Every Baby a Prophet, Every Cry an Oracle
The Absurd World of Children’s Books
It’s Monday morning, and I’m reading Avonlea one of her books.
The book is Who Sang the First Song by Ellie Holcomb, and the world depicted within is marvelous. Every scene is plastered with carefree idealism, bathed in color, bursting with joy. Children and Creation play together in unthreatened harmony—kids stargaze with polar bears, they swim with giant blue whales, they make smores around a campfire with foxes and storks and lambs. There is not a tear, there is not a problem, there is not an aching heart of any kind found anywhere.
All of which, of course, is positively absurd for those of us who inhabit the real world.
Finally, Avonlea and I arrive at a page where the book’s idealism crescendos. A small, blonde headed girl rides a seesaw opposite a massive, full grown lion. Both are wearing enormous, cheesy grins, roaring into the atmosphere.
Positively absurd.
Avonlea squeals and pitches herself forward in my lap. She has no idea what she’s looking at. But she reaches for the picture nonetheless, delighted. The morning sunlight bounces of the wobbling page’s glossy finish as she pats the picture with tiny palms, and a thought hits me:
To her, none of this is absurd.
This is a gift she has, one which I no longer do, to see the world with such wide eyes. To look at things like a lion and a girl on a seesaw together and think, “well that makes sense! I’d like to try that!”
The Prophetic Nature of Naïveté
What’s marvelous about a baby’s mind is how utterly foreign a cursed world is to it.
We Big People call it “naïveté.” We assume it’s something we must untrain when the time comes. And in one sense, of course, this is true because a baby’s naïveté is cause for legitimate concern.
Our kids, after all, are a risk to themselves. They don’t yet know the true nature of the real world. So we hover over them, staving off tragedy and accident after tragedy and accident. We seize the little hand about to be burned. Scoop the little body about to tumble over the edge. Pad the little head about to find a coffee table corner.
But as we go about saving them from themselves, a baby’s supposedly “naïve” mind seems to keep asking us, “well why?”
Why should such protective measures even be necessary here?
Why should I not grab this glowing red flame—it’s pretty! Why shouldn’t I leap as high off this couch as I possibly can—it’s so fun! Why shouldn’t I ride a seesaw with a massive lion—that’s so cool!
The real question underneath such innocent questions is perhaps: Why should the world hurt me at all?
Why should I fear it?
In this innocent questioning, a baby’s very being is prophetic. Their honest confusion about the broken world around them—the fact that they do not arrive in this world expecting to be hurt by it—is not mere innocence. It is the lingering voice of Eden’s programming confronting a world of Exile.
And while, for a time, babies lack the cognitive development and language skills to say it, the message their naïve bounding through the dangerous, real world reminds us of is this:
Any world less than Eden is alien.
Like the “upside-down” in Stranger Things. Any world which subsists anywhere underneath God’s intended wholeness for it—that’s what is actually positively absurd.
Hello, Baby: Welcome to the Exile
Babies come wired for blessing. We must help them meet our curse. And this introduction comes with steep learning curves. To the little mind born expecting the paradise of Genesis 1 & 2, the cursed warzone of Genesis 3 in which they find themselves is beyond bewildering.
Babies are born with no concept of Adam’s consequence (Gen. 3:17-19). Why should toil tax the body and wear down the spirit? Why should work draw us away from one another?
They have no concept of Eve’s penalty (Gen. 3:16). Why should the giving and nursing of life wound? Why should one gender fall underneath the power of another?
They have no concept of Creation’s curse (Gen. 3:17). Why should the world be at odds with itself and a danger to me?
They have no concept of an Enemy (Gen. 3:14-15). Why should there be someone or something out there I should not trust? Why would someone’s goal be my grief? Why would skepticism be wise?
Of course, in a baby’s living experience they are not thinking these thoughts explicitly. They have no language at all, much less the language of Scripture. No Christianese stockpiled, no library of Bible stories to pull from in their mind’s imaginary. They haven’t been to Sunday school, so they don’t know characters like Adam and Eve, Creation and the Serpent.
But even while lacking any formalized linguistic theology, babies are adept experiential theologians, nonetheless.
Even without knowing the Bible stories, per se, they know something’s off. They are made acutely aware of The Fall each time their guileless, plucky plodding through life is invaded by the unexpected disappointment and pain of their small experiences in this big, real world of exile. To them, the pain comes in little things:
…Why should my daddy have to go far away from me to work?
…Why should my parents ever be tired of holding me?
…Why should my body hurt my mommy’s body?
…Why should my body sometimes become sick?
…Why should I have to sleep in a dark room alone?
…Why should some things around me be threats while other things are safe?
In their first year of life, there is no end to these kinds of language-less questions for there is no end to the invasion of brokenness they are experiencing. Where is Eden? Where is the paradise of blessing I was made for?
Of course, we adults, in our seasoned realism, find these scenarios so commonplace, so mundane, we scarcely blink at them. For us Big People, the occasional illness, parents being absent from home to be present at work, the need to be careful and skeptical, the damage of birth and breastfeeding and accidents in playtime, the inability to ever permanently satisfy hunger and thirst…Well, these cautions and problems and frustrations are simply the daily vicissitudes of real life in the real world.
They’re normal. Normal is what’s real.
Reinterpreting a Cry
But babies challenge this normal. They have a distinct theological advantage over adults precisely because nothing for them is yet “normal.” Nothing is yet routine. Everything is fresh. Every experience is a shock, a mystery, a puzzle, an outrage! Thus, what to adults has become normal to a baby is seriously baffling.
Babies are born highly sensitive to that which we have become regretfully numb. And so, they do in their distress what the Grown World is eager to explain away in purely naturalistic terms.
They cry.
Their feeble eyes express in liquid, saline language that which their tongue has not yet learned to say.
They cry, and they cry often, and at nearly everything.
But is it purely naturalistic, a baby’s cry?
Is a baby’s crying at the pain around them, the hunger within them, the sickness they sometimes feel, the separation from loved ones they must learn to endure, merely a benign artifact of biology which we Big People must hurry to hush and untrain.
Or is their cry not also the weeping of the imago Dei within them, mourning a world they know to be, in some language-less area of their own tiny being, not quite the way it should be? A weeping on prophetic par with the laments of Jeremiah over his beloved, ruined Jerusalem.
A paradise lost.
Certainly, the former can be true without the latter being false. Certainly, a baby’s crying is both their body’s routine biology as well as their precious spirit’s fierce judgment upon the everyday grief of humanity’s still-going Exile. Would the God who both designed their body and imprinted his own image upon their spirit see these dual functions of a cry as incompatible? Does nature never speak of supernature? Are there not whispers of the spiritual found in the cries of the natural?
It is a tension. It is both.
And in this tension, learning can take place in two directions.
Back to the Classroom
In the first direction, we Big People are forced to assume our positions as educators. We have no choice but to subject our babies, our naïve little fools, to the education of the Real. In “reality,” we teach them to interpret what we hasten to call “the real world” around us according to its own broken, “realistic” norms.
“Be careful of this!” we say.
“Don’t touch that!”
“Only trust these people!”
“Avoid those people!”
“Life’s not fair!”
In essence, we are forced to ruin their wide eyed view of the world and teach them what dark things we humans unlocked in Genesis 3, when we seized the forbidden fruit and decided to define good and evil on our own terms. We must teach them how, in our endeavor to become rogue gods who would build God’s world without God’s presence, we wound up creating the exact dark planet that now disappoints and kills us. How, in our hunt for power, we became Cain—slaves to an inner nature that continually masters us (Gen. 4:7).
We are forced to teach them that it is because of us—our rebellion against the Giver of Life—that a lion and a little girl could not share a seesaw together. That such harmony is not normal and therefore not realistic. Because here, in this “real world” which we tried to re-design in our own image, there are now predators and prey; love comes with risk; pleasure with pain; power with abuse; half-measures of the good endlessly pursued by whole measures of the bad.
Babies came expecting blessing. We must help them meet our curse. This real world and the burden to teach its broken norms to our children is the reward of our rebellion, the fruit of our freedom.
That is one direction of the learning that must take place between babies and adults.
But thankfully, there is a second direction. Thankfully, God doesn’t give his teaching assignments only to us adults. For He knows that, while we have a job to do protecting our babies in this current broken version of the world, we adults have often grown too insensitive to hope to be the only ones entrusted with education.
So, He sends us babies—his littlest prophets on their own divine assignment. They come not only to provide humor, to be cute, to be taught by us. They come also to teach.
If we’re willing to slow down enough to reflect on what we’re hearing in their cries and seeing in their naivete, babies re-educate us Big People about the hope of renewal. A hope we old fools often allow to grow cold in iced and craven hearts. They call us to see again that to which our realist eyes have become blind.
Namely, that this “Real World” we now inhabit is not the True and Good World for which we were made.
In that sense, babies are more in touch with the true nature of things than we are.
“At that time Jesus, full of joy through the Holy Spirit, said:
I praise you Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children.”
We grown people—we, self-acclaimed experts of the “real”—must be humble, therefore, as we teach our children, for we are only experts in something fading away.
This world and its kingdoms are little more than passing illusions, counterfeit imitations, things not fully real in the way sandcastles are not places a real queen would live. And because this is true, the “real world” of now should never satisfy, never become too much a home for us, never numb our longing for the renewed world that’s coming someday soon.
Yes. Babies remind us that God, though a necessary pragmatist who stoops down and tolerates and accommodates human brokenness to bring redemption to pass, remains the Original Idealist.
God is the Original Author of such stories as we find in children’s books. He is the original maker of such blissful worlds wherein a lamb could lie down with a lion and where, after a nap perhaps, a little blonde headed girl like my Avonlea Mae could come along and wake the big cat up and flit off to go share a seesaw ride together with him.
God, let us not forget, is dissatisfied with the world in its present form. Babies remind us that, to be like him, we too should live dissatisfied by and sensitive to its brokenness, yearning in holy discontent for something more.
In the Living Room with God
Were God to come sit with us in our living rooms for a sunlit morning’s reading time and have his choice of book, perhaps he’d reach for the children’s story over the theology tome. Perhaps he’d sport a big cheesy grin and chuckle at the marvelous world depicted within it, finding its absurdly joyful pictures to more truly resemble that which he had—and still has—in mind for the real world. Perhaps a tear would fall from his cheek as he contemplated the vast chasm that still remains between the world that is and the better one that should be. And will be.
The world that’s coming soon. The world that’s already here, and yet still isn’t. The world Jesus says the Father is giddy to give us:
“Fear not, little flock,
For your Father has been pleased to give you the Kingdom.” (Luke 12:32)
In the fog of our present impermanence, let us not lose the hope for renewal.
Let us remember that the whole drama of our long lives in this temporary world is little more than a brief caesura—a break, a vapor, an interruption in God’s intended drama. Our citizenship here is a momentary evil. And we should cry prophetically against it the way springtime cries out against winter. The way our babies cry out against the everyday misfortunes which we tell them are “just life.”
For in a world that is God’s, life must cry out against death. The ground must groan against its curse. Justice against injustice, healing against sickness, joy against grief, peace against predation, hope against despair.
Eden must rage against Exile.
In every baby’s cry there is an echo of that ancient battle, Eden vs. Exile, as well as a fervent re-proclamation of the gospel, through tears, that one day tears must no longer fall.
One day a marvelous world must overtake the bleak real world. Carefree idealism must overtake skepticism. Children must play together with Creation in unthreatened harmony, in bursting color, where there is not a tear, not a problem, not an aching heart of any kind to be found anywhere.
Because any world less than Eden is alien.
Questions of Holy Discontent
Today, whether parent or not (remember, Jesus led a non-romantic, non-married life and he esteemed the presence of children most), consider the prophetic questions babies bring us:
…Hey grown up, have you forgotten the absurdity of the world in its present form? Can you no longer hear it groaning?
…Hey big person, have you become comfortable scraping out a living inside the world’s death economy? Aren’t you tired of death?
…Hey heir of God, are you so well accustomed to Exile that Eden no longer whets your soul’s appetite? Have you settled for the mud puddle, forgetting the ocean’s hope?
In the end it is often not they, the little children, but we, the adults, who need to be re-educated about the true nature of things.
Eden is still not here. Let’s not get too comfortable.
“Behold, I will create new heavens and a new earth. The former things will not be remembered...
The sound of weeping and of crying will be heard in it no more...
The wolf and the lamb will feed together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox…
They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain,
says the Lord.”
