THE SMILE OF GOD

  I have been much around the very young recently, including a 5-month-old baby; and I have been fascinated by the baby’s smile. It is tiny, fleeting, but of pure delight.  
          Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the “unless ye become as one of these” passage in the Gospels. Children, after all, are frequently a pain in the arse; they are entirely focused on survival and presents; they are jealous of each other; they are piercingly noisy and they have a capacity for littering that no adult can equal; they often whine. I don’t think Yeshua was a dewy-eyed sentimentalist thinking dreamily about their innocence and cuteness. So what is it in the baby or the small child that makes it the model of Heaven’s citizen?
        In the first place, I suspect, it is single-mindedness. Whatever a child feels, while it feels it it feels it, lives it and expresses it 100%. For adults this is almost impossible and not even considered desirable: our feelings are crossed, shifting, complex, and each one contains its opposite. Singleness of mind, as Charles Morgan wrote in a fine preface to a play on the subject (The Flashing Stream), when we meet it in adults, has a kind of terrifying nobility – and may very well be of the stuff of Heaven. 
Secondly, there is the simplicity of trust. A child about to cross a busy street sticks up its hand without looking, knowing that its parent by its side will take that hand and guide it. Such simplicity, again, is direly hard for adults to come by. It implies knowing that there is someone beside one; that that someone has powers one does not have oneself; and that that someone is dedicated to one’s welfare and will take the proffered hand. It also implies putting away cynicism, suspicion and doubt.
Thirdly, there is the confidence of the loved child that it need not always feel guilty. Sometimes it does things right, and when it does, the adults smile with real pleasure. How many of us are prepared to think of God smiling fondly at us because we have done something right?
There are other things: the child’s delighted capacity for observation, of the almost inumerable things that are new, strange and fascinating in its universe; its lack of embarrassment at feelings; its pleasure at learning a new skill and showing it off. If we look at these with some care, we may be able to triangulate some sense of what Heaven expects of us. Starting with a smile: “a condition of complete simplicity/ costing not less than everything.” (T.S. Eliot)