You hold a spiritual memory of a simple and uncomplicated faith that arises from “the sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child.” What an eternal treasure this spiritual pearl is.
Yes, but it is trust in a person, not an idea. The person part of faith is crucial. People can easily comprehend the idea of God, but consciousness of the presence of the person of God is something different. Actually, it is much easier to love and trust a person than an idea. Ideas are fleeting, persons are permanent. Ideas don’t give back, people do.
Even as a child, my understanding of God was a relationship with a person whom I knew as Jesus. He was God to me. I was fortunate to have a certain Bible storybook written for children with wonderfully illustrated pictures showing a smiling, loving Jesus with children on his lap. He played with them, he told them stories, he healed them, and he loved the little animals too. He was “all that.” I got that book when I was two and held onto it until my little sister came along and I went off to school. That image of Jesus and the stories about him laid the foundation for a lifelong love affair, which I think can never end. It’s rooted too deeply in the person I know as Jesus.
But let’s be honest about this. Life is complicated. The innocence of a child may make it easy to connect to the person Jesus, but there are plenty of things that can challenge that connection. What we call “maturity” made me think more than once that perhaps my simple faith in Jesus was actually immature, not well thought out. But luckily, my life was filled with many crises which kept me going back to him, my only true friend. And he never failed me, ever. I’m the one who would get distracted from time to time, but the inner call has always been very loud for me. Deafening, actually. That, I think, is because of the Thought Adjuster I’ve been blessed with and not because of anything special about me or my faith. Love is a two-way adventure.
I can tell you from experience that faith is a more or less completely mysterious idea for those who begin their search for God later in life. They typically lack this spiritual memory, so they really know only one end of the line you draw, the doubting end. For the material mind seeing is believing, so the idea of believing before seeing seems utterly backwards, like leaping before looking, reaching a conclusion before considering the evidence, putting the cart before the horse.
Yes, I’ve said many times on this forum that most people on this world think backwards. I don’t know how to fix that problem. But part of the problem is getting all tangled up in ideas about God and never getting to know him as a person. I don’t think you need spiritual memory for that. I mean, the guy lives in people’s heads for crying out loud. How is it that he can be ignored the way he is? It’s a puzzlement! The creator of the universe lives inside the head of almost every living person! How is it that people can miss someone so huge and so close? I think it’s a weakness derived from fear of being thought of as a sincere and trusting child.
And it begins to dawn that there is something beyond the satisfactions of a truly cosmic philosophy, something above the unbelief of mere intellectual certainty and conviction, something with the spiritual purity of “the sincere and trusting optimism of a believing child.”
Yeah, it’s recognition of God as a Father and Jesus as a friend. Both are people and young children are usually very accepting of people until they’re taught not to be. It’s not for nothing they begin the Book with the concept of Deity. God is a person and all the stuff people want to believe about God is tangential to the reality of his actual presence inside the mind, where he lives and very personally leads, enlightens and loves 24/7. It’s a truly good and beautiful thing.
p69:6 5:5.11 God-consciousness, as it is experienced by an evolving mortal of the realms, must consist of three varying factors, three differential levels of reality realization. There is first the mind consciousness—the comprehension of the idea of God. Then follows the soul consciousness—the realization of the ideal of God. Last, dawns the spirit consciousness—the realization of the spirit reality of God. By the unification of these factors of the divine realization, no matter how incomplete, the mortal personality at all times overspreads all conscious levels with a realization of the personality of God.
p1732:5 155:6.12 You must cease to seek for the word of God only on the pages of the olden records of theologic authority. Those who are born of the spirit of God shall henceforth discern the word of God regardless of whence it appears to take origin. Divine truth must not be discounted because the channel of its bestowal is apparently human. Many of your brethren have minds which accept the theory of God while they spiritually fail to realize the presence of God. And that is just the reason why I have so often taught you that the kingdom of heaven can best be realized by acquiring the spiritual attitude of a sincere child. It is not the mental immaturity of the child that I commend to you but rather the spiritual simplicity of such an easy-believing and fully-trusting little one. It is not so important that you should know about the fact of God as that you should increasingly grow in the ability to feel the presence of God.
