a conclusion that is the exact opposite: seek wealth, influence over others, power! Or the notorious barbaric stupidity accepted so innocently from once-innocent youths from their fathers: be a man! That is, throw your life to shit but be accepted doing it: that's all that counts. Be a man truly means be for others, which means: you are too unmanly, too unwilling to be a human being, to be yourself, for you cannot be a human being without being the being you are designed to be. Be a man means: be anything but a man; take the path of simplicity, never assert yourself in such a way that demands the pain necessary for sustaining your personality. Be a man: augment the physical, grow mad muscles, always waver between a stage of soberness and inebriation -- an existence that is actually better understood as being-towards-inebriation. Be a man, where everything is for the sake of "the weekend", "the sports game", "getting lucky", the dehumanization of women, the negation of pure relation with others, the perversion and instrumentation of the entire beautiful world, addiction, attachment, bondage, misery, frustration, death, despair, despair, despair! Be a man! Kill yourself!

Become as children! I have in mind the illuminating age of three to five, where the world bursts with mystery, where all things resonate with exuberance and newness, where life itself is almost exhausted by the inexhaustible curiosity of the child and its careless extraction of all the goodness the world itself holds. At approximately seven the greatest tragedy unfolds itself in the very midst of the garden of Eden: hyper-selfconsciousness blooms on the scene, and the seedlings of the adult makes itself known. Aware of itself, the child loses itself in the infinite negation of negative inwardness. The realization is a conflagration of fear and anxiety, and anxiety, being based in possibility -- the possibility involved with freedom -- proves that the grand gift of freedom necessarily has a tormenting birth. Nonetheless anxiety has a basis: future action; the torment of what you could be called to do for any situation. The sting of anxiety is the realization that anything at all could happen. Fear, healthy in itself (that intuitive instinct that serves in the bloodstream of the prudent like a light unto their feet), becomes intensified through anxiety: one fears not a particular object, a stimulus, but the possibility of an object, a stimulus, as yet unknown. Only until this child, now clothed in the destitution of its own overflowing self-consciousness, gains salvation -- relatively or absolutely, that is, religiously -- does this disease continue to thrive. Salvation -- that is, willing the singular, the good. "Purity of heart is to will one thing," free-floated the words of of that dexterous-minded Dane, Kierkegaard. Salvation is the commitment to this singularity, and more: the attachment of oneself to it as the greatest hope for oneself. The heavenly hope, born not of this world, based not on necessity and contingency -- the methods that this world espouses --, but between man and God, particular for each and every man, found in the Eternal consciousness of man, the revelation of this command, this law (as Emerson called it), and the continual existential recollection of it -- that is the quintessential cure for superfluous anxiety (and not all anxiety is superfluous), the beast whose fuel is a concern for the world around it, and a holding of value in something that can be lost in it, be it something physical, material, or more abstract, such as money, or, perhaps the most popular of all: reputation. Reputation is an implicit deal with appearance, and appearance is the meat that the world feeds on. But the child! He knows no value in money, least of all reputation! He has no value for looking good, fitting in, conformity. Its own body is valuable insofar as the immediacy of negative stimuli are concerned -- keep away from what hurts. If the world would only keep to this, the rest of life would come breaking towards it with such enthusiasm that strength would be born simply in pushing against this glorious tide.

More: the child knows how to hold on to each moment, consume its experiences, digest them, let them go, and move on. It holds no grudges, do not transfer whatever fears you experience into memory, thus translating them to, again, anxiety. The world is blown away in the unbroken cycle of anxiety: that great precendent to incredible choices has swallowed the weaker constitutions of the world -- and how many there are! -- thus the primary secular salvation is found in formulating methods by which to escape from it! But children! They experience it in its appropriate context and are not clogged with the unending pessimism involved with looking ahead to anxious situations -- thus creating anxiety at that moment! Their anxiety has a season.

What else? Trust. Trust implies a half-consciousness of that which provides in the mode of the provider. The babe that trusts its father is less aware of the father as a provider than as a father himself. Trust is always inferior to the stream of love, for it is born of love. It also entails a continual choice in relation to the one trusted, thus making the antithesis to trust (sin) possible. Children also make choices, and what paragonal choice-makers they are! What shame they put adults to, these anxious prattlers, despairing shadow-selves, quick to hit any form of insulation to save them from actualizing themselves in this world. Children know their contexts; they accept their misakes, their rebellions, their excellencies, and, once again, move on. They hold true a parental version of Luther's oft-misunderstood statement: love God and sin boldly! For the child: love those you have trust in, and break from this trust boldly! Their audacity is the only thing that makes them capable of being punished sufficiently, thus refined sufficiently. Even adults have no power to authentically, defiantly sin against those in whom they place their trust, God or man. Caught up in the stop of resentment and the envy and cowardice inherent to it, they speak in whispers, behind the backs of those perceived as culprits, and never learn to forget what has been done to them. Unlike children! Do children even have a concept of resentment? A boy is more likely to punch another boy in the arm than hold ill-defined feelings for him past his bed-time -- feelings that would only swarm until resentment is full-blown. Child, you have sinned boldly, and now you can taste the purifying though bitter waters of punishment, and learn to purge the devils that chase you. An adult -- ah, he doesn't even have devils; like his very self, he drags with him demon shades, whose voices speak as softly as he does. He can find no momentary superficial freedom in going through with these thin little demons, but instead: the everlasting hell of contempt that has no legs to stand for itself and finish the situation now fulminating in the bedraggled walls of his mind. That is the hell of resentment.

Trust, that is: let go of the world, for you believe that someone else holds it for you. The state of affairs is such that even if one confesses himself to be a Christian there is no palpable conviction of a divine providence watching over the world. Christians push it off to the after-life, where punishments will be handled so-called accordingly, meanwhile anyone with a dying voice of justice breaks through a rainbow of colors on his countenance in view of the injustices that clutter the world today. What does a child do? He may be exasperated at his seen unfairness, but if he is in the right company, he looks to his father, and even if the father apparently does nothing the child still has comfort in the perceived power of the father to keep things in line so that child -- doesn't have to. For power is implied in repose just as much as it is in actualizing itself. A king has power without commanding a single subject, just as much as the king who moves armies to conquer.

How insightful it was for that neglected existential-psychoanalyst Leslie Farber to speak of the loss in the belief in a divine will that keeps this world in sufficient condition for those who believe in Him, and how the prevalent loss of belief in this will can result only in neurosis. This relates directly to trust; faith is trust. To have faith in God is to trust Him, and without the feeling of an overseeing will that relates to the world and holds it together, the self will naturally strive to hold it together himself. Pure, concentrated madness. And this is where the person who follows through with this mode ends up -- in insanity. Think of the obsessive compulsive personalities. What is their psychosis based in? Bad neuro-transmitters? Well, yes, to a degree. But ideologically understood, the problem is based in -- a loss of trust: trust that the world will be alright without the assertion of one's will to make it alright. "Alright" here is meiotic for perfection, and perfection, it must be noted, is a relative state: bestness per moment, if you like. The fulfillment of potentialities; the greatest an entity or subject can be at any particular moment (thus the statement in the bible becomes possible, but horrifying: "Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect." -- Matthew 5:48). The person struck with OCD has no concept of perfection in this sense; perfection for him or her is an absolute goal, an impossible, unreachable, goal, not a higher dimension within time towards another (continually shifting) goal. The Christian goal is to will the good, and in willing it salvation (or living in truth) is the continual reward. When one mis-acts and fails (or better, refuses) to will the good, another chance is there in the next moment (repentence is the return to this wholeness through correct willing). That is ideally what is needed.

The child -- ah, endless fount of wisdom -- knows how to take the world unseriously, and in taking the world unseriously, it can take its own fun seriously. "A man's maturity," says Nietzsche, "consists in having found again the seriousness one has as a child, at play." Seriousness toward the world stems from a desire to gain something from it. Men go as far as to manipulate the world, and the people in it (thus dehumanizing them), in order to get what they want, and this oftentimes means getting the attention, the pure perception, the love, of others. And for a while they may have what they want, but always, always actuality falls short of the demand, the desire. Resignation is needed. Ah, resignation -- truly the hardest act a person can muster. Few do. It means an act of conscious forgetting, of throwing away for the fulfillment of the paradoxical demand of happiness: give that you might gain. It means supressing that which is bringing you down, freezing your consciousness on a single past even or idea or person -- letting them go. Children -- they have no need for resignation. They have no need to get ahead in the world, and forgetting comes naturally for them. Each problem dissolves with the hours that succeed them. The goal of resignation should be a conditioned capacity to forget easier. The child is here our master.

Thus it is: to be a Christian is to be as a child; not childish, but child-like. To be child-like is to essentially move on, digest one's experiences, greet the day and the stuttering souls within it without predispositions, without the paltriness of intersubjective quibbles, and thereby learn to love whatever one finds himself in front of. Aha, you may be thinking, children are not as ideal as you present them: they are selfish, complaining, starving for attention. Yes, but children know how to sin; the depravity of humanity magnified as it is in the adult reveals that not only has he no grasp of righteousness, no continuity in doing good, but also that he is clueless as to how to even properly sin, and that is: in the moment, and leave it behind. The child, as a paradigm for a spiritual state, would be a terrible paradigm if it had little to no relation to man's potentialities, to his dark sides, to sin when it presents itself. Blessed are you child, for you, like nature, are everywhere, and yet we have no yees to see the wisdom you have for us each and every day.

We are called to become as children! There is no greater sanctuary for paradox than Christianity. And there is no greater sanctuary for awe than paradox.