My children love hearing the story of the time I got into trouble as a kindergartener, the time I had to “sit on the black line” at recess. It would be difficult to overstate just how ominous this punishment was to 6-year-old, goody-two-shoes me. At school, I was the poster child for “well-behaved.” I raised my hand to speak, I kept my blouse always tucked into my uniform shorts, and I finished drinking my little carton of chocolate milk every lunch, despite hating it, to avoid the frowns of the cafeteria helpers. Until that day, I stayed in the clear of all reprimands, negative consequences, and disapproval from the adults inhabiting my young academic life.
The action that led to tarnishing my immaculate behavioral record? Deliberately throwing a bouncy red ball into a muddy puddle. From my current perspective, I can see exactly why I deserved punishment: Besides being annoying, my choice made the life of my teacher more difficult. Even still, I feel compassion for childhood me, because as keenly as I recall the shame of punishment, I remember the sense of almost helplessness against the impulse to behave in this way. I simply had to know what would happen, what it would feel like, to throw that ball into the puddle. My curiosity, intrigue, and wonder—the drive to discover—were paramount.
Anyone with toddlers and young children in their lives knows that this kind of energy is a whole vibe. You just see it in kids: the bending down to sniff a worm on the sidewalk; the chubby hand plunging into a jar of peanut butter to squish between their fingers; the licking of the metal swing set at a park. This uninhibited way of being in the world will drive caregivers crazy, and it will often get kids into trouble, be it in the form of a seat on the black line or a tongue stuck to a frozen pole. And yet, there’s something to learn from it.
I tend to think of myself as a curious person, but I can’t remember the last time I felt the urge to smell something that I didn’t already know would be pleasing to my senses or wondered what it would feel like to reach my hand into an unfamiliar place. As I recently read Abigail Thomas’ memoir, Still Life at Eighty (Golden Notebook Press), I was struck by her telling of two back-to-back falls that resulted in simultaneously broken left and right wrists. While Thomas notes the pain and inconvenience of the injuries, she expresses some satisfaction in the emergence of a new experience, which she notes are hard to come by as a near-octogenarian.
I’m less than half the age of Thomas, but I relate to her positionality. When was the last time I had a completely new experience? Have I really wondered about something or felt genuinely surprised by the unfolding of an event recently? No, not that I can think of. This dearth is in part the product of the natural growth in knowledge and experience that occurs as we age, and also I suspect due to living in a hyperconnected world where information is infinite and instantly available. When questions that cross my mind can be immediately answered with a Google search, little time is left for wonder.
I think another part, still, is that our modus operandi changes as we age. I can’t tell you how many times my kids have asked a question that stumps me, but that I also couldn’t care less about going to the trouble of figuring out. I encourage my kids’ quandaries, but I defer the task of investigation. “I love your inquisitive mind! We should ask Uncle Andrew. I bet he would know!” The noble motivation here is that I want to instill in my kids the idea that asking questions of people is a surer path to sanity than asking the internet; the less noble is that I’m too lazy and disinterested to extend the effort it would take to explore the question. I’d rather keep washing the dishes.
The existentialist philosopher Albert Camus wrote, “A day comes when, thanks to rigidity, nothing causes wonder any more, everything is known, and life is spent beginning over again. These are the days of exile, of desiccated life, of dead souls.” It’s a grim description and maybe overly dramatic. I’d hardly call my life desiccated. But awe-anemic? Spiritually dry? Sometimes.
Camus goes on: “To come alive again, one needs a special grace, self-forgetfulness, or a homeland.” I wonder if that special grace might be the wisdom of toddlers who don’t need to forget themselves because they are still very much in the process of learning themselves. Their lives are awash in new experiences. While we can’t go back to being 3 again, I do believe that we can adopt the postures of curiosity, wonder, and openness that characterize the lives of the young. We can let children be our spiritual guides, and embrace mystery.
Consider, for example, how toddlers readily accept that they don’t have all the answers. Children ask questions constantly, with eagerness and comfort. To them, there’s nothing shameful about not knowing. This is quite different from most adults I know, especially when it comes to matters of faith. Recently, one of my daughters asked, “Why did Jesus die?” It’s a good question, but I found myself giving her a canned answer: “Jesus died so that we could live.”
My answer wasn’t necessarily a problem but the patness of it is. What does it even mean? And isn’t having the question—asking it, reflecting, praying for understanding, and trying to know in a new kind of way—more spiritually evolved than reciting words I can only presume I learned two decades ago? Asking questions and not rushing to answer them, being able to sit with the not-knowing, is a valuable spiritual practice.
To pretend to know the ways of God isn’t just factually wrong and arrogant. It’s also boring. I don’t want a God who is human enough for me to understand, and I don’t want a faith that is small enough for me to memorize.
I love what the Jesuit priest Karl Rahner said: “Faith means putting up with God’s incomprehensibility for a lifetime.” I can choose to embrace the incomprehensibility of the universe in the way that toddlers do. It’s a mindset shift, but it’s easy enough to do when I take my cue from children: Ask lots of questions, relish sensations, delight in movement, and be surprised. Welcome the freedom that comes from admitting and embracing ignorance.
This article also appears in the August 2025 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 90, No. 8, page 43-44). Click here to subscribe to the magazine.
Image: Unsplash/Peter Dlhy
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