The Discipline of Innocence

We speak of it as a thing lost, but it can be also a thing renewed...

Blackberry Gathering by Elizabeth Forbes

The great old oaks stretch over our heads. A small wind darts like a minnow among their branches, setting the leaves to shimmer. For a moment, I listen. Listen. To the layered song of many birds, the slurp of the stream, the quickened breath of my small children as they sight adventure. I lay a worn blanket on the ground in the shade, a few feet away from a creek bed. My children are already wet, immersed in the otherworld of the water’s twist and rill, their wellies already filled. I chuckle and give up all hope of keeping anything dry. Time eases its grip upon my mind. Minutes don’t matter here in the cool air of this hidden place. There is nothing to be done. Except… spot the dragonfly in its sapphire hover over the stream. Gather stones. Trace leaves. Devour a picnic. Hug tired little bodies, heal small hurts, and… wonder. Everything is a wonder to my small ones.

These are the spacious days of summer and we spend them mostly out of doors. A season of earth and imagination; this is what I decided our summer would be. We mostly wander the English countryside. Sometimes we walk the path over the railway bridge behind our house to a little wilderness. Sometimes we sit in the garden under the willow and read. Sometimes I take the children on a bus to a nearby village and we explore the countryside.

On the days we venture farther afield, I cannot count the number of times someone - on a bus, in a cafe, along the road - says to me ‘you have your hands full’. The presence of children seems to dismantle the usual English reserve in commenting upon a stranger’s circumstances. It’s almost always kindly meant, and I smile in answer. But there’s usually more than a hint to imply that the fullness of my hands is a burden to me. I don’t want my children to think of themselves in that light, so my standard reply is usually ‘I do. And they’re a jolly crew. We have a great deal of fun.’

But as I’ve spent wide hours pondering these conversations while my children explore the meadows and byways, I’ve found myself wishing I could say so much more because I am learning precious things from my children this summer.

I wish I could let them taste the altered state of being, the potency of the world that returns to me in the company of young children, when child time, child sight, rules our days. I wish they could wander with us and taste the broadening of time, the way it gentles and slows and tags along at your heels like a tame dog instead of the angry cur it usually is. I wish they could experience the restored significance of tiny things - the treasured status of stones and feathers. I wish they could savour the healing way that children tether us to the essential realities of human existence: many hugs, many tears, the need for food, the need to be heard, and the profound trust that all these things will be provided when they need them.

I wish they could taste the innocence my children restore to me.

I think a lot about innocence these days.

My mental health has been more precarious than usual, an intensification of my OCD that followed Elanor’s birth and has not eased. My mind flashes forward constantly from very ordinary moments to landscapes of visceral loss and disaster. The whole world feels to me like a trick waiting to be played on the defenceless and my uneasy mind feels that our only hope lies in my constant vigilance, my constant awareness of danger, my cultivated fear. I need to be afraid so that we’ll be safe. I need to check symptoms, compulsively say prayers, check boundaries or else disaster will overtake us.

I find it very hard to relate to the world in an innocent way.

Fear is the opposite of innocence. Fear operates on the assumption that loss hovers around every corner, that the world is so fallen, its patterns so twisted by selfishness and violence and random disaster that only a terrified vigilance will keep us safe from disintegration. Fear assumes no help will come and I am on my own.

Fear pervades much of my life. It’s an illness, yes, but it seeps into the wider arena of my consciousness; it colours the way I see every relationship, every new situation, every prayer. In Marilynne Robinson’s novel Lila, the title character spends much of the book caught between her lifelong fear and the love she has found that invites her, begs her, to trust. She keeps a knife hidden in the house where she has come to live with her husband; the knife is an emblem of her suspicion, her need to live in the assumption that at some point, love will fail and fear will be necessary once more.

I have felt the edge of that knife.

But this summer, immersed in the company and innocence of my children, I can almost imagine setting it down. That’s why I’m going to therapy, of course, to treat the illness that makes this action so hard. But I’m increasingly aware that there is no keeping my fear, that knife, as a back pocket assurance. Fear doesn’t work like that. Fear is a framework, a worldview if you will. Fear is the opposite of trust and I am required to choose between them. I must find a way, not just to stop being afraid, but actually to reach for trust, choose it, hold it fast and let it transform my restless hands, my heart, my misfiring imagination. And that is a choice that encompasses the whole of my life, the totality of my story, not just the angst of my broken mind.

I watch my children with fascination these days because I want to become like them. These are the days of their innocence, the rare, sweet days of their trust. This season is an invitation to ‘taste and see’ what it looks like to live in expectation of God’s goodness pervading the world. ‘You must become like a child to enter the kingdom of heaven’ said Jesus. I understand the poignant truth of this better each day. My children trust with the same abandon that they enjoy and that is the root of their free happiness. They trust that I’ll comfort them when they’re hurt, feed them when they’re hungry, protect them from dogs and loneliness and anything they deem ‘scary’. They trust that I will remain, that my love will not fail them, that I am at back of their adventuring and therefore, somehow, they are safe.

I’m well aware that someday my children will be hurt, that grief or pain will crash into their story like the stab of a knife. But that doesn’t mean they have to lose their innocence. I really don’t think it does, because I’m beginning to believe that my own suffering and fear doesn’t mean that I need to lose mine. I’m learning to understand innocence as trust, innocence as a heart so rooted in Love it is still able to reach out in astonishing, world-defying trust that Love will arrive with healing in his hands. My job at the time of their wounding will be to help them keep their hands open to that trust, to show them Love so that they will not grab the very knife that wounded them and use it as a faulty shield.

This, I find, is my work as well. To set down the knife. To be a child. To trust.

I’ve been a Christian for many years, but sometimes I forget that the heart of the Gospel I believe comes down to the simple choice to believe in the love God has for me. The Father who stands at back of all my adventuring. Who answers my hunger. Who hears my cries. Who heals my wounds. Who saves me. Perhaps one of the great disciplines of faith is simply the choice to be innocent… to trust.

So I sit, day by day, in the gentle light of summer, the dappled light of my children’s innocence. I watch and wonder, and reach out in trust toward the Love that undergirds us all. I’m learning to put down my fear. And find my innocence… renewed.

I Am a Child, by Edward Dufner