Cry-babies
I clicked on this article because the intro included "In Defense of Cry-Babies." That's me! Starting at #2, the author talks about crying, about child-like faith including crying: "Maybe it is also an invitation to be a cry-baby, to run into the Father’s arms when we get hurt, and to shamelessly cry-out to God in our grief and fear...God, full to the brim with agape love, can take our worst — even our tantrum-throwing, snot-stuffed, cry-baby selves." Yes.
https://mbird.com/week-in-review/july-22-28/ by Cali Lee, 7/28/23, The Mockingbird.
2. Musicians and artists, through song and various mediums, are able to do what many of us adults refuse to do: express our emotions. But children — as seen in grocery store lines, fast-food restaurants, little league baseball games, and even church services — are not afraid to share their feelings no matter how red in the face their parents find themselves. The self-awareness that young children lack is discovered in excess when they reach middle school, as tweens become awkwardly aware of their own bodies and of the social spheres of pubescent hell. Self-awareness is usually akin to wisdom (or at least self-awareness is supposed to make us wise), but is it inadvertently causing us to take ourselves too seriously? The School of Life touches on this dichotomy, suggesting that maybe our grocery-line-snot-stuffed-crying children don’t have it all wrong:
We [adults] register everything. We notice the withheld smile of a colleague we quietly despise, the silence all morning when we’d hoped for a message, the little cruel joke at our expense a family member made, the invitation we didn’t receive, the friend’s promotion that throws a spotlight on our modest achievements, the lover’s caress that went missing, the half day we wasted trying to get something to work that cleverer people would sort out in an instant. At the time, we laugh it off, we like to move on fast, we don’t even admit the distress to ourselves, but it’s all been noticed and it all festers within us. It settles in a deep reservoir which is slowly filling up and is connected by a complicated hydraulic system that eventually enforces on us a heaviness of spirit, a dry smile, a proclivity to rage and a bitterness and envy. We too quickly forget the exact details of what wounded our spirits and then can’t extract the splinters from our psyches. […]
One of the wisest things about very young children is that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears, because — compared with adults — they have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world: they know they are extremely small beings in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can’t control much of what is happening around them, that their powers of understanding are limited and that there is a great deal to feel distressed, melancholy and confused about. […]
It’s regrettable that such wisdom gets lost as we age. We start to associate maturity with a suggestion of invulnerability and competence. But this is the height of danger and bravado. Realising we can no longer cope is an integral part of true endurance. We are in our essence and should always strive to remain cry-babies, that is, people who intimately remember their susceptibility to hurt and grief. Moments of losing courage belong to a brave life. If we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at great risk of one day fatefully snapping.
The Christian call to live a child-like faith comes to mind after reading The School of Life‘s piece. But perhaps having faith like a child is not only about trusting in and depending upon Jesus. Maybe it is also an invitation to be a cry-baby, to run into the Father’s arms when we get hurt, and to shamelessly cry-out to God in our grief and fear. As Juliette Alvey wrote for Mbird, kids are comfortable being at their worst with those who they know will love them unconditionally (even self-awareness cannot fully keep us from reverting back to our child selves around our parents). And God, full to the brim with agape love, can take our worst — even our tantrum-throwing, snot-stuffed, cry-baby selves.