[These quotes probably don’t make sense outside of the context of the chapter they are found within]
Thomas remarks: “So long as he has not the use of reason he is like a non-rational animal.” Though this comparison may strike the modern reader as unduly harsh and dismissive of children, it was meant to underscore the urgency and importance of caring for children. Because they do not have the capacity of reason, children are entrusted to parental and ecclesial care to guide them into fuller humanity.
…Thomas’s account values children not so much for who they are but for who they will become. Children are on the way to personhood, and childhood is rapidly discarded along the way. Such an account runs the risk of ignoring the nature of childhood and the children in our midst.
The contrast with the Thomistic model here is obvious. Children are valued not for who they will become, but for who they are and whose they are. Yet we can romanticize these images of Jesus of children in the New Testament quite easily. His invitation to become like children can evoke nostalgia for a childhood devoid of responsibilities.
“For the vast majority of the world’s children, childhood itself – as the space and time in which we claim God’s choice of us, pay attention, imagine, and play – exists in name only.”
[Speaking of Hagar and Ishmael in Genesis 16] “The wail of the child in the bushes is the very voice that God hears….God hears the cries of abandonment and responds, empowering mother and child to keep on living.”
“For an increasing number of children worldwide, hunger remains the abiding reality. Every three seconds, a child somewhere on the planet dies of malnutrition: that equates to approximately one thousand children every hour, thirty thousand every day, ten million every year who die because of lack of food.”
“When we allow children to thrive, the unmistakable sounds of their playfulness will be heard in the streets and across the countryside. Their play infects our own, inviting us to play with them, intimating God’s delight in creation.”
“Sometimes, too, the parent, having a hearty interest in the plays of his children, will drop out for the time in the sense of his years, and go into the frolic of their mood with them.”
“Play, as Bushnell notes, “wants no motive but play.” Its joy is found not in reaching some kind of goal, but in the delight of the others with whom we play. We can see this if we watch the faces of children at play: this delight in the moment, this sense of connectedness to their playmates….To play with others is to reconnect to the vulnerabilities and otherness that make each one of us a child of God. Perhaps by playing with children, we recognize again our undeniable need for each other.”
“Perhaps this kind of attending is also critical to the life of prayer; perhaps it is the component of prayer that allows us to see attention to the world and attention to God as one and the same turn. To pray as children pray is not to lose oneself in God, but to involve oneself in God, or better said, to open one’s eyes to the God who is already passionately involved in us.”
Jensen, David Hadley. Graced Vulnerability : A Theology of Childhood. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2005.