Of Such Is The Kingdom

I know I haven’t written here for a while. I know that I promised to. I’m sorry. But I have an excuse.

These days, I'm a PhD student at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. Right now, I’m sitting in a public park under trees that don’t grow in Utah. I’m not connected to WiFi. It’s warmer here than back home. This city is—generally—marvelous.  I walk along a street called Telegraph every day past milling crowds of students who join and part like schools of fish. I regularly step over chalk art that manages to be both political and whimsical. I never knew a city could be eccentric. I’m at home here. In the basement of what looks like a cathedral, I work in a library devoted to Emanuel Swedenborg, the Swedish mystic whose works I’ve been reading since I was barely in college and whose life has directed mine more than anyone else’s. The library might even be haunted. I don’t know whether that’s true or not. I don’t know if I want to know. It’s a strange, colorful, wonderful world I’ve found myself in. I’m lucky to be here. Swedenborg believed that Divine Providence is at work in even the details of our lives, and I often swear I feel it brushing up against my neck.

But there’s a catch. Berkeley is expensive, I need to be on-site for the first two semesters, and I couldn’t afford to bring my family with me. So I have a small room in an arts-and-crafts house with yellow walls and a lamp on the wall instead of the ceiling. I fly back to see my wife and my daughter regularly, and I spend about two weeks in each place. It’s a good compromise. I get to dive into this magical city, and I get to see my daughter for weeks at a time. 


But boy do I miss her right now.

She’s two years old now. I’ve watched the lights turn on bit by bit behind her eyes. First on her back and then on her stomach, she went from crawling to walking to running and climbing. Like Eve and Adam, she pointed at things and spoke their names. Mamma gave way to Pappa gave way to dog and cat and more and hat and bee. She knows her own name now. She looks in a mirror and recognizes  herself.She’ll dance. She’ll play. She’ll run, and I’ll catch her. I’ll run, and she catches me. As if she hadn’t caught me from the very beginning. 

I look into her eyes and see what I can only call innocence. Swedenborg taught that the highest heaven—where God shines for everyone’s eyes like a sun, where it’s always springtime—is a world of innocence. This innocence isn’t naïveté. It’s not weakness or ignorance. It’s wisdom, and angels, he says, are wise only insofar as they’re innocent. This is an old doctrine: Socrates was wise because he knew that he knew nothing. Zen teaches that, while the expert sees few possibilities, the beginner sees many. The 93rd section of the Doctrine and Covenants explicitly says that we were innocent in the beginning with God and are meant to become innocent again.

Swedenborg writes that the angels in this “Celestial Kingdom” wear nothing and  they are not ashamed. They accept what is given to them, whether much or little, and they trust that it’s what they need. Their vowels are round and their consonants soft. From a distance, they even look like children. Children on earth, in fact, are innocent because of what flows in from this place. It’s not a projection of our nostalgia. Our nostalgia is a projection of this place. 

This sounds naive. I know. We live in a time of hatred and murder and genocide and trauma. I am terrified of the world my daughter will inherit. I came of age with the carefree, eccentric optimism of the early Internet. I remember the hope of that time. I mourn it. But it is also true that one of the worst sins of our time is its war on childhood. I am one of the last people to have an undocumented upbringing, where play outside was normal, where screens stayed put and loading took patience. I was bored. I’m so grateful I was bored. I’m terrified that my daughter won’t be.

You know what I mean. I won’t be condescending and pretend you don’t. You know that the stakes are high and the prospects are dire. There’s no use denying it. But cynicism is the wrong response here. Like with all assaults on the innocent, we need resistance and action. Not just protests—at least not in this case—but something bolder and more counter-cultural.

We need wonder. My daughter is full of it. I saw her touch a tree last week, and it was the only thing in the world for her. It was a world. I don’t need to teach her how to marvel like this. But I’m responsible for protecting that marvel. The celestial glow haloed around the world she sees will fade with time, and it’s up to me to keep that fire as lit as I can. For my daughter, yes, but also for myself. And for anyone I have influence over.

There are ways to do this. I taught “Ethics and Values” for five years at Utah Valley University, and—relatively unsupervised—I designed my curriculum around curiosity as a virtue. As philosophy professors often do, I began my class with the Allegory of the Cave: a prisoner in a world of shadows who leaves it and finds a real one full of color and dimension. The world is so much bigger than he thought: shape where there was only shadow, light the darkness couldn’t comprehend. But I taught my students that this story isn’t just a thought experiment. It’s real. The cave is everything you’ve learned to lock your eyes to. The cave is your screen, your looping thoughts, your filter bubble. But it’s not real, and you can leave it. It’s actually not that hard. 

Every week I’d assign my UVU students to do a “random act of curiosity”: a little experiment in attention or action that they designed and wrote a brief report about. They climbed trees and found it harder than they remembered. They showered in the dark and noticed that soap had a smell. They found childhood blankets in their closets and counted the squares in their kitchen. They counted with the numbers they found and rarely made it past fifty. And—for every student who tried it, every one over years—fasting from social media dramatically improved their life in just a few days. All it took was a pulse of attention, a pinch of creativity, and a nudge from a professor. And it changed their lives. I have thousands of submissions, and the trends are clear. I’m writing a book about it.

But here I am staring at my screen with Berkeley spring around me on all sides. I stare at my screen too much. The shadows on the wall are tempting. They’re familiar, comfortable. And so I look up again. Just now a boy with a yellow shirt ran past me. There are bugs flying with twisting jerks, and they’re doing it everywhere. I look for purple, and I find it. I look for green, and I find more of it. The sun is shining through a tree I didn’t notice was there. 

Curiosity is a virtue, and like all virtues, it needs practice. I’m committing to that practice. I will cultivate that practice in my daughter. I implore you to cultivate it in yourself, your children, and in anyone who wonders why your eyes aren’t cast down. Look up. Please. This world needs it. Our time needs it. 

Jesus himself said that “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” He was speaking of children. I’ve since realized that—if we all learned to see like children do—the world would become heaven. That’s the world Swedenborg saw, the world children haven’t forgotten how to see. To them, Swedenborg marvelously said, all things “laugh and play and live.” They do for my daughter. They can for us too. That world—where it’s always springtime, always sunrise—is laid out all around us, and despite our blindness, It’s there. It’s really there. I promise you it’s there. All you have to do is open your eyes and look. 

So look.

See?