by Graham Adams, Tutor in Mission Studies, World Christianity and Religious Diversity at Luther King Centre for Theology and Ministry, in Manchester
To enter God’s alternative kingdom (a realm where the world is turned upside-down), Jesus tells us to ‘become like little children’. I wonder whether this is not only because the realm itself has a childlike quality to it, but because the one who shapes it also does. But despite increasing appreciation of the need for a variety of metaphors to reflect the fullness of God’s mystery, most of our metaphors remain essentially adult (father, mother, parent, judge, king, midwife, etc). Perhaps we are so conditioned by the prevailing power of ‘adultness’, along with the other ways in which ideologies become idols, that our childlike imagination has been constrained.
In my new book, God the Child, I am therefore not searching for a cute or innocent vision of God, as though to focus on Jesus’ early years. Nor is it about replacing all adult metaphors, but adding to them, and in some respects destabilising them. Its primary purpose is to ask what happens when we give focused attention to childlike metaphors – and how this can shape our sense of the world, both the world as it is and the world as it might become.
In particular, it examines the questions of God’s omnipresence, omnipotence and omniscience, in order to draw out different childlike emphases – namely, the smallness of a child’s hand, present in and receptive to all belittled experiences and overlooked potential; the seeming weakness of a chaos-event, which nevertheless initiates disproportionate change, messing with the rules of our adult games in pursuit of deeper justice; and the curiosity of the horizon-seeker, empathetically yearning for greater understanding of diverse experience, making friends across borders, and encouraging us to do the same.
So here, for instance, I affirm divine smallness –
God is small. Small enough to be in the spaces which we neglect. The spaces we forget. The cracks. The hollows. The hideaways. Where broken toys are lost. Where the little can squeeze, either for some sense of safety, or because the giants have backed them into a corner. God is small enough to be in the margins, places of shame which are vast yet overlooked, or sites of new beginnings, ridiculous in their insignificance, but from where surprises and transformations emerge or burst, or resurrect…
Here we greet, or are greeted by, God the Child: small enough to give value to every instance of brokenness and every site of recreation, in their very unnoticed-ness.
(God the Child pp.28, 31)
Paying attention to ‘sites of smallness’ can help us not to romanticise childness; not to ignore the many real struggles of children’s experience, such as abuse, neglect, hunger, violence, lack of agency, and so on – and similarly, not to ignore adults’ pain with regards to childness: child loss, pregnancy loss, childlessness, memories of childhood traumas and so forth. God the Child, in a sense inarticulate in the face of such anguish, offers a different kind of solidarity in the midst of what might be overlooked. At the same time, I acknowledge that I am selecting certain traits – much as we select certain traits for our vision of divine adultness – and giving them a positive meaning. Of course, ‘chaos’ is not always creative or constructive – it pulls down and overthrows, just as the child Jeremiah was commissioned, in addition to building and planting – so I recognise that these ideas can be experienced in different ways. But so can our adult metaphors.
It was also important that, in addition to the adult prose of a theology book, some of it should be expressed more playfully, creatively and poetically. Ultimately, though, I think I’m not only striving for a rediscovery of our own childlike imagination, but seeking to uncover something of God’s childlike imagination – again, this is not to romanticise it, as though to overlook the struggles of real children or any who are belittled, but to understand that such imagination does two things. God’s childlikeness not only faces the world as it is – what I call ‘the colonial matrix of adult power’, which ‘schools’ us, or conditions us, into accepting prevailing norms and patterns as inevitable – but also dares us to envisage the world as it might become. This is aided by other liberative theologies which stretch and enrich it – like Black theology, disability theology, and queer theologies. They help to expand on the location of God the Child, in solidarity with all who are belittled; the agency of God the Child, struggling against systems which disable it; and the transgressiveness of God the Child, moving across borders.
These possibilities are gathered together in this re-working of a familiar prayer –
God, our heavenly Child,
May you be praised in all creation!
May your imaginative scribbles of a new world come into being,
May your dreams and visions be fulfilled on earth.
May we give and receive, inspired by your open hand, until everyone has what they need.
May we change our minds, learn and forgive, as you show us how to let go.
May you fly a kite that guides us, caught up in the breath of hope, towards better horizons.
May you show us how to rage against what is unfair and cruel, until these things crumble.
For your chaos-power, your glorious imagination, and your wonder-full dream of new creation fill us with hope and determination,
Now and always, Amen
(God the Child, p.122)
Any thoughts?