Innocence and children - Some thoughts I had watching some children during Mass
Anyone who thinks that children are "innocent" in the moral, let alone the theological, sense of the word, has never spent ten minutes in the company of a real live child; and, what is worse, does not remember, or refuses to remember, his/her own childhood. Certainly children do not have the idea of the depth and extent of evil, of the many ways temptation can seize on you, the vast dimension and background to every act of sin. But to say that children don't do wrong is blatantly wrong; and to say that they don't know it's wrong is nonsense. Children take up evil with the same mixture of concealment and defiance, with the same evasive arrogance, as adults do. When confronted, they either bluster, or attempt justifications, or both - just like adults. And it is only when these things are broken down that they accept their responsibility - just as adults do. And just like adults, they tend to forget the lesson after a while. It's not necessary to go as far as the murderers of James Bulger (although anyone who tries to tell me that they didn't know what they were doing is going to get a loud horselaugh in his/her face); any child who steals biscuits from the larder, who fakes his father's signature on a permission slip, or who deliberately hides stones in a snowball, knows perfectly well that whet s/he is doing is wrong and forbidden. The one thing they will not do is be surprised when someone charges them. The question in their minds was not whether what they were doing was wrong, but whether they would get away with it.
Nevertheless, the notion of innocence and our experience of children are indeed intimately connected. Only people associate them wrong. It is not their past that is innocent: it is their future. We adults, worn down as we are by our decades of effort, frequent failure, inevitable regret, and more or less admitted guilt, can't help but be warmed by the unbroken energy and enthusiasm of most children. Children are the wonderful gift made to the human race at large, to allow us to be renewed again and again, to have a new start with each new birth. It is the fact that they have not yet suffered what we have suffered, nor yet had to do what we found ourselves doing, that they have, in our eyes, that wonderful quality of innocence. And that innocence - that lack of the burden of an inevitably painful and often guilty past - that makes them such a pleasure and such a relief to be with. There are no complications with a child. In the rare cases where s/he instinctively does not like you, s/he lets it be known with no messing, and that is in a sense a relief from the difficulties of adult company, where (especially in England) you may be acquainted with someone for years before you find out that s/he dislikes you. And most of the time they just welcome you. It takes very little to make friends with a child. One little girl at Mass today smiled at me before I had so much as spoken a word to her, just because she saw that I was interested in her book (a "Children's Bible" with illustrations).
And our instinctive love for that innocence, that innocence of the future, imposes on us adults a frightful duty. We have a duty to that innocence; we can't, for shame, allow our children's future to be worse than ours has been, nor even as bad. We have, somehow, to guide our children to be better than we are.
Not just richer, better off, more prosperous. Every adult knows, in spite of all the obvious ironies and superficial responses that spring to mind, that in the depth of reality money can't buy anyone happiness. We certainly don't want our children to be poor; but if all we could offer them was material prosperity, we would have to realize that we have failed them. We have not given them a better life than we had; we have passed them the same burden of weariness, disappointment and guilt from which their innocence was such a relief. We want them - and here is the terrible thing - to be better human beings than we have been.
Is that even possible? I don't know. But I am reminded of something that happened to me. One moment in my childhood I remember very well is my mother teaching me to ride a bicycle without side wheels. I was six. She stood behind and near me, ready to catch me if I fell, until I had understood the mystery of balance, and, to my enormous surprise, was riding ahead, straight and fast.
It took me forty more years to find out that my mother had never learned to ride a bicycle herself. She had taught me something that she herself could not do.
Does that make me a better person than my mother? In a million ways, no. But it shows that what seems like an impossibility and an absurdity - teaching children to be better than we are - can, in some areas, really take place.
Nevertheless, the notion of innocence and our experience of children are indeed intimately connected. Only people associate them wrong. It is not their past that is innocent: it is their future. We adults, worn down as we are by our decades of effort, frequent failure, inevitable regret, and more or less admitted guilt, can't help but be warmed by the unbroken energy and enthusiasm of most children. Children are the wonderful gift made to the human race at large, to allow us to be renewed again and again, to have a new start with each new birth. It is the fact that they have not yet suffered what we have suffered, nor yet had to do what we found ourselves doing, that they have, in our eyes, that wonderful quality of innocence. And that innocence - that lack of the burden of an inevitably painful and often guilty past - that makes them such a pleasure and such a relief to be with. There are no complications with a child. In the rare cases where s/he instinctively does not like you, s/he lets it be known with no messing, and that is in a sense a relief from the difficulties of adult company, where (especially in England) you may be acquainted with someone for years before you find out that s/he dislikes you. And most of the time they just welcome you. It takes very little to make friends with a child. One little girl at Mass today smiled at me before I had so much as spoken a word to her, just because she saw that I was interested in her book (a "Children's Bible" with illustrations).
And our instinctive love for that innocence, that innocence of the future, imposes on us adults a frightful duty. We have a duty to that innocence; we can't, for shame, allow our children's future to be worse than ours has been, nor even as bad. We have, somehow, to guide our children to be better than we are.
Not just richer, better off, more prosperous. Every adult knows, in spite of all the obvious ironies and superficial responses that spring to mind, that in the depth of reality money can't buy anyone happiness. We certainly don't want our children to be poor; but if all we could offer them was material prosperity, we would have to realize that we have failed them. We have not given them a better life than we had; we have passed them the same burden of weariness, disappointment and guilt from which their innocence was such a relief. We want them - and here is the terrible thing - to be better human beings than we have been.
Is that even possible? I don't know. But I am reminded of something that happened to me. One moment in my childhood I remember very well is my mother teaching me to ride a bicycle without side wheels. I was six. She stood behind and near me, ready to catch me if I fell, until I had understood the mystery of balance, and, to my enormous surprise, was riding ahead, straight and fast.
It took me forty more years to find out that my mother had never learned to ride a bicycle herself. She had taught me something that she herself could not do.
Does that make me a better person than my mother? In a million ways, no. But it shows that what seems like an impossibility and an absurdity - teaching children to be better than we are - can, in some areas, really take place.