Childlike Faith

Hi friends!

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It is *very* late on Monday night and I am quite tired, but I read an article today that moved me deeply and thought I would share with you (see below!)! If you like this article, I highly recommend Claire’s substack – you can subscribe to that here.

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I’ll be back with this newsletter next week 🙂

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In Christ,

Jane

​A Childlike Faith vs. a Childish Faith by Claire Swinarski

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In Matthew 18, Jesus says that “whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

He goes onto say that we must “become as little children” to enter the kingdom of God.

I have three children, all radically different in nature. One cried the other night, so terrified that being bored in church would mean they were headed straight to Hell. The other gleefully reminds me how much Jesus loves them on a regular basis and regularly reminds their siblings of their many “sins you’ll have to go to confession for!” The third is still learning the basics—that’s Mary, that’s baby Jesus. That’s Moses. That dove is somehow God. All related, but they don’t grasp the details. They say a mighty cute St. Michael prayer every night, though.

So which one, exactly, am I supposed to be becoming like? Which child has it right?

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“Why does God allow bad things to happen to me?”

This is one of the most basic questions of our faith. Nearly every Christian has wrestled with this at some point or another. It is second grade, VBS-level stuff. I used to have a really great answer for this involving permissive vs. perfect will. Well—no. I had that answer for why God allows bad things to happen to you. I, on the other hand, was Very Very Blessed. I was a devoted servant. I was spreading the Gospel! To be frank, why bad things happened to you was explainable with the right Bible verses. I only really started wrestling when bad things happened to me, which—look, if you didn’t know you were following a wretched sinner, you do now.

If you had to sum up the last two years of my faith life, it would be trying to find an answer to this question. Every Fr. Mike Schmitz video, every Trent Horn podcast, every book someone would lend me. Surely, there was an answer I could uncover if I found just the right expert. The theology of free will is wild and untamed; the truth of human nature is a vast, endless ocean.

This season on The Chosen, a major character (who isn’t from the Bible) dies. People were outraged, as people on Al Gore’s internet are wont to be. A friend who saw it said to me, frustrated, “but so many people use suffering as evidence that there is no God, so this is just giving fuel to them. The show has to be responsible to new or questioning believers.”

My response: “How responsible would it be to insinuate that following God means your life will be absent of any suffering?” People should know what they’re getting into, I wanted to follow it up with. People should know how brutal all of this can be.

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More than any YouTube video on making sense of suffering I can find, this story sticks with me the most: the Christian writer and WW2 resistant, Corrie Ten Boom, writes in her book The Hiding Place about a time she asked her dad a hard question.

I ask again, “Why does God allow bad things to happen to me?” The answers, apparently, are stuffed in a suitcase with watches and spare parts.

One of my earliest memories from childhood is going to see the fireworks at a giant park. It’s not actually the fireworks I recall, though—it’s the wagon ride back to the car. I can see it in glimpses and flashes. There were so many people pressing in on all sides; lines and lines of cars beeping and turning and trying to escape the masses of people after the show had ended. I had been plopped in a wagon with my sister and our blankets. I specifically remember seeing my parents pulling the wagon in front of me, being pulled through streams of people all tucked up in my PJs. I had no idea where we were going, or when we’d get there. But I didn’t have to know. Someone else had it covered. I’m happy to be so safe in here, I remember thinking. I’m happy to be along for this ride.

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So many Christian & Catholic writers/speakers/musicians have left the faith. Every time I log onto Instagram, I see another person who’s announced that they can no longer align themselves with churches that harm, abuse, and destroy.

I can’t stop reading deconversion stories. I’m not studying them, looking to dissect what went wrong in someone’s faith life. I’m more immersing myself in them. Realizing how close to some of these people I feel; understanding just how much we agree on. This person’s baby was born at 25 weeks and survived a lengthy NICU stay—why didn’t God help women in developing nations the way God had helped her? This person’s neighbor was evicted—why didn’t God cry out for justice, the way she’d been taught? This person’s child died of cancer, even after she’d prayed and prayed—why didn’t God step in and give her a miracle? This person’s pastor was arrested for molesting little boys—why didn’t God stop it? The answers they’d been given rang hollow. The beliefs that had been instilled in them seemed paper thin. Purity culture and the prosperity gospel are not made to last. Houses that had been built on sand, stories that had pretended no righteous people die so as to be responsible—the storm had come.2​

A loving God would not allow for this sin and depravity, they explain in pithy Instagram captions.

I don’t want to sound minimizing, but eventually I learned that you can boil almost any deconversion story into one of these two things: I didn’t know I’d have to deal with all of these bad people or I didn’t know life would be this hard.

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Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of fairytales3 to my littles. Try as I might, they just don’t love contemporary stories nearly as much as they love princesses and dragons and knights and spells.

I realized, reading this tales of heroism and bravery, that courage does not exist if there aren’t difficult circumstances for it to sprout in.

Forgiveness does not exist if there wasn’t a wrong done to someone.

Compassion does not exist if there isn’t sorrow.

Some of the most beautiful virtues could not exist without difficulties that break our backs and shatter our hearts.

Vigen Guroian Groin writes in Tending The Heart of Virtue, “That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”

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The other morning, my daughter had a meltdown—the kind of meltdown that only a 3-year-old can have. The kind that involves wailing and the pounding of fists. We were out of her favorite yogurt. If she was one of my older kids, I probably would have snapped that there were kids in Ukraine and Gaza who are starving and she could suck it up and have some damn Cheerios. But she’s my 3-year-old. So instead, I wrapped her up and rocked back and forth, while she sobbed, devastated, into my shoulder.

“I know,” I told her, over and over. “It’s hard when we can’t have the breakfast we want. It’s so hard.”

Two hours later, I had spiritual direction. I was, to put it very lightly, struggling. Things felt so stupidly hard and heavy. I didn’t have one more ounce of patience in me; I couldn’t summon a single piece of goodwill or forgiveness or kindness. Instead I burst into tears, heaving like I would never catch my breath. I said that Job was an idiot. I said that God felt abusive. I said that the older son in the parable of the prodigal son had it right. I tried to say these things, but I’m pretty sure it came out in a garbled, blubbering mess of sobs.

When I finally glanced over, I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry-I’m-sorry, the priest was handing out a box of Kleenex.

“I know,” he said quietly. “This is hard. It’s so hard.”

I’m glad he didn’t tell me to suck it up and eat the Cheerios.

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In Abandonment to Divine Providence, Jean-Pierre de Caussade writes: “To escape the distress caused by regret for the past or fear about the future, this is the rule to follow: leave the past to the infinite mercy of God, the future to His good Providence, give the present wholly to His love by being faithful to His grace.”

I’m reimagining prayer, like a child practicing piano scales. Reorienting myself to what I believe it to be. I pray fervently for a request and immediately follow it with not my will, but yours be done. Here is what I want, and I accept your will, too. That’s how kids learn, right? Imitating their dads?

I don’t want a childish faith: the demanding, the despairing, the throwing of fits. I do want a childlike faith: the trust, the consolation, the knowledge that although I don’t know where we’re going, someone else does. (I might not stop asking questions, though—I have three kids, and believe you me, I’ve answered 87 questions by breakfast.)

If I had to choose one word to explain the focus of my faith the past few years, it would be trust: something I’m seeking, and something that children inherently have. Instead of riding in the wagon, I am so tempted to shriek about which turn is next, or better yet, to hop out and walk on my own. I want to justify the route we’re taking or find answers as to why, exactly, this color and brand of wagon was chosen.

Instead, I think: I’m so happy to be safe in here. Riding along, as the masses press around. Staying in the wagon, long after it begins to hurt.

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1 A phrase she’d read in a poem, meaning a sexual experience

2 Matthew 7:24-27

3 https://www.scottgustafson.com/classic-fairy-tales-book — that’s our favorite

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P.S. Here’s a pic of our Fourth of July Tahoe sunset – one of my happiest places to be 🙂