The innocent outlook of childhood
It is a pleasant feeling to stay inside one’s head, enjoying the brilliant thoughts and balanced logic there. But it is sometimes a trap. The mind—overly enamored of beauty within—may design cloud-castles that cannot survive transfer to the real world. To avoid this, we need to do a reality check.
Unfortunately, our perceptions of reality—life as it goes on outside of us—may be distorted. Our fevered brain or frenzied heart may cause us to misinterpret what our eyes tell us.
How can we guard against this danger? First of all, we need to quiet our brain and our heart. We must learn to see life outside us with an innocent eye, not a jaundiced or covetous one. That is to say, we should view each person or thing that comes before us with respect and reverence and, perhaps, with wonder and awe.
It’s not an easy task to contemplate things in this manner—a blade of grass, a drop of water, a sunset; a street person, a person who is drunk, an Alzheimer patient; a cracked and crumbling wall, a torn spider web.
An oil slick on a mud puddle seems ugly, an occasion for getting clothes splashed and dirty. A small child crouches carefully down, however, entranced by the momentary glimmer of a swirl of color, then says excitedly, “Oh, Mama! Come see the beautiful rainbow!”
We have to work at seeing life this way to regain the innocent outlook of childhood where all things are new and fascinating and worth our attention, worth taking the time to really look at.
An innocent eye allows us to see a thing as though it had just come from the hand of God. We see that it has its own existence, separate from ours. We treasure it for being what it is. We do not force it to be subservient to our ego or greed, nor project on it our moods and feelings. We let it be what it is, as it is.
Ego-driven persons look for things to enhance their prestige and increase their fame. They are indifferent to wisdom or beauty or truth existing outside themselves. Greed-driven persons seek things to satisfy their pleasures and lusts. Goodness—in and of itself—has no value for them. Only what is good “for me “is worth their attention.
Sentiment-driven persons search for things to act as a dumping ground for their feelings and ideas. Fearful of being different from others, of being alone and isolated, they invest the other with their own exaggerated responses to life so that they are assured of comfort and safety in alike-minded environment. They do not like a person—or even an inanimate object!—to have its own sentiments.
Having sentiments is normal. It’s a healthy response to being alive. Being sentimental is unhealthy, an over valuing of ideas and feelings. Those afflicted with this condition confuse the innate aloneness we all experience(due to our uniqueness and individuality) with an abiding sense of loneliness.
In many ways, they are lonely people, in spite of all their efforts to share. They have not yet become their own person, and what could be more lonely than that? They lack a sense of autonomy—or are terribly uncomfortable with it—and so they are equally reluctant to honor it in others.
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Silent Reverence
Children, however—and adults of childlike heart—are quite different in the way they view life. They feel themselves to be their own person in some way and are not unduly ego-driven or greed-driven. They take time to stand before each and every thing that comes before their eyes. They contemplate it in silence, let it speak to them in its own way, on its own terms. They reverence its being, its existence, its autonomy—its “personhood” so to speak.
An irreverent person, as Dietrich von Hildebrand has written, does not remain “inwardly silent. He never gives situations, things, and persons a chance to unfold themselves in their proper character and value. He approaches everything in such an importunate and tactless way that he observes only himself, listens only to himself, and ignores the rest of being. He does not preserve a reverent distance from the world.”
This idea of “reverent distance” is a psychic halfway point, where an object is not so far away that it is blurred or its existence forgotten, but not so close that it’s absorbed by a voracious viewer and loses its autonomy. It’s somewhere in-between, in a middle distance that has a magical, magnetic quality about it.
The object is close enough to be seen clearly and sharply, yet far enough away (and sufficiently autonomous) to draw people out of themselves. By their continual contemplation of the object, they enlarge their sense of being.
At the turn of the century, Lafcadio Hearn—a teacher of creative writing at the University of Tokyo—told his Japanese students that everything had a face. “Either you like the face, or you dislike it, or it leaves in you a state of comparative indifference. We all know this in regard to faces; but only the artist and poet know it in regard to things. … A tree, a mountain, a house, even a stone has a face and character for the artistic eye. And we can train ourselves to see that character. …”
Hearn told his students they must learn to be childlike. “The child is incomparably superior to the average man in seeing the character of things, and the artist sees like a child.
“If I were to ask 20 children(say, five or six years old) to look at the same tree and to tell me what they think of it, I’m sure many of them would say wonderful things. They’d come much nearer to the truth than the average university student, and this, just because of their absolute innocence.
“We don’t see properly, said Hearn, because “education usually teaches us to use the ideas and language of other people to describe our own feelings. And this habit is exactly contrary to every principle of art.”
Hearn wanted his students to see for themselves and to describe what they saw in their own words. One who can keep “the freshness of the child in his mind and heart—notwithstanding all the knowledge that he absorbs—that is the person who is likely to perform great things in literature.”
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Go Forth Each Day
In a similar vein, Walt Whitman wrote: There was a child went forth every day, and the first object he look’d upon, that object he became; and that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
Note the double absorption. He became it; only then did it become part of him. (And only for part of a time.)A childlike wonder and awe at really seeing a thing lies in letting ourself be drawn outside of our own being, to “become it” for a while. Not to worry about our prestige or pleasures or safety or moods or fears or loneliness. Just to become it and let its character unfold in us.
Jesus speaks of those who have eyes but see not, have ears but hear not. And he says, Unless you become as little children, you cannot enter the kingdom.
Artists, scientists, saints, children—those who possess an innocent eye can take away our blindness to life.
Photo by ©Mark Olszewski, Madonna House
