So how exactly do you return to the faith of a child?

How can you get over these textual difficulties? How do you even make sense of your “rebellion” against your childhood faith, when it may not seem like a rebellion at all, but rather an awakening to truth?

Asking questions can be the very thing that drives you away from faith, as reason alone seems to call for finding truth elsewhere. You have been lied to, and now the time has come to correct it. The authority over you has been revealed to be a fraud, just to keep you in your place.

Do you know what this is? Do you recognize where you have heard this before?

This is the temptation and the fall of man. The serpent tells Eve this exact message, persuading her that God is hiding the truth in order to keep humans lower and lesser. The snake says, “God knows well that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, who know good and evil.” (Gn 3:4-5)

I’ve said this many times, but if you had told me back in college that in my forties I would be quoting Genesis and telling others about how the serpent talking to Eve makes total sense, I probably would have jumped off a bridge. I’m not even exaggerating. Ok, maybe a little. But I was in full-blown Thomas Paine mode, and teetering on Richard Dawkins’ atheism. Any book I picked up regarding Genesis would have been to argue against it or mock it as fairy tales, because I was completely convinced that evil portrayed as a talking snake was only a scare tactic for those in authority wanting to keep control over people.

But then life happened. In those days of life, I came to realize that there are falls that we must pass through. Every person who has ever lived must pass through the fall, or falls. If you don’t think you’ve encountered the fall, you either haven’t reached it, or you may need to hike longer yet. The third option is that you have had the gift of faith, like a child, from the beginning and never lost it. Those are the most fortunate people, but the rest of us must reach the fall.

The fall is the oldest trick in the book, the oldest temptation, which is exactly why it’s in the beginning, right after the creation stories. Adam and Eve are you and me. They are these naive childlike humans who reach the age of reason and start to ask questions about the world. The experience of Eve describes my own thoughts and feelings once I reached middle-school age. No longer content with the answers I was given, I started wondering about the narrative and rules that had been handed to me, and once I started down that path, the fall happened. I didn’t eat a literal fruit, but asking questions and getting unsatisfactory answers I veered into doubt, thinking much like Thomas the Apostle and Thomas Paine the revolutionary. The lack of logical explanations increased my doubt, shaking the foundation, and coupling that doubt with the weight of hypocritical adult behavior that I could observe, the rock teetered toward tumbling down the hill. The last nudge came simply from my own desire to push the rock over the edge.

The flow of the fall goes like this:

There is something I want. I know I shouldn’t do it, as I’ve been told not to or advised not to. The idea occurs to me that the rules don’t apply, that I see others breaking the rule, and that the rules are really only for “bad” people. If I really want to do it, I’ll find someone to do it with me, or research for some book that tells me it’s ok to do. But really, if I see others doing it and not being struck by lightning then it must be fine; others have already jumped the fence and the bull has not gored them to death. Then the temptation comes more alive. Why am I prohibited from this thing? What’s the big secret? I am coaxed into moving the desire outside of my head and into action. With nervousness, the threshold is crossed. The fall is complete. Now I have knowledge. The knowledge of those who were already doing it suddenly belongs to me.

The musical Into the Woods has a song by Little Red Riding Hood called “I Know Things Now” that dives right into this fall. The lyrics contain all the good stuff from Eden. She rejects motherly advice as she falls for the wolf’s seductive invitation. After being swallowed by the wolf she realizes that mother was right, and then needs someone to save her from the darkness.

Mother said, "Straight ahead," Not to delay or be misled. I should have heeded Her advice... But he seemed so nice!

He seemed so nice! The wolf and serpent in the Garden of Eden seem to have something in common. Almost like these are parallel tales instructing us with an allegory here. Little Red Riding Hood and Eve could probably go to coffee together and hash this out for several hours. “Wait,” says Eve, “did you say a talking wolf? That’s so weird! I ran into a talking snake.” Little Red Riding Hood replies, “In the woods?” Eve says, “No, a garden.” Anyone overhearing the conversation would assume they are baked or tripping, as the two of them would be in total unison once they got into the details.

Back to the song from the musical, Little Red Riding Hood continues:

I really got scared, well - excited and scared - but he drew me close and he swallowed me down, down a dark slimy path, where lie secrets that I never want to know, and when everything familiar seemed to disappear forever.

Oh, Little Red, I don’t think the sacred writer of Genesis could have said it better. Paradise lost, innocence swallowed up. She took the plunge and the fun wore off. In the fairy tale, her mother tells her to run nice and straight to grandmother’s but the wolf distracts her, and uses the same tricks that the serpent in the garden uses, and those are the four D’s: Deceit, diversion, division, and lastly despair. The wolf distracts her, showing her all the lovely flowers of the woods, and Little Red thinks that perhaps granny would like a bouquet. The wolf suggests that she pick some flowers in order to deceive her about his real aim, which is to eat her. So Little Red is diverted from her path and suddenly divided from her mother’s instructions, she is acting against the one that loves her, thinking the kindly wolf means well. A few hours later she is betrayed, swallowed up, and in a dark and hopeless place - despair. (The musical Into the Woods has a lot of searching for fulfillment, as characters fall into despair over their unfulfilled desires…I could talk about it all day because fairy tales and fables tell us more about ourselves than we would ever suspect, just like the book of Genesis).

Little Red Riding Hood finally comes to knowledge, and not just the knowledge of the fall, but knowledge of the solution. She knows that someone must set her free. In this case it’s the huntsman, who slices open the wolf and sets the girl and grandmother both free.

So we wait in the dark until someone sets us free, and we're brought into the light, and we're back at the start.

What a great line, and the writer of it is not a Christian. This is where these “seeds of the word” are all over the culture, even in the most secular places like Disney films. What is happening in this fairy tale? She falls, she despairs, she is saved by someone who undoes the mistake. He slays the wolf, and from her darkness she is “reborn” into the light of the world. I mean, she is literally reborn, cut from the wolf by C-section, and then she is “back at the start.” What is the start? She is once again a child. She has returned to childhood. Does any of this sound familiar? She has fallen and is reborn into the light, saved by a savior, and once again a child. In fairy tales, we are close to touching scripture stories and don’t even know it, but this is why fairy tales and fables never die.

Little Red goes through the fall and restoration rather quickly, while we may linger long in the belly of the wolf. This is because once the falling sequence begins, it becomes comfortable, the action can quicken, because the authority, now exposed as a fraud, holds no sway. If we believe our mistaken path is good, we will follow it for a long time. Unfortunately, the act that you believed would “open your eyes” to knowledge and make you into a god, can never deliver because it was based on a lie to begin with. But we will tell ourselves there is always a next action, a further step, something a bit more extreme or different, that may be the key to seeing the fullness of life, where we will unlock the god level.

The quote of Thomas Paine saying, “My own mind is my own church,” is simply his self-deception carried to its logical conclusion. He has elevated his own thoughts, temptations, and desires to be sacred and godlike. To call your head a church is to proclaim yourself a god. There’s no other way to interpret that statement. Even though I always mention how shocking Jesus’ declaration of his divinity is, that calling himself God is incredible, in reality billions of us do this daily, just in our own minds. Thomas Paine is a terrific author to read because he celebrates his fall so openly that it’s like a dissection of doubt, splayed out for us to review. I like writers who do this, because they show what the mind is like without the gift of faith. Never forget, that faith is a gift, one that is given to us, but we must ask for it, and Thomas Paine lacked the gift and I suspect he didn’t ask for it, because he thought it was for suckers and fools, just as I did before I came up against difficulties that could not be overcome without help outside of myself. Maybe he never felt boxed in, trapped, or in the darkness like Little Red Riding Hood, Eve, and me. Whatever the case, for someone like Paine, or other writers who clung to an open rebellion against God, such as Charles Bukowski or Christopher Hitchens or Karl Marx, I suspect that power, fame, and recognition had something to do with it, and the root of all that is pride.

The secret that you learn once you turn is this: the thing that took you into the darkness, is how you will be purified. I’d really like to claim that idea as my own, but St. Bernard (not the dog) said it, and if you go to recovery meetings this is only a revelation to newcomers, as those who have passed through the bottom come to realize that without their vice they would never have reached bottom and been reborn to become free of the vice.

The great contradiction for us follows the path that Dante took in the Inferno, in arguably the greatest writing of all time, where midway through his life’s journey he found himself lost in the dark, and the only way to get to heaven was to pass through hell, and of course once he gets to the bottom of hell, seeing all the vices and sins human beings can commit, he emerges onto the mountain of Purgatory. Yes, he has to go down in order to go up. The trick of the serpent and wolf is that their false promises lead you to believe that sin will make you level-up to be like god, but sin actually takes you down, in a spiral, that slowly circles around. You can get stuck in that spiral for a long time thinking that the rock or crack you cling to is where you want to end up. Some stay there forever. But life has a way of pushing you down that spiral once you begin circling the drain, and ultimately you need to let go and pass through the drain, through the darkness, or you can never get back to the light.

This temptation in the garden that Eve faces is the moment before we depart from our childhood faith. Modern literary people would call this a “coming of age” story or “loss of innocence.” The moment in the Gospel of Luke where twelve year old Jesus is in the temple ‘asking questions’ seems included for a specific purpose. There are no other childhood stories of his life. So while I laser in on the fact that Jesus was “asking questions” in the temple as a signal of his coming of age, of the moment where many of us would take the first fall, the rest of the chapter in Luke tells us something important, as Jesus doesn’t take the fall (as I did).

When his parents saw him, they were astonished, and his mother said to him, “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” And he said to them, “Why were you looking for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” But they did not understand what he said to them. He went down with them and came to Nazareth, and was obedient to them; and his mother kept all these things in her heart. And Jesus advanced in wisdom and age and favor before God and man. (Lk 2:48-52)

The worried mother, Mary, reminds Jesus of the parental authority over him. In the response there is a whiff of rebellion in pre-teen Jesus. He instructs his mother about his purpose, about who he is, about who his real father is, but the critical turn back to obedience is made before he overrides his parents’ authority. The temptation of a normal person to rebel is strong; imagine being God, with infinite power, and having to obey a human. However, having already selected Mary to be the mother of God, he relents and obeys, and doing so, Jesus shows us how to avoid the pitfall of the fall of man. He keeps his childlike faith intact by listening and asking questions. When his mother gives him instruction, he obeys. He shows us how to live. There’s so much more to go into here, but let’s stick to the fall, that root sin of pride and the rejection of authority.

As for us regular humans, we want to disobey, so we do. We toss out authority and faith, sometimes at the same time, or sometimes gradually. Even if we don’t fully throw out faith, we only keep it nearby for when a lifebuoy is needed, because to live with the open faith of a child in a teen or adult world would make us seem like a freak. Consider how a high school senior would be received if he came to school excited about Santa Claus. He’d be treated like a moron, like Dostoyevsky’s Prince Myshkin in the The Idiot. When I first rejected God, I had this notion of God as a myth like Santa Claus or Zeus. The problem here is that this is an immature understanding of what Jews and Christians mean by “God.” If my concept of God was so small that I could compare the creator of the universe to a man that brings gifts and lives in the world that he created, then I had no concept or understanding of the God that is being itself. The reason God says his name is “I AM” in Exodus is because there is no name for him, he is beyond our labels, but we need a word so we say God.

To protect ourselves, even if we still believe, we have to keep it hidden. After everyone else has stopped believing, we would hate to seem like a gullible fool, so we dust the small concept of God under a rug, thinking it will go away. One of the most surefire nudges toward the death of faith is when one of your closest friends, someone you trust, or an older person you admire either expresses their own doubts or makes fun of your gullibility.

I can think of several people that pointed out how gullible I was, not about faith, but about other ideas or notions. Once you have the wound of feeling like a gullible fool, you need to find a fig leaf to cover that. Cynicism is a giant fig leaf that can cover entire bodies - it’s like a frond more than a leaf. More people hide behind cynicism today than just about anything else because the cynic doesn’t trust and doesn’t hope. Wonder and enchantment have left the building. The cynic sees the conspiracy and ulterior motive in everything, because once bitten they are twice shy. The idealist who is exposed as gullible or foolish can retreat rapidly into cynicism as a defense move. The cynic appears bold but the fool who admits his faith and takes on insults for trusting in God has far more courage. Why? Because he is exposed. Openness to God means exposure and vulnerability, while cynicism is easy and effortless. The difference between the two can be seen in any classroom in America, where the student that raises his hand to ask a question is exposed and vulnerable to the back row cynics who mock the question and he who asked. But the cynic is the one riddled with fear, which is why the fig leaf is needed.

The cynic is a visitor who will enter your life on a “speak and destroy” mission, like a heat seeking missile, pretty much like a serpent in the garden or wolf in granny’s bed. The person may not intend to be the catalyst for your fall, but they will provoke you toward the rejection of authority, God, and all things sacred. The abandonment of the childlike faith is nearly unavoidable, but this fall can be the greatest blessing of your life if you do eventually return, if you get up again. Rising from this fall may take five years, twenty years, or you may be on your death bed before you can overcome it, like the good thief on the cross next to Jesus, or the many people who call for Last Rites after having fallen away from their faith.

Overcoming the fall takes time. We don’t go through this fall like Eve or Little Red Riding Hood in just a few pages. But once you fall, you may have to fall all the way down.

Jesus tells the Parable of the Two Sons, which I think applies to the return to faith. A dad has two sons. Dad tells the first one, “Get to work,” and the first son replies, “Up yours, Dad!” and doesn’t move, but then later he feels bad about it and goes out to the field to do the work. (In case you didn’t notice, I’m paraphrasing the dialogue here.) Dad then approaches the second son and says, “Get to work.” The second son says, “Yes, sir, right away, Dad, you betcha, I was just about to go do just that,” and then he doesn’t move at all and sits on his butt and doesn’t feel bad about lying to his father. What’s the message? The first son will be chosen. The second one is just trying to look good, just saying the right words, and talk is cheap. To Jesus, talk is always cheap because he knows your heart. Jesus actually tells the Apostles and Pharisees that the prostitutes and tax collectors will find heaven before those who say all the right things in the temple.

Wait. What?

The reason why the worst sinners find their way to Jesus is because their fall is so far and they hit the ground so hard. Wham! Drunks and addicts know this. They come to realize that they have rejected God because they feel his absence. God doesn’t provide the safety net, he lets them hit in order to jolt them back to life. The people who go wild in their fall, their coming of age, who throw out God completely during their age of reason, who choose their pride of life over God, these are the ones that become brutally aware of what has been lost. How do I know this? Because I lived it. As I said, the sin you like the most, will start the fire that purifies you. By falling I became aware, and addicts worldwide tell this tale. Addiction is a way to fall, and recovery is the rebirth, the return. Many are the ways to the path of addiction: drugs, alcohol, sex, success (or vicarious success through your children), gambling, lying, co-dependence, stealing, setting fires, inhalants, nicotine, gaming, shopping, cutting yourself, gaming, pornography, tanning, coffee, work, fitness, social media. Any addiction can get you there. You can fall to the bottom and hit the ground hard through any of these channels.

If you have an experience that mirrors the Parable of the Prodigal Son, the story of returning to home is powerful. For those who think of Santa Claus as the same as God, I have never met anyone who hits bottom and wakes up to realize that it all started when they rejected the jolly old elf. No, the comparison of Santa to God is for immature atheists, not for serious doubters. The awakening begins when you are cut out of the belly of the wolf by a creator and savior called God, big ’G’, not by a fat mythological character. But in order to be set free, you must give up, surrender, to give back authority to the loving embrace of God. And many people refuse to do that, claiming that they cannot, or are not ready.

My point in all of this is that in order to return to the faith of a child, you have to have abandoned the childlike faith in the first place, otherwise you would never have left that state. The faith of a child is what you see when the child sings and doesn’t care who is listening, or dances in springtime puddles. It’s having loud conversation in quiet waiting rooms, or running around outside naked without awareness that it’s illegal. The faith of a child means to be exposed and vulnerable and free, and to believe that Goldilocks really did eat the bears’ porridge. To return, you must be open. You must not care about your exposure and vulnerability, and trust that God’s will is being done regardless of what mockery comes your way.

Also, you can only return to something that you left behind.

I so often look at the Gospels and think of Jesus’ own life as the model for living, the perfect example of how we should live. What I’ve often wondered about is the eighteen year gap between twelve-year old Jesus being “found in the temple” and his baptism by John, which marks the beginning of his ministry.

Could it be, perhaps, that Jesus gives us the example in his own life, staking off a period of time when we venture out, when we mature. Aren’t these middle years precisely when the wheat plant is growing but not yet ripe? The grain of a wheat plant doesn’t exist until it is mature, therefore a grain of wheat cannot yet die. To mature and produce grain, a plant must go from childhood to adolescence and finally adulthood, and only then can grain fall to the ground.

To me this eighteen year gap in Jesus’ life story is speaking something to us. We know that Jesus did not sin in his initial temptation to rebel. He obeys his mother and keeps his faith. Of course he does; he’s God. But that temple story shows us how we were supposed to live to avoid the fall. Then the story goes dark for almost two decades, where we can assume he is working construction jobs with his earthly father, Joseph. Somewhere in there, Joseph dies and we know little else except for that around the age of thirty, Jesus emerges, and begins to speak and heal.

The baptism of Jesus is the first metaphor for us to observe in the grain of wheat parable, as baptism is being “reborn” in the water and spirit. As I mentioned before, the “unless a grain of wheat dies” message has two metaphors that can apply, if not more. The first is to be reborn, and the act of baptism fits like a puzzle piece.

The second metaphor is the literal death of the body and resurrection. The first death and rebirth is something we can carry out now. Only Jesus can lay down his life and take it up again. But baptism is the action we can perform here and now. In fact, we can be reborn every day. In fact, the purpose of the Sign of the Cross is to renew our baptismal vows every day. It’s not just a cool hand motion we Catholics do for kicks or to get attention. This is one of those things, so ancient in the Church, that we don’t even remember what it’s for, so we need to remind ourselves now and then. Check out the free e-book from Word on Fire on the Sign of the Cross for some illuminating insights.

Dare I venture into further interpretation? (I wish someone wiser than myself was here right now, like Trent Horn or Father Mitch Pacwa or Saint Pope John Paul II, to guide me back from the precipice of bad interpretation.)

Jesus knows that we are going to fall and turn away. He practically implies that you are lying if you can’t admit that you have turned away. Jesus, who knows our hearts, fires shots at the Pharisees for false representation. The accusation he makes at the Pharisees centers around them being clean on the outside but filthy on the inside. Nicodemus becomes confused with Jesus during their conversation about “rebirth,” unsure of the meaning. It’s so easy to bash on the Pharisees as Jesus points out their error, since they are so legalistic in following rules that they think that is all that matters, that no change of heart is needed.

The Pharisees are the protectors of the culture, so their behavior is following God’s will of the Old Testament. The Jewish people are always being hemmed in by other cultures, from the time of Canaan boiling their goats right up to the infiltration of Rome. The Pharisees are doing their best to keep the covenant, to save the traditional culture, to keep the Jewish people “set apart” from the pagan, polytheistic world that surrounds them. What great lengths Nicodemus and company go to in their defense of that culture. Then suddenly John the Baptist shows up and says everyone must repent and be baptized, and then Jesus shows up and takes it even further saying a full rebirth is required. None of this makes sense right away to Nicodemus or his colleagues because they feel that they are righteous, that they have never rejected God. Jesus comes to tell them, “Oh yes, you have.” The fact that Nicodemus doesn’t know he’s taken the fall means he is still spiritually blind. Why? Because he is so bloated with pride, whereas the prostitutes and tax collectors and Prodigal Sons of the world are all too aware of their own fallen nature so that they understand what Jesus is saying long before the educated and wealthy classes begin to understand.

What I’m trying to say is this:

How can you return to something unless you have gone astray in the first place? Jesus knows we will go astray. He knows that we already have gone astray, and that we’ll not just do it once, but repeatedly. It’s not just a middle-schooler or drunk college student problem. The problem is shared by all, in all ages and all phases of life. Again, if you believe that Jesus is God, then you must read everything he says as coming from God, and God knows everything written in Genesis because he himself beamed it down somehow to the sacred writer. He knows about the Fall in the Garden, he knows about our rebellion, and he’s all too aware of our attempts to hide from him.

So if Jesus, who was sinless, gets baptized at thirty years old, despite not needing to be baptized but to show us how to live and be re-born, might we not suspect that he is deliberately telling us (and here by us I mean myself): “Yes, I know you spent many years rejecting me. I know you turned away from me, and I saw you closing down all those bars and acting the fool. At least Little Red Riding Hood was only picking flowers for grandmother, but you were totally out of control. I also know how you mocked me, and said I was just an imaginary being like Santa Claus, just invented to control people. Oh yeah, I saw all of that, and more, especially the things that only you know about. But as you know now, I’m real. I’m here. I came for you as one of my lost sheep. I waved many signs in front of you that you chose to ignore. But I’m glad you are listening now, and that you can see me again. So follow me. From now on, I will lead you. Be baptized and believe.”

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