They do not force their lessons on us, so we often fail to learn from them.
These days, couples who have decided against having children are often strikingly can did about it. We may be shocked at the casual way they measure the value of children against winter sports, trips to Europe, and careers.
It was the moment it dawned on our three-year-old that everybody dies that put the matter into perspective for me. An old friend had died suddenly, and Beth had been told about Ollie Mae going to heaven. For a few weeks Beth could be heard praying out loud, “God I love you and please don’t die me until I’m very old.” Once at the dinner table she blurted out, “I don’t want to go to heaven; I just want to stay in this world with you and Mommy forever.” In moments like those it comes home to you what you’ve brought into the world: a soul like yourself, caring infinitely for life, categorically hating the idea of not existing—a being absolutely not to be compared with ski trips and flexibility of schedule and career continuity.
Children signal a change in your life from which you will never wholly recover. Initially it is a change from being footloose to being able to go out only rarely—and only then with the hassles of finding a decent baby sitter, and of having your “free” time at home reduced to that evasive hiatus between the moment you get the last child cajoled, pajamaed, peed, tucked in, storied, kissed, watered, and prayed with, and the time, 45 minutes later, when you flop exhausted on your bed and sink into that similitude of death from which you will not rise until the wails from the crib commence at about 2 A.M. Yes, if you’ve been used to spur-of-the-moment outings for pizza, visits with friends, and trips to the hardware store, there is no doubt that having children represents a radical change in your life.
In one degree or another, this change is both inevitable and obvious to everybody. But there is another kind of change that children can bring on—not inevitable, and not so obvious. It is a kind of spiritual growth that, if it occurs (and it doesn’t always occur), is a blessed by-product of parenthood, a debt of deepened humanity that parents owe to God for the privilege of being given children to rear.
Jesus dares to commend to us the lilies of the field and the birds of the air as spiritual teachers. They are there, for those who have eyes to see, as reminders of truths that often evade us. Like the lilies and birds, children do not force their lessons on us; witness the fact that so many of us fail to learn from them. And yet they are not like books of wisdom that sit silently on the shelf waiting—maybe for years and then finally in vain—for us to open them. Nor are they like lilies that present themselves only at one season of the year and then perhaps only if we go out for a walk. Having children in your house is like having books that climb down off the shelves, jump into your lap, and demand to be read daily, nay hourly and by the minute. It is like having lilies and birds that sit at your table and interrogate you year-round about your soul.
The avoidance of children, so greatly facilitated by birth control, abortion, and day-care centers, is not the unmixed blessing that some take it to be. Indeed, as a basic outlook and policy, it is a deathly curse. Some couples, after falling into spiritual laxity, have scurried back into the bosom of the church upon the wife’s pregnancy. Children enhance our sense of vulnerability, and so may incline us toward greater dependence on God. Knowing that in our children our stake in the well-being of this planet extends beyond the years of our own life may provoke a greater sense of responsibility about the environment. And of course, child rearing is an excellent school—even better than Harvard—for learning the virtues of patience and self-control. But right now I want to dwell on just three of the countless ways the presence of children among us can be a force for deepening our spirituality, transforming our vision, and fitting our hearts for God’s kingdom. Children can remind us of the fundamental importance of love, of our kinship with every human being, and of our need for eternity.
One reason we flee the company of children is the pursuit of achievement—the doing of business, the building of careers—in short, “becoming something in this world.” If you let children become a serious part of your life, they will inevitably “slow you down.” But as Christians we know that this pursuit is at best secondary and at worst the formula for loss of selfhood. The apostle Paul, thinking of church-related powers and achievements, even some enormously heroic ones, warns against their emptiness:
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing” (1 Cor. 13:1–3).
If spiritual emptiness and loss of self are possible for the most eloquent evangelists and preachers of the gospel, and for Christian prophets and miracle workers and martyrs, how much more for people who give themselves without reservation to money making, intellectual brilliance, medical and political careers, fame, and influence? And being a Christian business person or politician is no guarantee against the danger. As Paul makes abundantly clear, even if these things are done in a Christian context and for Christian goals, the danger remains that in God’s eyes, they may amount to absolutely nothing.
If you live with a three-year-old, it is more difficult to fall into thinking of life as the pursuit of one or another achievement. A three-year-old does not judge her worth by her achievements or by her parents’ achievements; she judges this fundamentally by whether she is cherished. This is what she “demands,” what her unenculturated nature wants from life. When her daddy looks into her eyes, centers down into her presence and converses with her, his achievement mentality fades into the background, and life is focused in something more like the perspective of God. In the presence of this child, who so simply desires to be cherished, the daddy whose heart meets her need momentarily becomes “something”—the opposite of the “nothing” to which the apostle refers.
Of course, your humanity can be achieved without children; you might, for example, try loving your neighbor. But my point is that children are an especially compelling object of love. Despite the resistance we sometimes put up, there is something natural to us about loving children. And so they become a primary focus of our humanity in a world where there is so little of it. Our homes, where our children dwell, are like oases and special schools in which love is learned, love for its own sake, from which, with effort, we can go out into the world and see it more humanly.
We are sometimes told that Christian love is not a matter of liking people; after all, we are called upon to love “neighbors” with whom we have no natural ties of affection, and even enemies. And so we get a picture of Christian love as a kind of gritting our teeth and doing our cold duty toward people who mean nothing, or less than nothing, to us. You are supposed to love without having your heart in it, and if you care too much about people, there is even the suspicion that your love is not genuinely Christian. But this picture is false to the New Testament. Jesus is said to have had compassion on a mixed crowd (Mark 6:34) and on a presumably unknown leper who came to him (Mark 1:41). His demeanor toward people is in general not that of a man doing his cold duty, but one of affection. And the apostle tells us to be “tenderhearted” to one another (Eph. 4:32).
There are few places in life where being tenderhearted is as naturally powerful in us as in our role as parents. The psalmist, wanting to describe God’s compassion for his people, chooses the familial image: “As a father pities his children …” (Ps. 103:13). In the New Testament there is no writing that more exudes tenderheartedness than the First Letter of John. It is infused with the affection this old man feels for his disciples. Nor is it an accident that he repeatedly addresses them as “my children.” It is as though John’s family life has given him a way of “seeing,” an emotional matrix through which to perceive his friends. We take a natural joy in the well-being of our children, and a natural sorrow in their troubles. Here, if anywhere in life, we feel that organic connection with other human beings that means that we suffer when they suffer and rejoice when they rejoice (1 Cor. 12:26).
These facts suggest a spiritual exercise. Let us say that you come in contact with a morally disreputable person, a selfish, calloused, militaristic, and deceitful person—you who are a parent. He is not one toward whom you are naturally disposed to be “tenderhearted,” but in Christ you are called to love him. And this means, in part, to be tenderhearted toward him. The exercise is this. Contemplate him (that is, look at him, listen to him, or just think about him) with your child’s help. Thinking of your own child, remember that this man was once a child, one who desired above all else acceptance, security, warmth of affection. Look at him now, but picture him as the age of your own little one.
In doing so, you will see through the calluses to that central core of personality around which so much thorny growth has accumulated. You will see beyond the cruelty and ruthless ambition to the essential human passion of which it is so ugly a perversion—the passion for acceptance and love, for an identity of his own. A certain tenderheartedness—of your human kinship with even this person—will supervene upon you when you remember where this man has come from: he has come from a childhood, in essential ways like the one in which your little boy is now sojourning. As Franz Kafka put it, “A man’s embittered features are often only the petrified bewilderment of a boy.”
This past Christmas we took our annual trip to Wichita to visit my parents. My 78-year-old father renewed his acquaintance with my one-year-old daughter. The human distance between these two close relatives was, of course, striking: the fresh, soft-skinned young one, plump as a transparent grape, just starting out in life; and my father, the raisin, with so many years behind him—“many years” by a certain myopic human way of reckoning things, that is. In a short time (as the history of the world goes), my little daughter will herself be an old woman, bouncing a beaming baby upon her knee.
“A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains for ever” (Eccl. 1:4).
With our modern machines of war we are less certain than the Preacher that the Earth will remain “forever.” But that the generations pass away—of that there is no doubt. And the coming of the new generation, those little bunk dwellers and Hot Wheels riders who soon will take our place as the “productive members of society,” remind us of our own passing, and also of theirs. In reminding us, they also make the fact more poignant by the beauty of their enthusiasm, their heedless zeal for life, their astonishing aptitude for wisdom and folly, their sheer lovability. Indeed, to love children is to love life, not like an egoist who cringes in the face of his own annihilation, but like a connoisseur who appreciates the treasure for its intrinsic worth. And so, finally, children can help us learn a right appreciation for the gospel of Jesus Christ, the message of redemption and eternal life. Without that message the beauty of children would compel another conclusion:
“All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.… I have seen everything that is done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a striving after wind” (Eccl. 1:8, 14).
Clinging to Christ we are not forced, in beholding the unutterable value of life, to conclude that all is vanity, and that creation—at least from our point of view—is a colossal bad joke. In him the delectable goodness of human life, so vividly exampled in our children, becomes something in which we can take joy without reservation.
