Cultivated Innocence

Like children He would have us...

Viktoria Kalaichi

When one is often accompanied by four small children, one goes through the world on high alert, intent upon avoiding the ire of the general population. So last week, when my husband and I took our children for a visit to a charity shop, we kept our usual sharp ear ready even as we browsed the tumbled treasures of the little shop. The children were quickly lost to a world of their own, toys talking to each other, small dramas, compact worlds blossoming up from the floor of the shop. They were quiet in their play, so I dared a wider exploration. But I moved swiftly back when I glanced up to see two older ladies intently watching my little ones. I moved closer, ready to placate, but what I heard was not complaint but wistfulness.

‘Ah, look at them. Lost in their own worlds they are. It’s wondrous. It’s just wondrous. What joy to have an imagination like a world, to be happy like that,’ said the first with a little sigh.

‘I couldn’t get anywhere near that state now without a large gin,’ said the second with a smirk and laugh, but then she too added a sigh. ‘There’s no getting back to that kind of innocence.’

I moved quietly away.

The ache and reach and frustrated hope of that conversation smote my heart. On one hand, I instantly recognise the jaded admission of the second woman. Of course there is a native innocence that is the birthright of children. Before one bears any responsibility, any sense of the world’s vast pain (or your own many disappointments with existence), one can encounter the whole of creation as gift. To be grown up is in some sense to lose this, yes, to tangle with a world immensely broken and dirty, pocked by strife and meanness and taxes and death. There is for many of us a helpless sense of having lost something from our earlier lives, an innocence, a joy, that we simply cannot recover. The wound goes too deep.

I write today from a place of deep exhaustion. I think many of us find ourselves in the land of weariness on the eve of Christmas Eve. I’ve felt a jaded incapacity to wonder. My prayer times feel more like the the psychological scraping of an empty-barrelled mind than any encounter with divinity. It is easy to sympathise with her pronouncement. We need a sedative, or a large gin, or something we can’t even name to unlock the open-hearted joy that is the mark of children at play in their countless interior worlds.

And yet, and yet.

For the last three years I’ve been wrestling with the idea of quiet and if there is one burning truth I have come to believe about why quiet matters to us in this world, it’s precisely the answer to the second woman’s need: quiet, deep and chosen is a benevolence that meets us with far more grace than we possess in our exhausted selves, quiet is the tonic we need to actually enter again the blessed space of childhood.

To renew our innocence.

Or rather, to have it renewed by the person we actually meet at the heart of quiet. As we come to the end of this Advent season, I am reminded again, again, that it is the Christ child I find at the heart of my quiet who invites me into the precious innocence he bought with the price of his own broken heart. This is why quiet is so vital, not as a discipline or a spiritual feat, but as the place we come again each day to hear the voice of the God who came as a child, who loves children, who is the Father and Comforter we crave, whose lavish love makes us innocent again.

I read a line in a poem by Anthony Esolen today:

As a child He enters first,
As a child would save us,
Through the walls of glory burst
And as children have us.

Innocence, in many ways it’s just another word for trust, the open-hearted expectation of children that they will be met with love, with wonder, with joy. And though for children it is native, I believe it is something we may recover even in the darklands of adulthood because we too, with wrestling, with yearning grief, my reach toward the light that does, that has, that always breaks into our darkness.

detail from Nativity by Gerard Van Honthorst

We may make of that reaching a way of life that is a cultivated innocence, the continual shaping of heart and impulse and habit toward the expectation that God will arrive… in the heart of our loneliness, our pain, our aching bodies and bruised hearts. The choices are tiny ones. Today, I’ve found my stomach tight with fear over a possible loss, been knocked over by a drunk man as I pushed Elanor to the grocery store, wondered once more what to do about the recurring (though harmless) joint pain that is a new part of my life. I haven’t had much sleep or hush, and I don’t have great answers, but I do have the evidence that in each moment when I have reached toward the presence of God, looked for him, believed in his help, I have found peace, tiny as a spring blossom but just as potent, opening in my heart. He is here. I trust his help for my fear, his aid in my pain, his graciousness in my own outrage. And I’m shaping my tomorrow to cup that light in every moment. I’ve just slashed ten things to do tomorrow in favor of moments to be - in prayer, in laughter with my children, in rest, even in a few moments of reading my new novel.

All of which help me to that child-hearted trust that really is a medicine much stronger than gin has ever dreamed of being.

As we enter the Christmas season, as the journey of Advent closes and the horizons of celebration glimmer and burn, my wish for you, for myself, is the capacity to put aside the weary rush, the ragged sense of what needs to be done, the lie that joy is for children and innocence can’t be restored… and instead, stop. Turn. Find the light to which Advent has been leading us. Lift our faces, astonished, to the rising of Love. Lose ourselves in its brightness. And find whole worlds of hope blossoming up from the ground of our ordinary.

In her novel Small Things Like These, Claire Keegan describes how one character feels after an act of courage that is a kind of chosen innocence, an act of compassion that is rooted in the wild power of love rather than fear. There is a

fresh, new, unrecognisable joy in his heart. Was it possible that the best bit of him was shining forth, and surfacing? Some part of him, whatever it could be called – was there any name for it? – was going wild, he knew.

May we too enter the shining light of love, find a fresh, new joy growing up in our hearts as we choose the way of innocence. Like the children we are on our way to becoming once more.

Happy Christmas Eve’s eve to you all!

Boys by Fyodor Pavlovich Reshetnikov