What Children Do

Children are not like adults…they have fun all the time. —Charles Péguy

Besides watching the Steelers score touchdowns, which does not happen all the time but certainly more frequently than a Kamala Harris press conference, the highlight of my weekend is building skyscrapers with my granddaughter. She will soon turn five, and while she has absolutely no architectural skill to speak of, neither do I, which is why it is such great fun—and wonderfully freeing—to put blocks together without having to follow a set of blueprints.

What she is really good at, however, and takes obvious pleasure in showing off her skill, is making me laugh. She did this the other day when she told me what her purpose in life was. “My job,” she said, “is to play. And I have to get back to work!”

This was said with a perfectly straight face, mind you, and ever since I’ve been sharing the news with others, including my students, a few of whom appear to be about five years old all the time.  

Not entirely a bad thing, I should add, if we are to take seriously the injunction Jesus gives us in Matthew 18:3: “I assure you, unless you change and become like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of God.” This is not an invitation for the adults in the room to set about infantilizing themselves, but to become rather like little children themselves. And how do they do that? By keeping their eyes wide open. “Reason is like an eye,” explains Luigi Giussani in his signature work, The Religious Sense, “staring at reality, greedily taking it in, recording its connections and implications, penetrating reality, moving from one thing to another yet conserving all of them in memory, trying to embrace everything.” 

Not so very different from the attitude of my granddaughter, by the way, whose eagerness to know everything is quite the most endearing thing about her. Nor is it alien to the attitude of Jesus Himself, who, when presented with a child in the street, welcomes the child at once, while admonishing His disciples not to get in the way, for “whoever receives one such child in my name receives me” (Matthew 18:5). Not to mention, receiving the One who first sent Him into the world—the Father. Why else would He have come if not to try and make children of us all? 

So, let us be as passionate as possible about reason, because without it we’re barely alive, barely even anthropoidal. Only with that opening of the eye, of remaining receptive to the reality that surrounds us, will we awaken to “the religious sense,” which is to ask over and over with fierce, childlike ardor, “What is the meaning of everything?” Not this or that thing, but everything. Why else have we been given the capacity to reason if not to satisfy its most basic need, which is to pursue and possess meaning? And isn’t that simply another way to say God, whose name bespeaks meaning, as in Logos, Word?  Only with that opening of the eye, of remaining receptive to the reality that surrounds us, will we awaken to “the religious sense,” which is to ask over and over with fierce, childlike ardor, “What is the meaning of everything?”Tweet This

Nor should we, for a single moment, forget that, as Giussani reminds us, “the very existence of the question implies the existence of an answer.” Why else would humans be hardwired to ask about God if there were no God? Or if the meaning of being were no more than a nothingburger? Who could endure a world no longer “charged with the grandeur God,” as the poet Hopkins exults, but electromagnetic waves instead? 

The fact that we are configured in such a way as to remain open to reality, transparent before everything, more than suggests that our primary task, before all else, is simply to look at all that is out there, and not to negate or preclude the evidence before our eyes. Do not reduce what Chesterton has called “the impossible things that are” to the status of sheer banality. But rather, in the blink of an eye, lay hold of the whole blooming universe, so as to both identify what is there and to make judgments about it. “I inquire in order to know something,” St. Augustine tells us, “not to think it.” 

Again, not so distant from the mindset of my granddaughter, who remains especially avid to know everything. Isn’t that why, like so many popcorn balls, they pelt us with questions all the time? Professors are no different, except that some of us actually do know, if not everything, at least a few things. And so when we come to class we pelt our students with questions. The other morning, for instance, I asked them which is preferable: to work or to play? To be busy or to do nothing? Labor or leisure? And because, thank God, enough of them are not too far from the halcyon days of their own childhood, they opted for a life of play. Endless, uninterrupted indolence, if you please. When they get prodigious enough in the exercise, who knows, they might even make time to pray.  

Or so Ludwig Wittgenstein thought. “The meaning of life,” we learn from reading the Tractatus (or, in my case, reading Giussani quoting from it), “that is to say the meaning of the world, we can call God. To pray is to think about the meaning of life.” How that enlarges the scope of one’s leisure! That just by thinking about these things, that by reflecting upon the meaning of being, one is actually engaged in conversation with God.  

There is a wonderful Spanish proverb that I never tire of repeating: “How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterwards.” Who can argue with such wisdom? How fitting, too, that the people who invented the siesta came up with such excellent advice. And Holy Scripture, of course, provides confirming evidence of it. “Be still,” we read in Psalm 46, “and know that I am God.” It is the first principle in the spiritual life, incidentally, which is knowing that a) there is a God and that b) it is not you. So, lighten up a bit. Relax. Let go, as the mystics say, and let God.

Such a refreshing contrast to its opposite number, which I’m sure some mad Teuton came up with: “Get busy and work as if you were God!” Of the two, then, which is truer? I certainly know which is the more desirable. Keeping busy, or taking a nap? Of course, in the case of Pope St. John Paul II, it was never quite so simple. When he was advised to slow down and maybe take a nap or two himself, he would invariably respond, “We shall have all eternity in which to rest.”

Irrefutable, I’d say. But along the way he managed to carve out great swaths of leisure as well; about which a wonderful Catholic philosopher by the name of Josef Pieper wrote a captivating little book: Leisure: The Basis of Culture. And in what does it consist? Nothing less than pure contemplative repose. Oh, yes, and lots of play, which is an art form the very young seem to have almost effortlessly mastered. Along with some of their elders as well. So long, that is, as we continue to join them in building weekly skyscrapers out of blocks.