Scripture tells us: unless you become as a child, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. By child, it means not mere youth of years, but a consciousness unburdened—where the weight of self-awareness does not press, where the chains of human opinion hold no sway.
A child gazes in wonder at a dung beetle, at the dewdrop clinging to a blade of grass. She does not obstruct them, does not judge—she simply watches in stillness. There is no urgency in her, no fear of what others might say. Here dwells no accounting, no abyss of dread, no shadow of doubt. This lightness of being—this is the soul's true nature: joy without thought, peace without question.
When the mind falls silent in waking, there returns that clarity we have lost. Doubt, fear, the whisper of 'what will people say'—these shatter all gods within us. Remove these, and consciousness dissolves into the ocean of love, where the self merges into the Divine, becomes one with it.
To reclaim childhood is to return to that truth—where we know ourselves to dwell in God's presence, in God's heart, one with God himself.
# The Return of Childhood There are moments when we are suddenly seized by something we thought had long since died within us — a tremor of the heart, a brightness in the eye, a quickening of the blood — and we realize that childhood has not truly left us at all. It has only withdrawn, like a tide, into the deeper chambers of being, waiting for the right moon to call it forth again. We grow older and believe ourselves transformed. We cultivate gravity, deliberation, the careful architecture of adult thought. We learn to distrust wonder; we call it naïveté. We learn to parse the world into categories — useful and useless, possible and impossible — and we congratulate ourselves on our wisdom. Yet all the while, something within us remains stubbornly alive: the child who once pressed his face against the window to watch the rain, who heard voices in the wind, who believed that anything might happen. And then, without warning, it returns. Perhaps you come upon an old photograph — your own face, impossibly young, caught mid-laugh in a garden you had forgotten existed. Or you hear a song that plays beneath the years like a current beneath still water. Or you walk alone through a street at dusk, and the slant of the light, the particular quality of the air, opens something in you that has been locked away. In that instant, the machinery of adult consciousness grows thin as tissue, and you feel it: the child's way of seeing, the child's profound astonishment at existence itself. This is not sentimentality. It is not regression or weakness. It is the unexpected visitation of a truth we have temporarily forgotten — that wonder is not the province of the ignorant, but the birthright of those capable of genuine perception. The child does not marvel at the world because he understands it poorly; he marvels because he sees it truly, unmediated by the thick callus of habit and assumption. As we age, we become curators of our own forgetting. We learn what is "serious" and what is not. We learn which questions are worth asking and which are foolish. We learn to smile at the child's earnestness, even as something within us — something irreplaceable — grows quieter. But the child does not die. He only waits. He waits in the architecture of memory, in the body's sudden stirrings, in moments of unexpected grace. When the return comes, it is often unbidden. We do not summon it through effort or will. It arrives as a gift, or a visitation — a reminder that we have not entirely left behind the person we were. The man who approaches middle age and finds himself weeping at a simple thing — a child's trust, a ray of sunlight through leaves, the smell of earth after rain — is not losing his grip on maturity. He is recovering something essential that maturity had nearly succeeded in burying. There is a strange humility in this return. For it suggests that all our accumulated knowledge, all our hard-won sophistication, has not actually brought us closer to understanding. The child, in his simplicity, may have grasped something that our complexity has made us lose. He lived in direct contact with the real; we have interposed so many layers of interpretation between ourselves and existence that we can barely touch it anymore. To age with grace is not to perfect our distance from childhood, but to allow it to return, again and again, like a tide that cannot be permanently held back. It is to recognize that the questions we asked at five — Why is there anything? What am I? What is this strange, inexplicable fact of being? — were not childish questions at all. They were the deepest questions, and we have been running from them ever since. The return of childhood is thus a return to seriousness. When a man sits in silence at evening and feels, with the clarity he knew as a boy, the mystery of existence pressing against him like a presence in the room — in that moment, he is not indulging in reverie. He is touching ground. He is remembering what is true. And if he is wise, he will not turn away. He will sit with it. He will let it remake him, just as it remade him when he was small and the world was still full of doors.
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