Children do not yet "know" enough to resist the force that governs and guides them from one goodness to the next. They haven't yet been fooled by their senses into practicing the impractical practice of trying to run their own lives and prove themselves in relation to others. So they show us what the scriptures teach -- that there is something we can trust. Our superficial perspective fools us all into seeking security by hanging on to certain interpersonal conditions and experiences in what is, after all, an exploding universe of divine self-revelation. This places us in opposition to the current of life and prevents us from increasingly seeing and expressing the unfolding good of God. Yet in the silence, we too can learn to go with and be carried along by the flow -- from one liberating revelation of the great eternal One to the next.
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. One who has never experienced that has missed something important. We must sense that we live in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.