Walking on Water by Madeleine L'Engle Page A

over and over again that not only were they to let the little children come to him but that they were to be like little children themselves. When we are like little children, with the openness the child has up until the age for school, then we retain our ability to be creators, our willingness to be open, to believe.
    I need not belabour the point that to retain our childlike openness does not mean to be childish. Only the most mature of us are able to be childlike. And to be able to be childlike involves memory; we must never forget any part of ourselves. As of this writing I am sixty-one years old in chronology. But I am not an isolated, chronological numerical statistic. I am sixty-one, and I am also four, and twelve, and fifteen, and twenty-three, and thirty-one, and forty-five, and…and…and…
    If we lose any part of ourselves, we are thereby diminished. If I cannot be thirteen and sixty-one simultaneously, part of me has been taken away.
    Some of my friends and I have remarked that it would be marvellous if we could go back to college
now;
if we could go back to college and be eighteen again but keep everything we have learned in the intervening years, how much more we would get out of it! The marvellous thing is that in the writing of fiction we can, indeed, be eighteen again, and retain all that has happened to us in our slow growing up. For growing up never ends; we never get there. I am still in the process of growing up, but I will make no progress if I lose any of myself on the way.
    We will not have the courage or the ability to unlearn the dirty devices of which Traherne warns us, or to keep our child’s creativity, unless we are willing to be truly “grown-up.” Creativity opens us to revelation, and when our high creativity is lowered to 2 percent, so is our capacity to see angels, to walk on water, to talk with unicorns. In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind. Something almost always happens to startle us during the act of creating, but not unless we let go our adult intellectual control and become as open as little children. This means not to set aside or discard the intellect but to understand that it is not to become a dictator, for when it does we are closed off from revelation.
    Scientists sometimes understand this better than theologians. Dr. Friedrich Dessauer, an atomic physicist, writes,
Man is a creature who depends entirely on revelation. In all his intellectual endeavor, he should always listen, always be intent to hear and see. He should not strive to superimpose the structures of his own mind, his systems of thought upon reality….At the beginning of all spiritual endeavor stands humility, and he who loses it can achieve no other heights than the heights of disillusionment.
    Creative scientists and saints expect revelation and do not fear it. Neither do children. But as we grow up and we are hurt, we learn not to trust, and that lack of trust is a wound as grievous as whatever caused it.
    It strikes me that perhaps I am elevating scientists and downgrading theologians, and that is not true, nor fair. For the few scientists who live by revelation there are many more who are no more than technicians, who are terrified of the wide world outside the laboratory, and who trust nothing they cannot prove. Amazing things may happen in their test tubes and retorts, but only the rare few see the implications beyond the immediate experiment. They cannot trust further than their own senses, and this lack of trust is often caught by the rest of us.
    I was told of a man who had a small son he loved dearly, and so he wanted to protect him against all the things in life which frighten and hurt. He was emphatic in telling the little boy that
nobody
can be trusted. One evening when the father came home, his son came running down the stairs to greet him, and the father stopped him at the landing. “Son,” he said, “Daddy has