April, 2006

Connecting with Your Inner Child

A sermon delivered to the Concord (NH) UU on Youth Sunday
by Callie Lowenstein

Callie is 18 years old and a senior at St. Paul's School in Concord, NH

I am sitting in the sun. It is March 31, and I am finally done with the college process. It is a Friday. I should be doing nothing. It seems like I'm doing nothing. Unfortunately, that's not the case. My mind is frantic: pacing back and forth across the electronic academic day planner screen in my mind is an endless litany of to-dos. Homework. Job applications. This sermon. Despite the warm spring wind that dances, beams, and settles fluidly around me, I cannot help myself from mentally scheduling, re-scheduling, and then re-scheduling again. In fact, the margins of the very paper from which I'm reading aloud right now are peppered with to-do lists and organizational plans, which will theoretically help me to feel more relaxed.

The sad truth, of course, is that they don't. The sad truth is that my mind can't sit still and enjoy no matter how little I actually need to accomplish in the coming night. I am a restless ball of all-American nervous energy. Responsibilities, duties, and odd-jobs plague the not-so-relaxed playing field of my imagination, bickering for my attention. In this way, I'm much like the "bisy backson" of Benjamin Hoff's Tao of Pooh. Instead of taking moments as they come, the bisy backson squeeeeeezes as much as possible into every one of her days, often at the expense of sleep, chitchat, and general enjoyment. To quote Hoff, "..." It is this kind of restless mind that is desperate, absolutely crying out, for some of that down homey inner child. And unfortunately, this very kind of mind is usually too busy thinking about Important Business and Things To Do to remember perceptions, moments, and little things about childhood itself, which is, of course, the first step to communication with one's inner child.

On the cusp of August and autumn, my mind wanders to Brooklyn. Color swells in the veins of elm tree leaves, and my fragmented memories come piecemeal, eager to carry me back to Saturday mornings in the market and Prospect Park. My recollection of the Slope's geography is muddled, but the air is crisp, engaging, exact. At the square where the farmers set up their booths, chrysanthemums come in plastic pots, red and purple and flourishing in the September chill.

At home on First Street, we play on the stoop before dinner. Past the house with a "Beware of Dog" sign on the door, Jonny and I are in the neighbor's basement, then up on the roof with a friend. We play X-man and I am wolverine. The wind blows strong and the tree in his yard rustles with the fall's brisk reminder that the leaves will soon crunch on the pavement. We drink cider. The sky stays bright till late in the day, and just before dinnertime, color flashes in the tree. A bluejay. I run to tell my Mama.

Here, in these bits and pieces, I get a sense of myself as a child. I remember whatever those things were that stuck out for my four year old eyes, ears, nose. And through this memory, I reconnect with the Saturdays free of schedules. Now, what I hope is that while I daydreamed out loud, you were doing some daydreaming of your own. About your little leagues, carousels, and cranberry pancakes. About Mrs Piggle Wiggle, rollerblades, and scented markers. What I fear, because I know this is how daily school chapel too often goes for me, is that some of you were calculating how many light, medium, and dark laundry loads you'd be doing this afternoon. Would you run the dishwasher tonight or tomorrow morning? For this problem-and a terrible problem it is-the inner child can be a big help.

The inner child says, "Hey! You! Running through life with blinders on. Get those things off, look around you. Get curious about something and drop everything to explore it. Be responsible, but not just for your to do list-be responsible for the expression of your best self." The inner child reminds us to play, to loosen up, to speak up and ask questions. Our inner children are often our most articulate selves. If we open up to them, we become more astute about the basic principles of our lives. However, it is my belief that the spirits of our inner children are not limited to the idealistic, innocent, purified elements of childhood. If I stopped speaking right now, this sermon would have been one giant half truth, because it would have recognized the imaginative, creative, uninhibited side of childhood, without acknowledging the confusion we experience as young children. Part of the joy of being young is the freedom to live completely in the moment, without care for the bigger picture of society, the world, etc. This often means unfiltered information drips through in unmonitored, imbalanced chunks to kids who really don't know how do deal with the unchecked amalgamation of facts they receive. I want to tell a story to illustrate this idea, because this event not only changed the way I think about childhood itself, but fundamentally altered my dealings with the concept of the inner child.

We were on a hike at Camp Manitoga, marching down to Mary's Meadow from the pond where my little brother used to be the crayfish king. On the way up, we had gotten half a mile behind the group as five year old Philip struggled to find the motivation to keep walking. It was frustrating, more so for him than for me, because all the other kids went straight up without blinking an eye. He dawdled, wanted to turn around, needed to take breaks, and needed some extra pushing to get going. He was one of our troublemakers. During sports and games time, we learned that he had self control issues, as he tended to lash out, even trying to kick and punch his playmates when their behavior angered him. This we knew how to deal with.

We would step aside, sit down and talk about how we treat the kids around us. However, this was something else altogether. I knew Philip to be troubled. I knew that he needed extra attention. I knew that his emotions often got the best of him. But I could not fathom what he had just said. I want to kill myself. This is what he said to me a summer ago, and my heart nearly stopped.

So I squatted down next to him and looked him square in the eye. "Philip, you don't really want to do that. Do you know where you got this idea?" And without batting an eye himself, Philip bent down to pick up a shiny rock, smoothed off the dust and said, "God did it. God killed himself and I want to."

This added a whole new dimension. All of a sudden, religion jumped into the picture. Presumably some blend of TV news reporting from the Middle East and Christianity's confusing history, and I had a five year old who was making offhand comments about his impending suicide.

He was so nonchalant and matter of fact about it. Though the gravity of his words was more than apparent to me, he seemed almost oblivious. I was sure that he was not simply looking for attention. He didn't make clear what that meant, "I want to kill myself," where he got the idea, what brought this to mind, so seemingly out of the blue. He repeated himself a number of times, and each time he said it, it was more alarming. He was expressing a feeling that revealed so much confusion on his part that I could hardly wrap my mind around it. Regardless of his actual intentions, his actual emotions, his actual comprehension of what God did according to Christianity, Philip had been neglected. Here was a kid that needed someone to talk to. And needed someone to talk to him. He had picked up on a piece of something, but the imperative part- that part which would have made it all make sense- got left in the dust.

Because I grew up Unitarian Universalist, I had no concept of what it was to be a young Christian, as I assumed he was; I wondered: Do they really make you feel guilty enough for a little kid to say this, or do they just not explain Jesus' death properly? I asked if he usually went to church on Sundays. Nope. I asked if he knew what religion his family was. American. So where did the God piece come from? It was an absolute mystery.

Now comes the "What my Mother Taught Me segment". As a nurse, my Momma was taught to be very careful about her comments around young patients, because there is no way to tell what a child fully hears and processes. We must be sensitive by recognizing that we won't know what they fully understand, what will be confusing, and what they'll pick up in fragments. We talk and small pieces click, and there's no way for us to know which. And here was Mom's principle in spades: somewhere along the line, somebody had mentioned suicide bombers or Jesus or their own strung out momentary sentiments, and had failed to notice the five year old standing next to him.

And to me, this is the big thing about the inner child. As older people, we are exactly the same way. Others speak, we listen, grasp at what we can. The same things happens in reverse. And somewhere down the line, it's all too possible for our words to emerge having taken on a different form. No matter how sophisticated we are, pieces of the puzzle fly right over our heads, and we are too occupied "bisy backsoning" to track these pieces down. We have inner children, whether we channel them or not. So perhaps this is not just about channeling our inner children, but also about connecting with them, recognizing and validating them, nurturing and beginning to understand them. In this sense, we must remind ourselves to take off those blinders and perk up our ears, so that when something gets lost in the shuffle, maybe our playful spirits, maybe something else, something imperative to the sense of things, we can find it and bring it to light.