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The innate nature of children, and therefore of all of us, is closeness to Divine Reality, says author Kim Nataraja*. Through meditation, she says, we can attune to the pure spiritual consciousness we were born with.
Unless you turn around and become like little children, you will
never enter the Kingdom (Matthew 18:3).
I’d like to start by telling you about an incident that happened, when I was leading a retreat in Florida. After a session of role playing to discover who we truly are, one of the participants came up to me and said: “I hope you don’t mind, but I don’t like speaking in public. But I want to share a story with you.”
She said: “My daughter just had another baby and her young son, a toddler of three years old, came up to her and said, ‘I have to speak to the baby.’ My daughter answered: ‘Of course, go and talk to her.’ She stayed near the door of the nursery, as the young boy went up to the baby. He just bent over the cradle and seemed to be engaged in a serious conversation. After a while he came out and his mother said: ‘You seemed to be having a good chat. What were you talking about?’ The little boy answered very seriously: ‘I asked her, what God was like because I am forgetting.’”
As we see from this story, very young children are indeed still in touch with Divine Reality, a truth often expressed by poets. William Wordsworth put it beautifully in ‘Ode to Immortality’:
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting. The soul that rises with us, our Life’s star, hath elsewhere its setting. And cometh from afar; not in entire forgetfulness, and not in utter nakedness but trailing clouds of glory do we come from God, who is our home: Heaven lies about us in our infancy!’
As the story and the quote from William Wordsworth show, babies are still in touch with the Divine Reality that they were part of before they were born. But roughly from two years onwards, the ‘ego’ starts its development out of our wider consciousness and the young child starts to forget his/her origin, as we see from the behaviour of the toddler. Slowly the focus turns to the environment around him/her.
We hear Jesus say in the Gospel of Matthew: “Unless you turn round and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom (the Presence of God)”.
He uses the phrase metanoia in Greek, which means “to turn around”, implying a total change of consciousness. “Becoming like little children” is therefore not a regressive step but one that transcends the ‘ego’ consciousness back to the pure, spiritual consciousness of the ‘true self’ we were born with.
The implication of all this is therefore that, when we meditate by faithfully focusing on our prayer word, we temporarily switch off the ego circuit with its interminable thoughts and in doing so we “leave self behind” in Jesus’ words. At the same time, we reconnect with the present moment, and thus return to our original consciousness with its connection to Oneness, Divine Reality, that we experienced as children.
The Tao Te Ching expresses this beautifully: “He/She who is in harmony with the Tao is like a newborn child” (Tao Te Ching Ch. 55). It is therefore no exaggeration to say that children are born contemplatives.
Let’s consider the qualities that we are all born with, which children still have naturally in their early years.
What we notice first of all is a total openness and their unquestioning, loving trust. Remember that we were all in the loving embrace of Divine Reality before our birth, totally at ease and full of trust. We as children then transfer these qualities of a trusting, loving bond with the Divine to our relationship with parents/carers and other adults around us with whom we feel totally at one initially. There is still no sense of being a separate being.
Normally as children grow up, they gradually start to focus more and more on their immediate environment. Here the ‘ego’ comes to the fore and helps them adjust to their environment, which implies a slow movement away from the ‘true self’, their original self. But there is still a healthy link between the two. The child still has memories of that loving embrace of Divine Reality.
But this is also the moment that things can go wrong. If the behaviour of the adults surrounding the child does not resonate with this original feeling of trust and of being held lovingly and safely, it can cause damage to the link, resulting in children feeling lost, being cast out from the Reality they were united to. This makes them turn their attention entirely towards their material surroundings, encouraged all the time by the growing ‘ego’.
Depending on the severity of this feeling of loss, it can damage and even break the important link between the ‘ego’ and the ‘true self’ with important effects on the self-image of a child. He or she may now have the sense of not being loved anymore, therefore not esteemed, valueless. Their only hope now is the environment and the‘ego’ for a sense of meaning and value. They will adopt behaviour that may bring them the love and acceptance they feel is lacking.
This feeling of being rejected, moreover, may lead children, as they are growing up, to project this perceived rejection out and reject the Divine in turn, doubting and feeling uncertain about the actual existence of the Divine.
The partial or nearly total severing of the link between the two sides of our being is actually the main factor that causes our sense of disconnectedness, isolation and meaninglessness. But here meditation/contemplative prayer has an important role to play. It can slowly repair that important connection again, as memories of the early experience of the Divine Reality resurface in the inner silence, with its consequent healing effect.
Another quality that we notice is one-pointed attention. When young children are at play or busy with anything, it is wonderful to see, how they focus their attention one-pointedly on whatever they are doing at that moment. If you call them and they don’t take any notice, this does not mean they are being naughty. They really do not hear you, so engrossed are they, in what they are playing with or doing. They are totally in the present moment.
They are like one of the Zen masters in this Buddhist story:
Two Zen disciples were bragging about the relative merit of their respective masters: The first disciple said: ‘My master stands on one side of the river and I stand on the other holding a piece of paper. He draws a picture in the air and the picture appears on my paper. He works miracles! The second disciple was unimpressed: ‘My master works greater miracles that that: When he sleeps, he sleeps. When he eats, he eats. When he works, he works. When he meditates, he meditates.
As adults we forget the power of this one-pointed attention and learn to multi-task. Again, meditation with its essential discipline of paying attention to one thing only, helps us to restore this inherent ability in us. Moreover, the growing ability to pay attention also means we listen more closely to those around us, which is the best gift we can give anyone.
Children do live totally in the present moment. If you offer them a treat but say “not now but in a few months’ time” they look quite disappointed and lose interest. Something in the future means nothing to them. They enjoy what is here and now. They see, hear, smell and touch all that is around them with curiosity and joy.
There is a Buddhist story that illustrates dramatically, what living in the present moment like a child means:
The Master was walking alone in the forest, when he noticed a tiger coming his way. Since the animal didn’t look particularly friendly, the master decided to move in the opposite direction. The tiger was following him and the master soon reached a precipice and the only escape was to go down the cliff, which he started to do, hanging on to the roots of the trees. As he was in this precarious position, the tiger came even closer and started to chew the top of the roots. Suddenly, the master noticed a bright red strawberry. Holding on to one root with only his right hand, he freed his left hand enough to grab the magnificent strawberry and put it in his mouth: it was absolutely delicious!
We on the other hand may spend so much time in our thoughts of the past and the future, worrying, planning, desiring or fearing, that the present moment can often slip away altogether.
Children’s natural state of being in the present moment also means that they are fully aware and attracted to Beauty in all its forms in their surroundings, which includes everything in nature, be it flowers, birds or the way the light plays on the trees in the garden or the sky at night.
They still remember at some level the Divine Beauty they were enfolded in. Therefore, anything of Beauty resonates with them on an intuitive level. Children in fact feel innately the calming and healing effect of being still and silent in Nature, evoking in them a sense of wonder and interconnectedness with everything and everyone. Being in nature can have the same effect on us, especially if we regularly meditate.
Children still act from their true, spiritual centre, which makes them naturally very intuitive and compassionate.They are instinctively aware of other people’s feelings. If you are upset about something, they feel it immediately and often will come up to you and hug you, wondering what is going on. They are totally open emotionally and do not dissemble or hide their feelings, as life’s experience often teaches us to do, to protect ourselves as we grow up. We have a choice, as this traditional Cherokee story about a grandfather, teaching his grandson about life, shows:
‘A fight is going on inside me,’ he said to the boy. ‘It is a terrible fight between two wolves. One is greedy, envious, aggressive, resentful and lies a lot. The other is peaceful, loving, kind, generous and compassionate. The same fight is going on in you and every other person too’. The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, ‘Which wolf will win?’ The grandfather simply replied, ‘The one you feed’.
We always have a choice. Attentive, faithful meditation, by leading us into deep contemplative prayer, helps us to feed the kind wolf, regaining the emotional openness and the other innate qualities of a child.
We have then have turned around and become like little children; and in the silence again experience the Kingdom, the Presence and Love of the Divine.
*Kim is an author and retired College Lecturer and Head of Department of Modern Languages. Her books include Dancing with Your Shadow, (2007), Journey to the Heart (2011), Sharing the Gift (2013), Food for the Journey (2014) and The transformative experience of Meditation (2019). She has been a contemplative since her youth and joined The World Community for Christian Meditation in 1993. In 1998 she became a Benedictine Oblate to the WCCM and since 1999 her service to the WCCM has included the role of Director of the International WCCM School, in which she led retreats and gave talks in many parts of the world.
For more information about John Main, how to meditate and the World Community for Christian Meditation (WCCM) see: https://www.thelivingwater.com.au/christian-meditation
*Kim’s article is a slightly edited version of a talk given at Benedict’s Well on 29 January this year. Benedict’s Well is an outreach of the Benedictine Oblates of the WCCM. The weekly event (Mondays) consists of a period of meditation followed by an inspirational talk. See: https://www.youtube.com/@benedictswell6373/featured
For more information contact Fr Mark Kenny at: themarkkenny@gmail.com