The Loss of Innocence

Children in their innocence illustrate the character of God’s kingdom. Jesus told the ancient Jews, “Unless you are converted and become like children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven.” That seems clear and obvious to many of us who read or hear the Bible almost daily. For we see children and admire their unaffected ways, their spontaneity and their unpretentiousness. Nevertheless, many fail to truly comprehend the value of what the Lord taught.

Is the purity of childhood such a non-renewable quality we adults find useless or difficult to attain? Take for instance their capacity to derive gleeful fun from things and situations that we adult already consider passé or wearisome. Compare the seriousness and fuss we put into big-boys’ games or toys such as basketball, racing and football. Kids, on the other hand, roll marbles on the dirt, ride their bikes on the grass and kick a ball around with abandon and without regard to the many strict rules and appurtenant rewards we put into “playing games”. The main difference being not the amount of thrill derived from “the moment itself” but the quest to land in the “hall of fame”. Hence, the highlights and statistics that sports networks flash onscreen record not the intrinsic worth of the game but the so-called “glory of triumph” and even the “agony of defeat”. And all that is supposedly done in the name and the excitement of business-as-usual competition.

Children do not think in terms of such high-valued -- or more precisely, high-priced – post-games intramurals. But mind you, many kids nowadays are no longer safely protected from the pernicious mentality that adults inevitably impose upon them. Computer games are what they are – violently sophisticated, ultra-realistic and mind-and-soul warping – because of what adults want kids to become. Or is it, because of what kids want from what they see adults do and what adults therefore end up giving the kids? The whole process seems to defy analysis but the shakers are way ahead in the money game, too. Use the kids to find out what sells to kids because their parents would want them to have it. In the meantime, parents are hard put to point a finger on why their children behave the way they do.

Will the time come then when the real gap between adults and children disappear? Or at least, diminished to a vanishing or negligible degree such that the world will have lost all vestiges of innocence? A terrifying thought, one that presages the disappearance of guilt as a social deterrent. That is, guilt as we still know it to be: the result of losing one’s innocence or the effect of violating the laws of life. Thus, in a guiltless-ridden society no law will apply; hence, a lawless society arises. Nervously, we sense that day coming upon us soon.

It used to be that bikini-clad dancers pranced and wiggled only inside dark, smoky bars. But now they shamelessly hump in front of TV cameras for tots and grandpas to watch. Innocence? What childhood innocence are we trying to preserve or protect as a Christian nation? On the contrary, we have allowed the unconverted and the perverted to rule over our society and altered the normal process of the human development. Do we think that the degradation of the ecology came without the corresponding decay in human character? The Apostles John wrote hundreds of years ago in the Book of Revelation about those who will suffer hell for “destroying the Earth”. Moral or spiritual decay naturally leads to total physical decay. Sin causes death, as obviously as children become adults.

How do adults become un-childlike then? What happens to them to make them lose their innocence? They, or should we say, their parents or guardians, often expect them to emulate adults who are unconverted. Simply said, the world’s standards – not the Lord’s -- become their own. Adam and Eve led the way to the loss of innocence. Since then, every generation has been given a chance to gain it back.

Children, in general, gain the basic moral and emotional foundations of life from elementary and high school. College merely adds more knowledge and a sense of sophistication. Hence, early on, we attain a more or less completed character or personality that is necessary for good or meaningful social behavior, ideally that is. What we were at around 12 years of age – give or take 5 to 7 years -- somehow defined what we are morally now in essence. A diligent person learned early to be so as a child. Conversely, a criminally-minded adult came to be so from teenage years. Many of our habits and even mannerisms we have had as children.

For most cultures, the traditional age range of 18 to 21 marks the point when a person starts to lose parental-control and gains self-independence. Young enough to be excusably childish at times, yet old enough to make responsible decisions. Interestingly, it also signals what many refer to as the age when one is allowed to lose one’s innocence. The fact that it now occurs at 14 or 15 bothers many people. How does one effectively admonish a pubescent kid to convert into a child in order to enter the kingdom? As a high school teacher, I did so in so many ways and on so many occasions. I know at least two instances when lack of self-control led to teenage pregnancies. A sudden and tragic way of losing one’s childhood and innocence at a time when life begins to beckon.

Perhaps, the ancients had it so right when they gave their daughters into marriage at 12 or 13, at an age when every person who has ever been young knows the impossibility of dousing the blinding fire of carnality. Ironically, today we have succeeded in teaching people to wait as long as they can until they are emotionally and financially capable to marry. Yes, marriage can wait but, sex? There are many ways of hiding in the guise of false innocence or of lessening the inescapable guilt from the loss of it. We are adults expected to be adults and not, as the good Lord said, children of the kingdom. Yet the Lord clearly said: no impure thing enters the kingdom. God doesn’t have to prevent us; our own guilt prevents us from entering. Claiming back our innocence is the key.

We live in a time of freedom, of experimentation, of cloning and of extreme experiences. The senses seek to taste the knowable as well as the unknowable. What we can have – money, pleasure and power – we must have. Why not indeed? What we cannot have – the infinite power to have and to create what we want – we may have. Who cares for such things anyway? Only adults do, not children.

(Photo above: Cotton clouds above dead pine tree and house in Baguio City.)