Children of God

In Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred Rogers always spoke slowly and directly to the camera, as if the viewer was right in front of him. Journalist Tom Junod writes, “He could talk to anyone, believing that if you remembered what it was like to be a child, you would remember that you were a child of God.” But what does it entail, to remember you are a child of God? “Precious and lovely are the gracious children in the sight of our heavenly Mother,” writes the fourteenth-century visionary Julian of Norwich in her depiction of Jesus as a loving mother, expanding on scriptural language in the gospels. Julian and Mister Rogers share a core mission to remind people who they are: I am a beloved child of God, and so are you. As children, our relationship with our God is one between dependent and provider, between a self-oriented, limited perspective and a patient, farseeing one, between the beloved and the one overflowing with love.

As God’s children, we all have irreducible loveliness and worth; as God’s children we are little and needy. Yet we bury this identity in sentimentalism, or ignore it. In everything Americans strive to be bigger, faster, stronger—to escape any vestigial bonds of childish limitation or dependence. Our technologies are meant to help us be better and more impressive and get more done. We set the Ivy League scholar at a higher value than the community college dropout; we treasure the president more than a prisoner. I find myself wrestling against the implications of this simple identity, adding caveats, wanting there to be more conditions, more complexity. So often irrelevant to how I live my life, this recognition should radically reshape how we treat other people. If we truly believed that friends, strangers, members of other political parties, parents, spouses, and criminals are inherently valuable children of God, then many common beliefs and behaviors become unacceptable, practices as large as the death penalty, or as small as a snarky Twitter comment.

I have needed teachers to slowly and carefully unpack the resonances and complications in this basic truth of my identity. The strangely matched duo of Julian and Mister Rogers have taught me that I must first learn to recognize myself as a child in order to believe and learn to act upon the reality that everyone I encounter is also God’s beloved child.

Recognizing Our Childlikeness and Our Childishness

In her visionary writings A Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich carefully unpacks the idea of Jesus as a mother and Christians as his children—and like Mister Rogers, firmly believes that if we meditate upon our similarities to children even as grown-ups, we will better understand ourselves. Julian divides the work of self-knowledge into two tasks.

The first is that, “We know ourselves, what we are through [Christ] in nature and in grace,” how we were created to love and be loved in return in our beautifully limited human capacities. At the end of each episode, Mister Rogers would say, “You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.” To know ourselves through Christ in nature and grace is to affirm the truth of Mister Rogers’ statement about the specialness and beauty of each person’s creation. As Mister Rogers hoped to cultivate, and Julian knew, children are better than adults, generally speaking, at accepting and receiving love, and that they are worthy of love.

Julian characterizes the relationship between Mother Jesus and his children with kind, loving belonging; the child belongs with her mother and remains completely dependent on her mother for all her needs: “Naturally the child does not despair of the mother’s love, naturally the child does not overestimate her ability, naturally the child loves the mother…” (ch. 63). The word Julian uses for “naturally” in her native Middle English is kindely, a word which means naturally in this context but which also gave birth to our modern words “kind” and “kin.” Young children happily take what is offered to them in their need. My children teach me this happy, untroubled acceptance of value, need, and gift. My son has no doubt that I will feed him each meal. He would be shocked if I forgot or neglected him. When my youngest daughter falls down, she looks to me for comfort in the midst of her shrieks. She does not regret seeking me out. It’s feature of her immediate trust in me. My oldest daughter will share stories she makes up, confident in their value to me.

In our best and worst moments, Julian understands “no higher stature in this life than childhood, with its feebleness and lack of power and intelligence, until the time that our gracious Mother [Jesus] has brought us up into our Father’s bliss” (ch. 63). At our best, adults become children: we are generous givers and grateful receivers, sharing our need and expecting happily to be shared with. We believe Mister Rogers: we do not doubt that what we have to share with the world is precious and lovely and worthy of attention even though we almost always need help. We rejoice in the good and mourn the bad. We trust that our Parent is good and caring.

Julian also speaks to our limitations with one another: we act carelessly or selfishly within our own ideas and limitations. I unpleasantly discover my casual word choice or action had the effect of a dagger in the back. Often, I reflexively defend my actions instead of acknowledging my foolishness and apologizing wholeheartedly. I make it about me. I carefully craft what I have done into something justifiable, something grown-up. Alternatively, I wound intentionally. Often it’s because we are desperate to show that we are big, or should be taken seriously, to watch the importance of our actions reverberate—exercising our will to dominate. No one fully grasps the damage they have wrought. This lack of understanding does not excuse the action nor does it lessen the severity of its consequences. Julian’s second form of self-knowledge is, “That we humbly know our self with regards to our sin and to our weakness” (ch. 72). Again, seeing ourselves as children can aid us in this task: I have to work to recognize my childish shortsighted sense that the world should revolve around me.

Practicing Littleness

So we are loved and limited, though we resist recognizing it. After one of the early school shootings in 1996, Rogers grieved over the shooter, a fourteen-year-old boy. He had announced to his friends that he was going to do something, “Really big.” Rogers asked, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a different place if he had said, ‘I’m going to do something really little tomorrow’?” He dedicated a whole week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, to the theme of littleness as a joy that necessarily comes before big actions. What might it look like to rejoice in my littleness, rather than rejecting it, self-justifying, or at my worst, seeking to dominate?

Julian of Norwich provides her own illustration of the little life: Mary in the Annunciation. Julian describes Mary as “simple, “meek,” only a little larger than a child, and sees the wisdom of her soul:

I understood the reverent beholding that she beheld her God, that is her maker, marveling with great reverence that he would be born of her that was a simple creature of his making. For this was her marveling: that he her maker would be born of her that was made. And this wisdom and truth, knowing the greatness of her maker and the littleness of herself who was made, made her say full meekly to Gabriel: “Lo, here I am, God’s handmaiden…” (ch. 4).

Julian repeats words to emphasize: little, made, and marvel. Mary is at peace in her knowledge that she is created small, living in the glory of the Maker. She marvels, and reminds me that no small part of the little life is marveling and rejoicing, playing in creation. The little life invites us to marvel at our good bodies and minds, and the privilege that we, the little ones, somehow give and receive magnificent gifts.

Fred Rogers helps us, too. He deliberately made his program simple, slow, with moments of silence in order to dwell in what was happening right at that moment, zeroing in on the littleness. When Rogers testified in front of Congress in 1969 to save the funding of public television, he argued that teaching children that feelings are, “Mentionable and manageable” was a public service, “It’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing… gunfire.” Rogers would talk to the camera about the sadness we feel when a pet dies, or the fear that children were experiencing after Robert Kennedy’s assassination. No subject was too scary or too unimportant when approached with care and attention to little bodies with big feelings.

Mister Rogers knew that practicing littleness is not the same thing as diminishing yourself or others. I would never want my children to forget themselves and their gifts, or be satisfied as they trample over or are trampled by others. One cannot shrink or ignore natural neediness without great harm to oneself. At different moments each one of us has avoided a feeling that felt too big, or a conflict that escalated, or the troubling fruits of our collective past. And the results are often painful and filled with regret.

Acceptance of our need is also challenging because we live in a world that weaponizes or monetizes our vulnerability. It is hard to see the child in people doing evil in the world. Enemies do not go away because I know them as fellow children of God. How am I supposed to love my enemy as a child of God, as Jesus told me? When I’m hungry I struggle for kindness even with my own beloved children. There’s no easy answer, but there are some little acts.

I am learning to reject the cultural messaging of my childhood: I can’t do it all if I only put my mind to it. I can do little things, like eat lunch to enjoy my created body and to give myself the best possible chance at loving my children well. I imitate my children as they rejoice in their victories, and marvel at the strange beauty of a world that includes Jesus, octopi, and ice cream. Like a child reading challenging yet age-appropriate books, I try to abstain from materials that feed my easily-provoked hatred while not shutting the world out. I listen to people with different life stories and backgrounds than mine, to learn that I do not know everyone’s life and have not experienced other people’s pain. Sometimes I must then act on that newfound knowledge in particular ways. Children are under authority; they are held accountable for their actions by their parents, by Jesus. It does not mean I do not feel or deny what I feel; like a child learning about sadness and anger on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, I am learning to welcome and explore the big feelings that feel so awful in the moment.

As a child of God, I hold together my worth and my weakness, which are joyfully inseparable. When the last triumphs over the first, I lose sight of who I am. When I ignore the second, I succumb to the temptation of believing myself to be the center of the universe. And I recall, sometimes with pain and anger, that both these facts are true of others whether or not they recognize it. Such a realization, if held tightly, inflects every single interaction we have, from the small to the enormous: I work on speaking kindly to the fellow child of God, the internet customer service person, and I work on not hating the fellow child of God, the politician who uses religion for his own ends.

I remember those who lived little and through that littleness gave enormous gifts to the world. Mister Rogers set out to make a good and true children’s television show at a small public broadcasting station in Pittsburgh. In that narrow goal, he told countless children that they are loved without condition. Julian lived as an anchorite, never leaving where she lived and prayed. Yet from the cell in Norwich six hundred years ago, she still reminds us who we are, and who God is.

Julian of Norwich and Mister Rogers remind all of us to take Jesus in the Lord’s Prayer at his word: I am God’s child, wildly valuable, small and weak. Like a child learning to walk, I fall down over and over as I keep practicing my steps towards loving others. And in our falls and our walking, God gives us the gift of himself: turn, and become like children, and you shall receive the kingdom of Heaven.