Innocence has a lyrical continuity. A child cannot turn it on and off. The fractures in innocence are partial. In different moments, thresholds are crossed into experience. Yet innocence manages to hold off the full recognition of how broken the human journey will be. The innocence of the child is its immediacy and nearness to everything. Rilke says that in all our subsequent life we will never again be as close to anything as we were to our toys in childhood. The toy becomes your friend and closest confidant. Before and below words, you invest the delight and concern of your heart in the toy. If you are clearing out an attic and you come across one of your old toys from childhood, it can release a flood of memories. The child lives in the neighbourhood of wonder where innocence keeps mystery playful. Each new event and encounter is all-absorbing. No overall perspective on life is available. The child lives in the house of discovery. The unconscious innocence of the child assembles new experiences. It is their cumulative gathering which eventually signals the end of childhood. Brick by brick, the house of innocence falls to ruins. Once that threshold into adulthood is crossed, one may never return again to the kingdom of innocence. Innocence always urges the child to explore and continues to pace and shelter this exploration until the child is finally adult and ready to stand alone in its new knowing. In contrast to how a child belongs in the world, adult belonging is never as natural, innocent, or playful. Adult belonging has to be chosen, received, and renewed. It is a lifetime’s work.
Childhood experience is deeply infused with longing. The adventure of being here is utterly engaging. There is longing to explore, to play, and to discover. Because the sense and contour of the self are only coming into definition, the child’s sense of longing is largely unrefined. This is often evident in the way children play with each other. Their play is never merely chaotic. It is inevitably governed by self-conscious and elaborate rules which they stipulate. Perhaps these delineate safe zones in which new experience becomes possible.
The imagination of early childhood has no limits. This is why children are fascinated by stories. A story has permission to go anywhere. Its characters can have any powers and do anything they like. The child rarely experiences the story as an observer. The child enters the story, experiencing its drama from within. Often a child will explicitly ask to be included as one of the characters in a story: “Which am I, Daddy?” The wonder and imagination of the child are awakened and engaged. Perhaps the shape of story fascinates the child, because it takes the child’s longing to wild and dangerous frontiers where it cannot go in its day-to-day life. The story allows the child to act with a power and strength which are impossible in the limitation of its present little body. Anything and everything is possible in a story. The longing of the child lives in the realm of pure possibility. All doors are open. All barriers are down. Because it is a story with a beginning, middle, and end, it offers a form of belonging in which the full adventure of longing can be explored. Narrative is a dramatic form of continuity created by longing, and it is also a place where human desire can come home. Great stories retain resonance because they embody the “immortal longings” of the heart; our longing to enter them comes from the child-like side of our hearts.
The innocence of childhood is never simply pure. Childhood also has a dark innocence. In its unknowing, the child senses the presence of negativity and evil. The fascination with monsters and sinister goblins often grips the little mind. Children are not interested in stories which lack the dimension of fear. This accounts for the subtle depth of fairy tales.
As individuals, we are cut off from the dense and intricate networks of life within us. A simple instance of this is when you cut your finger, the surprise of seeing your own blood flow. We forget the tree of bone and the bush of blood that flows within us. Blood is one of the most ancient and wisest streams in the universe. It is the stream of ancestry. An ancient bloodline flows from the past generations until it reaches and creates us now. Blood holds and carries life. From mythic times, blood has been at the heart of sacrifice; life was offered both as plea and praise to the deities. The Catholic Eucharist still centres on the transfiguration of the wine of the earth into the divine blood of the Redeemer. This consecration is not merely a memorial of the past event. The divine presence in the Eucharist is understood as an actual participation in the ongoing memory of God.
