The Faith of a Child

I recently had dinner with one of the Denver Jesuits who asked me directly about my faith, what do I believe? I gave my usual answer, that I have a hard time balancing belief with my resolve that I should really only accept all the things I can perceive rationally. How can we know, really understand, things that are so profound that they defy the very human capacity for knowledge? I told him that when I think of God today it's not a big, bearded guy looking down on everything we do, but instead more of the pure energy that experts now say was the cause of the Big Bang and the beginning of our universe. Yet even then that energy can't encompass everything that is God.

That Jesuit then asked me if I remembered how the Gospels said we should trust in God with the faith of a child. I for one am not the best biblical scholar, yet that did sound vaguely familiar. I left the conversation saying one of my favorite lines "I don't know yet" and thought about it for the next few days. Then, on Saturday night while I was driving home after seeing one of my favorite childhood movies, Return of the Jedi, at Town Center, it occurred to me that I'd been doing this all along. For me, having childlike faith means having faith in the dreams that have kept me motivated through the last 27 years of schooling. It means working towards things that seem like impossible dreams today, healing our climate for example, that have possibility tomorrow. My last contribution to this column was in defense of dreaming, and today with all the rotten things going on around us, I think we need to be able to dream more than ever.

Oh Lord, may our days glow with joy.

Seán is a Ph.D. Candidate in History at Binghamton University focusing on the Americas in Renaissance Natural History. He is currently writing his dissertation "Trees, Sloths, and Birds: Brazil in Sixteenth-Century Natural History". He is also the creator of a podcast The Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane which can be found here.