Young children as mystics

Confusion, and the need to find what I believed around people who did not believe precisely the same things I believed, has characterized a good deal of my faith journey in Christ. I have frequently associated with churches, not because of their formal doctrinal stance, but because of the people who were there–because I felt God had called me to participate in the lives of those people (and them in mine). It was more about relationship that creed, which, I now recognize, describes my relationship with God as well. It is a friendship–sometimes a stormy friendship, and always a friendship in which I need to recognize that he is in charge–but a friendship nonetheless.

My earliest memories of a church come from a Congregational church my birth family attended from the time I was 4 or 5 until I was 11. We attended that church mainly for two reasons: 1) as a liberal Christian church, it was a good compromise between my mother’s conservative Southern Baptist upbringing and my father’s agnosticism, and 2) my parents were good friends of the senior minister and his wife (so I learned early the concept of going to church for the people in it). In fact, the minister’s family included two sons about my age, who were my best friends (and still are my friends).

During the time I was in that church, I should have “learned,” as most children do at that age, that God does not speak to me. I have observed that most young children–at least those in my culture–believe God speaks to them, and, moreover, trust him (though they also trust the other invisible voices which speak to them, which is the danger). Most young children appear to be, as I was, mystics in the wide sense of that term, and there are published secular child psychologists who agree with that assessment. As Jesus himself said:

Truly I say to you, unless you are converted and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of the heavens. Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of the heavens.

Matthew 18:3-4

Young children also believe in invisible friends who converse with them, and in other invisible things.

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible.

Hebrews 11:1-3 (NASB)

But adults in my culture usually gently correct them–“Ian, you know Johnny [your invisible friend] isn’t real…”. After such things are said repeatedly, and the child matures, eventually the invisible friend is outgrown. The adults responsible for raising young children in my culture generally likewise discourage the child’s belief that he or she can talk to God–even when the adult authority figure actually believes that God exists and has sometimes spoken to people. God is real, but the child’s conversation with him isn’t. The adults in this situation learned as children that their own conversations with God weren’t “real,” and therefore actively pass this cultural “knowledge” on to their children. Most children learn by the time they are in the early school grades that, if there is a God, he never speaks to them, even though at a younger age they believed he did.

I recognize, of course, that, in many other cultures, children are taught that some god, or gods, or spirits, can talk to people, and are taught to be open to some such experiences–but generally only in “safe” cultural ritual settings. But who or what invisible voices people in these other cultures are speaking with is a matter for another, much later, post. In the early 1960s modern white Anglo-Saxon Protestant American culture in which I grew up, the received cultural “knowledge” was that the invisible voices–even those of God–are all imaginary, just like my invisible friend, and should be ignored. This is still true of the public culture, in education, government and media, of the United States today.

Well, that is something I never fully learned. I did learn that my imaginary friends weren’t real. And I did learn not to talk about God talking to me, because of the embarrassing consequences that would follow if I said God had told me something. The experience of thinking I was hearing God became less frequent as I approached my teen years and wanted to go my own way–that voice often rained on my plans if I listened to it. But it never went away, and I never came completely to regard it as fictional or imaginary.

The Existence of Invisible Things

God Speaks to Us