I. The Call to Ecological Conversion
In an interview in 1963, biologist and author of Silent Spring Rachel Carson said, “We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a tiny part of a vast and incredible universe.”Footnote 1 For decades, environmental activists and educators like Carson have urged humanity to change the way we think and act. Facing rising temperatures, dying oceans, eroded soil, polluted air, and a mass extinction of species, they have called for a transformation of consciousness and habit that will enable humans to perceive and respond to a growing planetary crisis.Footnote 2
The call for a multidimensional, radical change of consciousness and habit has prompted some Christian theological thinkers to speak of the need for humanity's conversion.Footnote 3 Most notable is the 2015 papal encyclical, Laudato Si’.Footnote 4 In invoking conversion, theologians draw upon the New Testament and Christian spiritual tradition, in which conversion signals a transformation of mind, heart, habits, and loyalties; a new self emerges in relation to God and others, in Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit (Col 3:9–11).
To call for ecological conversion signals the radicality of the human change demanded by the planetary crisis while pointing to an ongoing process.Footnote 5 Pope Francis writes, “Many things have to change course, but it is we human beings above all who need to change,” developing “new convictions, attitudes and forms of life” (§202) in “a profound interior conversion” (§217). Elizabeth Johnson offers content to that conversion: ecological conversion means “falling in love with the earth as an inherently valuable, living community in which we participate, and bending every effort to be creatively faithful to its well-being, in tune with the living God who brought it into being and cherishes it with unconditional love.”Footnote 6 Denis Edwards argues that ecological conversion entails changes in our ways of thinking, seeing, feeling, acting, living, and praying.Footnote 7 For Christians, ecological conversion extends proper Christian faith to care for the planet, though as Neil Ormerod and Christina Vanin have argued, it has “potential for use within an interfaith context.”Footnote 8
In one sense, the call to ecological conversion is a call to maturity, a demand that we take adult responsibility for the planetary consequences of our actions. But what if ecological conversion is as much about “growing down” as it is about growing up?
In this article, I draw on the grammatical ambiguity of Mark 10:15 to argue that ecological conversion is a twofold conversion to the child. One conversion is a turn to the well-being of children in an age of climate crisis, which involves an adult personal transformation into the role of caregiver—and thus greater maturity. The other conversion is a recovery of certain childlike capacities—a “going back” or “growing down.” To explore this theme, I turn to theological work on childhood by the nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, showing how his vision of childhood capacities resonates with ecological consciousness as described in Laudato Si’. I enrich Schleiermacher's discussion with observations about three other characteristics of children (animism, urgency, and love of the small). Together, the “turn” and “return” to the child constitute a more holistic maturity relevant to ecological conversion. I conclude by suggesting practical implications of this vision of conversion.
II. “Unless You Receive the Kingdom as a Child”: The Serendipitous Ambiguity of Mark 10:15
The English word “conversion” has several sources in the Hebrew Scriptures and New Testament. In Hebrew, shuv means “to turn,” “return,” or “make an about-face,” and is used in prophetic calls for the people to return to God. The Greek equivalent of shuv is strepho or epistrepho. Both John the Baptist and Jesus preach the gospel amid a call to metanoia, often translated “repentance,” which entails not only sorrow over one's past ways but also a change of heart, mind, and life. The apostle Paul also uses metamorphosis, which indicates transformation (Rom 12:2).Footnote 9
In addition to words translated as “conversion” or “transformation,” the New Testament also frequently invokes imagery of infants or children to describe the new life. For example, in John 3, Jesus tells the Jewish teacher Nicodemus he must be “born again” (or born “from above”). 1 Peter 2:2 urges new Christians to be like “newborn babies” who “crave spiritual milk.” In Matthew 18:2–4, Jesus tells his disciples, “Unless you change [strepho] and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Whoever becomes humble like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” Jesus identifies himself with children in Mark 9:37: Ὃς ἂν ἓν τῶν τοιούτων παιδίων δέξηται ἐπὶ τῷ ὀνόματί μου, ἐμὲ δέχεται (Whoever receives [or welcomes] one such child in my name receives [or welcomes] me).” In Mark 10:14, he rebukes his disciples for turning children away, saying, “It is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs” (NRSV). He then declares in 10:15, “Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it” (ὃς ἂν μὴ δέξηται τὴν βασιλείαν τοῦ θεοῦ ὡς παιδίον, οὐ μὴ εἰσέλθῃ εἰς αὐτήν). This teaching from Mark 10:15 is usually taken to mean that children are to be models for adults, which agrees with the Matthew 18 text. Thus, the NIV reads: “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.”
Yet the Greek grammar of Mark 10:15 is ambiguous; it is unclear whether “as a child” refers to the adult disciple who should become childlike, to the “receiving” the disciple should do, or to a kingdom that is like a child. Translating δέξηται (receive) as “welcome,” New Testament scholar Peter Spitaler thus argues that Mark 10:15 is better translated, “to welcome the kingdom as one welcomes a child.”Footnote 10 In this interpretation, the act of receiving or welcoming a child is a parable of the kingdom. According to Spitaler, Mark's “Jesus embraces a child to demonstrate that he welcomes God's kingdom; his action does not reveal that he is welcoming the kingdom in a child-like manner.”Footnote 11 This has ethical consequences: “Comparing welcoming God's kingdom to welcoming a child … motivates social change. The disciples must act like adults, not like children, and demonstrate hospitality toward persons whose status they do not share.”Footnote 12
What is the status of children to which Jesus refers? Shelley Campagnola describes children's status in the ancient world:
The child is on the outside, not included in the inner circle of those who think they have the way to God. The child is on the bottom, not considered eligible for recognition or participation and thus does not seek those. The child is powerless, voiceless, defenseless, claimless, forgotten and forsaken.Footnote 13
In line with this emphasis on the social location of children, Joyce Mercer comments on Mark 10, “Belonging to/receiving/entering the kingdom of God comes from solidarity with—and not separation from—those who are the lowliest and the least, the most vulnerable to the hardships of imperial oppression.”Footnote 14
Before us, then, are two interpretations with quite different practical implications: first, adults’ welcoming children is akin to welcoming the kingdom, or second, the more traditional, adults ought to become like children. Rather than deciding between these two possibilities, I suggest that the ambiguity is serendipitous. It points to two visions of children in the Christian tradition, which sees them as both “models of faith and sources of revelation” and as “orphans, neighbors, and strangers in need of justice and compassion.”Footnote 15 In both cases, the disciple experiences a “conversion to the child,” whether the child without or the child within. These two images of children will ground the twofold view of ecological conversion I wish to elaborate.
III. Speaking of Children
To speak of children requires some definition. The United Nations defines a child as “a human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier,”Footnote 16 a definition helpful for legal and ethical purposes. However, given the fact that the gospels refer to a paidíon (infant or little child), this article will focus on children in infancy through puberty, while not excluding older youth.
It must be acknowledged that any discussion of children risks essentializing them (biologically, psychologically, or socially). As Mercer points out, it is problematic to ignore both the differences between different children and the social and historical conditions that lead to the construction of images of children.Footnote 17 Edmund Newey is correct when he writes, “As portrayed by the mature human being, the child is an imaginary construct, never innocent of the author's cultural preconceptions,” which means that “attempts to enter into the experience of the child” are “inevitably partial: both incomplete and subjective.”Footnote 18 This is especially the case in Christian theological discourse, where the idea that adults must become like children positions children as foils to adults in relation to adult concerns.
Despite these concerns, there are strategic reasons to attend to certain groups of humans in their commonalities, as well as for adults to theorize children.Footnote 19 As Mercer has argued, if we cannot speak of children as a group, we run the risk that “children and childhood will disappear from being subjects of theology”Footnote 20 just as they and their caretakers are taking the theological stage.Footnote 21
Omitting children from theological and ethical discourse is especially problematic in the context of environmental crisis. A burning planet has real costs. Lives, human and otherwise, are at stake. Among these lives are those of young human beings. David Hutchinson points to this reality when he describes childhood as “a unique and vulnerable phase within the human life cycle deserving of greater protective status than that afforded to adults.”Footnote 22 While he explores the cultural construction of childhood,Footnote 23 he also affirms “certain inherent differences between children and adults,” primarily that children are physically and psychologically less powerful than adults.Footnote 24 In consequence, children are “dependent on adults for care and support all through childhood.”Footnote 25 Not to speak of children out of fear of falling into essentialism is to abdicate responsibility for these vulnerable ones.
Given the context of climate crisis and children's vulnerability, I consider it worth the risks to discuss children as a category, while acknowledging that what follows involves generalizations that surely have exceptions. Moreover, my observations undoubtedly reflect the cultural moment of the early twenty-first century and my identity as a white female Protestant practical theologian, educator, and parent.
IV. Growing Out: Ecological Conversion as a Turn to Children's Well-Being
Maturity and responsibility are dominant themes in Laudato Si’. The encyclical urges the development of “a sound ethics, a culture and spirituality genuinely capable of setting limits and teaching clear-minded self-restraint” (§105). It calls its audience to reflect on our “accountability before those who will have to endure the dire consequences” (§161) and to reject immaturity marked by lack of self-restraint (§105), selfishness (§230), and “a self-centered culture of instant gratification” (§162). It describes an “education of environmental responsibility” (§211) led by educators who are “capable of developing an ethics of ecology, and helping people, through effective pedagogy, to grow in solidarity, responsibility and compassionate care” (§210).
Linking conversion with maturity resonates with twentieth-century Christian theological work on Christian conversion. Protestant theologian James Fowler describes conversion as the discovery and pursuit of human vocation. He writes, “Conversion … is not so much a negation of our human development as it is a transformation and fulfillment of it. It is not so much a denial of our adulthood as it is the liberation and empowerment of our adulthood toward entering into partnership with God.”Footnote 26 Jesuit theologian Bernard Lonergan describes conversion as a process of self-transcendenceFootnote 27 that involves self-appropriation, in which we move from being “drifters,” morally and psychologically speaking, to taking ourselves in hand, thinking and living with purpose.Footnote 28 Elaborating on Lonergan's work, and acknowledging Fowler's approach, Walter Conn relates developmental theory to conversion, arguing that natural human development and conversion are both necessary in the human movement toward self-transcendence and authenticity.Footnote 29
Brilliant as these conversion-as-maturity narratives are, they tend to emphasize adult experiences of themselves as free moral agents and to neglect the themes of children and caregiving. Yet if we follow Spitaler's interpretation of Mark 10:15, in which adults demonstrate their discipleship by welcoming children, ecological conversion takes on a new dimension; we must consider the situation of children amid environmental crises.
What is the situation of children on a threatened planet? In 2016, Princeton University and the Brookings Institute coproduced an issue of the journal The Future of Children dedicated to the topic of children and climate change. In it, Janet Currie and Oliver Deschênes write, “Today's children and future generations will bear a disproportionate share of the burden of climate change, which will affect child wellbeing through many direct, indirect, and societal pathways.”Footnote 30 They explain why children are so often the victims:
Compared with adults, children are physically more vulnerable to the direct effects of extreme heat, drought, and natural disasters. Climate change's indirect effects can also derail children's developmental trajectories—for example, through conflict, vector-borne diseases, economic dislocation, undernutrition, or migration—making it harder for them to reach their full potential. As some of the most vulnerable members of society, children generally suffer whenever there is social upheaval.Footnote 31
The research in The Future of Children traces the impact of rising temperatures on fetuses and children,Footnote 32 the impact of climate-fueled conflicts and natural disasters on children,Footnote 33 the effects of pollution on children,Footnote 34 and the overall effects of climate change on children in developing countries.Footnote 35 Currie and Deschênes conclude, “For a large share of the world's population, climate change is here and now and not merely some future problem.Footnote 36
Climate change, is, of course, also a future problem, one current generations are handing to future generations. Laudato Si’ is explicit about what adults owe coming generations, asking, “What kind of world do we want to leave to those who come after us, to children who are now growing up?” (§160). This question is rooted in the conviction that “the common good also extends to future generations” (§159). The encyclical comments:
Once we start to think about the kind of world we are leaving to future generations, we look at things differently; we realize that the world is a gift which we have freely received and must share with others…. Intergenerational solidarity is not optional, but rather a basic question of justice, since the world we have received also belongs to those who will follow us. (§159)
To address that future, adults today must change our ways of thinking and living. This is one way of caring for children.
Care for children also involves their education, the formation of their imaginations and loves. Environmental educator David Orr articulates the need for a “biophilia revolution,” in which humans become lovers of the Earth. That revolution, he argues, involves children. In a remarkable reference to Mark 10 in an otherwise non-Christian source, Orr writes, “We will not enter this new kingdom of sustainability until we allow our children the kind of childhood in which biophilia can put down roots.”Footnote 37 For this to happen, “we must take our children seriously enough to preserve their natural childhood,” which calls for “the establishment of more natural places, places of mystery and adventure where children can roam, explore, and imagine.”Footnote 38 In ecological conversion, children become an object of adult concern, and their future a central ethical criterion. In this way, adults welcome actual children, present and future.
Such welcoming is transformative for the adults who do it. As any parent knows, to welcome a child into one's life—especially for those who welcome children permanently into the center of their lives—is also to change. In pregnancy, a woman's body makes space for and allocates enormous resources to support the growing fetus; the first trimester is exhausting because one's body is rearranging itself so dramatically, growing and changing shape and chemistry.
Once born, children affect every aspect of their caregiver's life: sleep, time, body, energy, conversation, and plans for the future. Friends of mine recently became foster parents to an infant, and they have remarked on the sudden rearrangement of their life: new furniture, new baby gear, new sleep patterns, new interdependence on each other and their community. To become a primary caregiver to a child means to have the center of one's concern moved outside one's self and into the future: one becomes, however partially or involuntarily, self-transcendent. Even small things are altered, like the contents of one's pockets (today: a toddler's sock, a child's glove, three Lego blocks). Welcoming children entails a radical new becoming. I do not just care for children; I become a caregiver. Welcoming children changes me.
I am not arguing that to experience ecological conversion, one must become a primary caregiver to children (though concern for children as vulnerable is essential). Rather, the experience of caregiving for children (in its diverse forms) can be a parable of the changes one undergoes in ecological conversion, which is also a conversion to caring and caregiving.
I am a mother, and the effects of my children on my life are both constraining and enabling. Constraining: with young children at home, I cannot simply get myself ready and walk out of the house and go where I like. I must feed and clothe small people (who often run away in the process); pack diapers, snacks, water, and spare clothes; and wait for the kids to gather the toys they insist on bringing. I can no longer sleep in. I cannot read quietly in a corner, uninterrupted. I cannot finish an adult conversation at home. I cannot afford a big vacation because I am paying for childcare. I cannot stay late at work. I cannot cook a meal without considering whether my children will eat it. I can no longer maintain the illusion that I am a patient person. Caring for children is limiting, constraining.
But the effects of welcoming a child are also enabling: I get to smell the top of an infant's head—or remember that smell—and feel the cascade of endorphins. I see that infant learn to turn over and later crawl and then walk and talk, a slowly unfolding miracle of development. I notice new things: with children, I examine sweet gum pods on the sidewalk and investigate “worm houses” in the grass. I encounter people I would otherwise never meet—babysitters, other parents, schoolteachers, Sunday School teachers, my children's friends. I laugh at the delightfully funny things my children say and consider questions (do robins migrate?) that had not occurred to me. I get to help a child imagine the world, and imagine it better. I get to experience love for a child, and the world through a child.
Welcoming a child is constraining and enabling, so it is in ecological care. In ecological conversion, as we develop love for the Earth and its creatures, that love begins to affect every area of our life: our thoughts and dreams, our spending choices, our political actions, our worship. There are things I may no longer do, like buying cheap without regard for impact, eating high on the food chain, or voting only according to self-serving criteria. But new possibilities have also opened: I can give and receive items in a Buy Nothing group, patronize a farmer's market, attend education events about the state of the recycling industry, befriend concerned citizens across social and economic lines, and participate in a trash audit at the local elementary school. These new possibilities are not just obligations, but new sources of joy, new ways of being in a world I care about.
Strikingly, Laudato Si’ turns at its end to the example of Mary, who “now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world” and also to Joseph, who “can teach us how to show care; he can inspire us to work with generosity and tenderness in protecting this world which God has entrusted to us” (§§241–242). The gesture to these two parents suggests that, even as ecological conversion involves welcoming, it also implies a new becoming—becoming spiritual caregivers to a larger world that places demands upon us, constrains our actions, and opens us out in love. It is a growing out.
V. Growing Down: Ecological Conversion as Retrieval of Childlike Capacities
The previous discussion focuses on children as “orphans, neighbors, and strangers in need of justice and compassion,” as well as “gifts of God and sources of joy.”Footnote 39 To see children this way is to hear the call to become caregivers—for children and for the Earth that sustains them. Yet seeing children as spiritual models has a venerable history and is consonant with Matthew 18. What does it mean to see children as models? The work of nineteenth-century Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher is an instructive starting place.Footnote 40 I will describe major themes in his work that suggest the theological richness of seeing children as models, after which I will offer three other ways in which children might serve as models in an age of climate crisis.
Schleiermacher on Conversion to Childhood
Schleiermacher (1768–1834) is often called the father of modern liberal theology. A German theologian, professor, and pastor, he sought to integrate Enlightenment thinking, romanticism's emphasis on imagination and feeling, and Christian theology. Edmund Newey perceives in Schleiermacher the conviction that childhood is “less a unique and protected period than a stage in human life” that is wisely “drawn into relationship with life's other stages.”Footnote 41 Youth is, for Schleiermacher, “an attitude that should remain with the human being throughout life.”Footnote 42 Thus, Schleiermacher comments, “Being a child should not prevent becoming an adult; becoming an adult should not prevent being a child.”Footnote 43 The two phases of life together bring wholeness: “Youth is characterized by vitality and passion. It seeks for answers and self-expression. Age is the time of prudent circumspection, caution, the ability to weigh costs and benefits.”Footnote 44 Adult life, however, can become stale, passionless, or self-satisfied.
Schleiermacher is an especially helpful source for a discussion of ecological conversion and children in that he explicitly links conversion and childhood. This is clear in his 1806 novella, The Celebration of Christmas. The work, Newey explains, “is best seen as an attempt to evoke the mood of Christmas, the celebration of the birth of the Christ-child, in which children are held to have a central and exemplary role.”Footnote 45 Its central character is Sofie, a girl of about ten years old, who is “both startlingly precocious and endearingly naïve.”Footnote 46 Through various discussions with and about Sofie, the author contrasts restrained, cynical, or anxious adults with the emotionally present Sofie, who embodies “the spontaneous response to fellow humans and to God that Schleiermacher sees as the essence of human life.”Footnote 47 Sofie becomes the theologian's “ideal of humanity,”Footnote 48 as well as “a catalyst who unselfconsciously reminds the adults of the seasonal call to childlikeness … which is also a call to share in the ongoing event of the incarnation.”Footnote 49 Dawn Devries summarizes the lesson exemplified in Sofie: “For those who, through advancing years, have become alienated from the childlike, a conversion is necessary—a conversion to become as a little child.”Footnote 50 Displaying Sofie in the context of the celebration of the Incarnation effectively points to the theological content of conversion to the child: even as the adult retrieves childlike capacities, the adult also experiences conversion to the Christ Child, in whom we encounter the God who became a child.
Schleiermacher's legacy is apparent today. Environmentalist Rachel Carson wrote in the mid-twentieth century: “A child's world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood.”Footnote 51 Schleiermacher believed it possible to recover a “clear-eyed vision” in an adult conversion to childhood.Footnote 52 Laudato Si’ briefly agrees. The encyclical mentions return to childhood places: “[For] anyone who has grown up in the hills or used to sit by the spring to drink, or played outdoors in the neighbourhood square … going back to these places is a chance to recover something of their true selves” (§84). The encyclical also describes humans as God's “children,” citing divine “fatherly tenderness” (§73) and pointing to Jesus’ recognition of God as divine parent (§96).
Children, the Present, and Wonder
Schleiermacher suggests two ways in which adults can become childlike. First, he depicted children as living in the present moment. This theme appears in the Christmas novella and also in his homily on Mark 10:13–16. Unafraid of the sin of essentializing, Schleiermacher says, “The peculiar essence of the child is that he is altogether in the moment … The past disappears for him, and of the future he knows nothing—each moment exists only for itself, and this accounts for the blessedness of the soul content in innocence.”Footnote 53 Devries explains:
This ability to be completely absorbed in the moment is a child's gift to adults, and it is the recovery of this perspective, Schleiermacher argues, that the Redeemer says is necessary for those who would enter the Kingdom of God. Living in communion with God through Christ in the present, without anxiety about past or future, is the essence of the eternal life that Christ promises to those who believe in him … Adults, then, must recover this childlike perception, as if by conversion.Footnote 54
The theologian is obviously idealizing; children are capable of anxiety, and they do not live every moment “in the present.” He is also generalizing, placing children against their adult foils.
Yet his observation points to young children's capacity to spend time exploring what adults regard as boring, and at a different pace from adults. In line with Schleiermacher's thinking, Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor worries that adults can become “the worst kind of consumers, devouring creation whole and spitting out the seeds.”Footnote 55 She suggests apprenticeship to children as an antidote:
To apprentice oneself to a child is to learn that the world is full of wonders, a world in which nothing is simply what it seems because everything is packed with endless possibilities of usefulness and meaning. To enter that world, all you have to do is surrender your certainty that you already know what everything is and is for; all you have to do is start over again, assuming nothing and learning to approach every created thing with awe.Footnote 56
Adult rebirth involves learning to see, think, and feel like a child.
A memorable example of this sort of apprenticeship appears in Alexandra Horowitz's delightful article about human attention, in which she details a walk with her nineteen-month-old son, Ogden. To her, a walk follows a predetermined path; it is an accomplishment. To a toddler, she writes, a walk is “regularly about not walking.” It is instead “an investigatory exercise”; “exploring surfaces and textures” and “standing still and seeing who or what comes by; trying different forms of locomotion.” A walk is “stopping to admire the murmuring of the breeze in the trees,” as well as pointing to direct the mother's attention.Footnote 57
This capacity for open-eyed exploration facilitates wonder. Horowitz writes, “He stopped, agog … and pointed at the ground, and I knew that there was something new. ‘Pebbles!’ An elm tree had disgorged hundreds, maybe thousands of small green seeds on the sidewalk.”Footnote 58 Ogden teaches his mother that “there is a constant rearrangement of things on the street and in the air that is seen only by those who do not know that gazing at the cars on the street is boring.”Footnote 59 His fresh gaze instructs hers in wonder. It also requires her to walk at a different pace, giving her attention to the present.
What do attention to the present and wonder have to do with ecological conversion? Laudato Si’ returns often to the themes of awe, wonder, spontaneous response to beauty, and rapt attention to the present: “We are speaking of an attitude of the heart, one which approaches life with serene attentiveness, which is capable of being fully present to someone without thinking of what comes next, which accepts each moment as a gift from God to be lived to the full (§226). This description—which might be depicting Schleiermacher's Sofie—is a picture of the ecologically converted person, whose attitude allows for ever-deeper conversion.
In Laudato Si’, Saint Francis is the patron saint of this childlike spirituality: “Whenever he would gaze at the sun, the moon or the smallest of animals, he would burst into song, drawing all other creatures into his praise” (§11). The encyclical suggests that Saint Francis’ example prevents our temptation to dominate: “If we approach nature and the environment without this openness to awe and wonder, if we no longer speak the language of fraternity and beauty in our relationship with the world, our attitude will be that of masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on their immediate needs” (§11). Jesus also serves as an example because he “was able to invite others to be attentive to the beauty that there is in the world because he himself was in constant touch with nature, lending it an attention full of fondness and wonder” (§97).
The call to live in the present moment with awe is not to say that adults should stop thinking about the consequences of their actions. Rather, being present is an antidote to frenzied acquisitiveness:
In reality, those who enjoy more and live better each moment are those who have given up dipping here and there, always on the look-out for what they do not have. They experience what it means to appreciate each person and thing, learning familiarity with the simplest things and how to enjoy them. So they are able to shed unsatisfied needs, reducing their obsessiveness and weariness. (§§223, 226)
If with Schleiermacher we associate children with attention to the present, then the depiction of ecological consciousness in Laudato Si’ is a recommendation to become childlike.
Children as Embedded in Relationship
A second theme in Schleiermacher's portrayal of children is embeddedness in interdependent relationship.Footnote 60 Newey notes the contrast between Rousseau's child character Émile, who grows up isolated, and Schleiermacher's Sofie: “Schleiermacher insists upon the immersion of the child in the wider community, for the mutual benefit of both.”Footnote 61 On the one hand, children need adults and depend upon them: “In their utter vulnerability and dependence, children mirror the relationship between God and humanity.”Footnote 62
Yet even as children depend on and demand much from adults, they also bear gifts. Children's gifts to adults is a theme of Schleiermacher's “Sermons on the Christian Household,” which date to 1818. Devries summarizes Schleiermacher:
[Children] keep adults fresh and cheerful, and they assist adults in advancing upon the path of sanctification. Children remind us of the fact that God created humanity to live simply. They help adults to shed their obsession with the complexities of work and public life. Indeed, children draw adults back into the most basic of human relationships.Footnote 63
Adult caregivers to children know how often they must console their children with caresses, words, and bandages. But children can also be sources of consolation. In Pablo Picasso's 1902 “Mother and Child,” painted during his blue period, the artist renders a poignant image reminiscent of the Madonna and Child. The painting reflects his visits to the women's prison of Saint-Lazare, where “desperate and mistreated women” arrested for prostitution—many of whom had contracted venereal diseases—were housed with their children.Footnote 64 In “Mother and Child,” Picasso depicts an emaciated woman who gathers her child protectively in her arms, her right cheek resting on her child's head. Even as she holds her child, she seems to seek consolation in the child's presence.Footnote 65 The child—an image of the Christ Child—needs her care, and it renders solace. As Schleiermacher knew, children require care, but they also offer it in their own way.
Viewed as embedded in interdependent relationship, children represent the situation of all humans, who are embedded in a web of relationships that sustains our life. As Laudato Si’ repeats, “Everything is connected”; “everything is related” (§§91, 117). From a Christian perspective, the interconnected creatures of the world have their common origin and belonging in God. Laudato Si’ describes the creatures of the Earth “as part of the universe, called into being by one Father” and “linked by unseen bonds.” Under this divine parent, the creatures of the Earth “form a kind of universal family, a sublime communion which fills us with a sacred, affectionate, and humble respect” (§89). As children receive and give in a family, so all persons are called to acknowledge their place in the larger interspecies family—to receive care and render solace and compassion.
Yet in individualistic, anthropocentric cultures, we forget our place in the larger web, deny our own and our species’ interdependence, and close ourselves off from other persons, species, and life-sustaining systems. This repression and denial, an ecological version of Augustine's incurvatus in se, has disastrous effects: “Once the human being declares independence from reality and behaves with absolute dominion, the very foundations of our life begin to crumble” (§117). But Laudato Si’ holds out hope: “We are always capable of going out of ourselves towards the other” (§208). Such “going out” is one aspect of ecological conversion, which Francis says entails “loving awareness that we are not disconnected from the rest of creatures, but joined in a splendid universal communion” (§220). Schleiermacher shows childhood as a parable of human embeddedness in interdependent relationships. Ecological conversion is thus a conversion to the child we already are and can become again.
Other Aspects of Childhood: Animism, the Small, the Urgent
Even as Schleiermacher reveals childhood as a rich parable of converted life, he does not speak the last word on children. What else might we say about children and their relation to ecological conversion? Here I suggest three possibilities: children's animism, love for the small, and sense of the urgent.
Children and Animism
As that great observer of children Jean Piaget noticed, children demonstrate “spontaneous animism,”Footnote 66 ascribing consciousness or life to what adults do not. To see the world as living, and oneself as capable of communicating with this living world, seems a hallmark of young childhood. In Piaget's words, to the very young, “All things are conscious.”Footnote 67
Western adults tend to denigrate animism as cute or wrongheaded. Indeed, as Horowitz notes, Piaget considered children's animism an error, “an indication of the child's cognitive immaturity and poor biological understanding.”Footnote 68 But what if children's animism is morally valuable? Horowitz defends the reasonableness, analogical richness, and moral import of children's animism: “Compassion emerges from imagining the world alive.”Footnote 69 Indigenous botanist Robin Kimmerer agrees. In a striking reversal of Piaget's assumption, Kimmerer criticizes the “profound error in grammar” that leads scientists to describe an inert world. By contrast with scientific language, her indigenous language conceives of “a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything.”Footnote 70
To be clear, Kimmerer is describing a culturally developed form of animism that ascribes spirit and agency to elements of the world, not children's spontaneous animism.Footnote 71 Yet in both cases, the world is seen as alive, calling for personal greeting rather than technocratic use. According to Kimmerer, the language of animacy allows the speaker to “address the living world” as “family”Footnote 72 and to listen to plants as “wise teachers.”Footnote 73 Like Horowitz, Kimmerer connects the animist vision to an ethical stance: “Maybe a grammar of animacy could lead us to whole new ways of living in the world.”Footnote 74 To become childlike, I suggest, is to become capable of addressing the nonhuman world in love, listening to it for wisdom, and living in a new way.
In Christian tradition, animism has often been suspected as pantheist, polytheistic, and thus idolatrous. Yet Christianity also contains an animist impulse,Footnote 75 apparent in Saint Francis’ song addressing sun, moon, wind, and stars. Animism is also latent in Laudato Si’, where the “meaning of [ecological] conversion” involves (following Bonaventure) developing an “awareness that each creature reflects something of God and has a message to convey to us, and the security that Christ has taken unto himself this material world and now, risen, is intimately present to each being, surrounding it with his affection and penetrating it with his light” (§221). If the world is imbued with the Spirit of Christ, all the world may be addressed and listened to—something many young children seem already to know.
Children and the Small
To become childlike is also to notice and love the small. I recently returned home to discover that my young children had used the meager snow on the ground to construct “a tiny snowman.” They were immensely pleased with their diminutive creation (miniature twig arms, grass blade eyes) and wanted to give me a full tour of his compact person. Rachel Carson observes, “Many children, perhaps because they themselves are small and closer to the ground than we, notice and delight in the small and inconspicuous.”Footnote 76 She describes games of hunting in the grass for “the insects that play little fiddles”Footnote 77 and another in which she and her nephew Roger identified tiny spruce seedlings in the woods as Christmas trees for red squirrels, rabbits, and bugs.Footnote 78 Horowitz adds to Carson's observation: “Children sense the world at a different granularity, attending to parts of the visual world we gloss over, to sounds we have dismissed as irrelevant. What is indiscernible to us is plain to them.”Footnote 79
To value what others see as irrelevant, to honor the dignity of the unseen or limited: these Laudato Si’ sees as important to ecological consciousness: “There is nobility in the duty to care for creation through little daily actions” (§211). The encyclical points to the example of Saint Therese of Lisieux, who “invites us to practice the little way of love, not to miss out on a kind word, a smile or any small gesture which sows peace and friendship,” adding, “An integral ecology is also made up of simple daily gestures which break with the logic of violence, exploitation and selfishness” (§230). The encyclical cautions against the cynicism that dismisses such small actions: “We must not think that these efforts are not going to change the world. They benefit society, often unbeknownst to us, for they call forth a goodness which, albeit unseen, inevitably tends to spread” (§212). In ecological conversion, adults who become childlike affirm the dignity of the small and obscure.
Children and the Urgent
Finally, to become childlike is to feel overwhelming urgency for action—a result of life happening in the moment. As any caregiver for children can attest, children demand urgently that adults respond to their needs and questions. Infant cries awaken their parents and call for an immediate response, driving all other thoughts out of their parents’ minds. Toddlers can take over the dinner table with their demand for dessert, and elementary school children insist on immediate replies to questions about the world. As the famed Stanford Marshmallow Test demonstrated, younger children have trouble delaying gratification and are thus less patient.Footnote 80
Although Laudato Si’ criticizes a culture of instant gratification, children's sense of urgency around desired action can also inform ecological conversion.Footnote 81 Patience, after all, is not always a virtue. As Martin Luther King Jr. observed, “This ‘wait’ has almost always meant ‘never.’”Footnote 82 King bemoaned the “horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.” In the face of overwhelming injustice, he wrote, “I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” In similar tones, Laudato Si’ describes the impatience of youth: “Young people demand change. They wonder how anyone can claim to be building a better future without thinking of the environmental crisis and the sufferings of the excluded” (§13). Witness young Greta Thunberg's call to action: “I don't want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic, and act as if the house was on fire.”Footnote 83
VI. Implications
Ecological conversion is a process of transformation in which human persons fall in love with and learn to demonstrate care for the whole vulnerable creation. Although it is urgent that humanity in general undergo such transformation, Laudato Si’ demonstrates that ecological conversion is an appropriate expression and expansion of faith in Jesus Christ. This Jesus—born as the Child—models a life of love and builds, through the power of the Spirit, a community of self-giving love. This same Jesus called his disciples to welcome and to become as children.
To experience ecological conversion, I have argued, is to turn to the well-being of children, in the process becoming caregivers to all creation. Ecological conversion also entails recovering certain childlike capacities, such as the capacity for wonder, interdependence in a web of relationships, sensitivity to the living world, delight in the small and obscure, and urgency for action. Ecological conversion is a twofold conversion to the child—a turn and return that for Christians deepens conversion to the God revealed as Child. What are the practical implications of this argument?
Briefly, the turn to children's well-being calls for intentional action on behalf of children in legal, social, and cultural settings. This advocacy demands that adults and adult communities learn about and intervene in complex social issues. Further, the becoming involved in adult transformation into caregivers suggests patterns of education and formation that support the development of compassion, care, and nurture. If ecological conversion is a process of learning to feel and give care, then appropriate educational and religious patterns might be guided by what feminists Carol GilliganFootnote 84 and Nel NoddingsFootnote 85 have described as an ethic of care. Moreover, an ethic of care begins in attentiveness,Footnote 86 the starting place also recommended by Laudato Si’.Footnote 87
The retrieval of childlike capacities also has practical implications. Religious educator Jerome Berryman writes, “Children are not adults. Adults are not children. Adults, however, can become like children and over time such adults can nourish children to become even more like children as they mature. This is not madness. It is the pathway of infinite progress into the domain of God.”Footnote 88 Yet if adults are to find this pathway of infinite progress, a pathway to holistic maturity in which we are both caregivers and children on a finite planet, what will prompt and support this journey, when so much militates against it? Rachel Carson believed that children needed adult accompaniment in order to keep their “inborn sense of wonder.”Footnote 89 Adults, too, I would suggest, need companions who can awaken our child selves. We can and should “apprentice” ourselves to children. Yet only other adults can model how maturity cooperates with and is enriched by the childlike. Such modeling can happen informally in interpersonal relationships, but institutions such as schools and congregations can also practice pedagogies of wonder, play, and discovery with adults and in intergenerational groups, helping adults become both mature and childlike.Footnote 90
I conclude with one example of what this might look like. In a college class about the spirituality of attention, we recently practiced a “meditation on the soil.” We sat on the floor in groups around trays of soil I had dug from my garden. In silence, we observed the soil with our senses: smelling, touching, looking, even tasting. We wondered what it might teach us, what we might say to it, how we might advocate for it. Afterward, a student reflected: “Because of my major, I think about soil types and compaction rates. Sitting here, it occurred to me that I know a lot about soil. Then I realized that what I knew was getting in the way of seeing it. Touching the soil, I began to understand it again as a living thing.” To paraphrase Laudato Si’, she became “fully present” to the soil. The child awakened.
