RECAPTURING CHILDHOOD

          RECAPTURING CHILDHOOD

                                 Fr. Mervyn Carapiet

Young children have much to teach adults who have observed their sense of adventure and discovery. When a child chases a butterfly, tries to tie up his shoe lace for the first time, begins to jabber words and sentences that only gradually begin to make sense, adults can be amused and touched. Sometimes, something more happens. Adults can rediscover important things they had forgotten about. A child asks, “Why is that flower red?”, or, “Why do I have to go to sleep now?” “Why’s that man got no hair on his head?” You can just answer that question and leave it at that; or else you can begin to question all the things you had taken for granted; and sometimes, because you’re an adult with an adult’s experience, the questions are more searching. But there is more. Their questions can be devastating: “Why is that child crying? Where’s her mummy and daddy?” “Why are those children so thin; and why are they dying?”

 And if we’re honest, something of the child still survives in us, that we can only lose to our great cost. Let the nine-year-old persist in the ninety-year-old! In welcoming children and laying his hands on them, Jesus was conveying a practical parable about recapturing childhood. “Unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” Nine days to ninety years, all baptisms are infant baptisms! Children bear the image of God, are worthy of respect and dignity, having an uncorrupted and spiritual nature, capable of being virtuous and heroic, ever redeemable, whatever their misdemeanours, and destined for eternal life. 

On the other hand, a society for which the education of children is essentially about pressing a child into adult or pseudo-adult roles as fast as possible has lost patience with the commitment to guarantee the integrity of the childhood period. Think of the misshapen phenomenon of “child soldiers” in revolutionary outfits or of movies where children seriously ape adults. When childhood as an icon has been lost, the void is filled with an impoverished substitute, marked by an uncritical view of the child as “consumer” or “mini-adult”, or as a means of cheap labour, or simply as an object to be tolerated. This is a travesty of the distinctive significance of children, of their dignity, destiny and rightful place in the divine scheme of things. Persistence of the travesty and a veto on the rituals and roles proper to them will compel the children to create their own mythical world. 

Some of the foolish things we have done we hope they won’t do. In this calamitous world children are often the first to suffer from the violence of adults. Nothing seems so tragic or monstrous when children die with nothing to eat, those who are brutalised by human sin, cynics before their time, never having known love and hope and peace and justice.

What happened to them by a few deadly strokes of a murderer’s axe is happening to millions more of their kind in an extended way. I refer to the living death of child labour and prostitution, the blank emptiness produced by divorce and separation, the slow disintegration of the moral personality in a consumerist and hedonistic culture of death.

With one child in three going hungry to bed there’s always an emergency.

All this tells is why we need Christmas, so that the child for whom there is no room in the world’s inn may instead occupy our hearts, leaving no space there for evil. Childhood is the invention of Christianity from the moment Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me”, whereas formerly children had no status. . The children crave for a story of redemption that will capture their imaginative world, so that when they leave school they are equipped not with stale news best forgotten, but with a life story that is coherent, relevant and vitally central to them.