At Crisis Magazine, I revisited the topic that got this blog off the ground: the difference between being childlike and childish. Our current culture encourages us to get in touch with our “inner child,” which sounds harmless and even potentially helpful. Pulling that thread, however, reveals that there is a big difference between this imagined inner child and the reborn child of God we aspire to become.
As I wrote in my first blog post in January 2021:
So many of us, then, choose never to fully enter adulthood. The obligations of life often necessitate actions that used to be reserved for the mature and responsible in our society, so one might erroneously assume this means some people still come of age. However, signing a mortgage and begetting children are no longer viewed as an attainable identity, being an adult, but simply a set of activities undertaken while play-acting, the concept of “adulting.”
As a perpetual child masquerading as a grown-up some of the time, we miss out on the opportunity to choose. Our choices are constrained and limited, which is why it is all the more important we exercise them when the opportunity arises. Virtues are the path to true freedom.
Being childlike, as the Gospels exhort us, requires us to become a little child in the Kingdom of God, not a self-obsessed and immature version of ourselves.
You can read the article here.
