April recently posted about innocence, and it got me to thinking about the relationship between innocence and ignorance. She was responding to a comment made on a post by Mountain Mama that included a picture of two young children and some bottles of alcohol, with the commenter observing that he/she thought it was sad that children would be exposed to such things.
After wrestling with it a bit (please do read her full post), April concluded that:
How amazingly beautiful it is to see the options, interact with them, and THEN choose which way to go! How much more meaningful is a blameless life when those choices were made courageously?!
I will conclude, in my own opinion, that innocence is maintained in spite of exposure, as long as good choices are made. And perhaps innocence is redeemable? If we don't allow ourselves to choose, if we don't allow ourselves to be educated, if we don't educate our children....then we are just ignorant. I think I really believe that.
I think I agree with her conclusion as well. After mulling it for a while yesterday and talking about it with (at?) V for a bit, I'm starting to see it all as directly related to maturity. Certainly, there are things that are age appropriate. For example, I wouldn't take a child (or some adults, for that matter) to go see American Psycho. The world is full of brutality, and we can't deny that it exists, but it seems unnecessary to me to confront people with it, especially in its extreme forms. Sometimes we can be non-ignorant but still avoid exposure. But something like alcohol? Well, I suppose there are levels of exposure. I don't have any problem at all with adults drinking responsibly around children. I do have a problem with an adult offering a kid a shot of tequila.
So maybe it's also a matter of awareness vs. participation? Her comment about innocence being redeemable made me ponder my own life a bit. Over the course of things I've participated in some pretty rough stuff. But as I've matured (spiritually, emotionally, etc) the activities that used to be a natural part of my daily life would now feel completely uncomfortable and weird. Maybe that's something of what it means to recover innocence?
I know these thoughts aren't particularly well formulated, but I hope they make a little sense...
2 comments:
Jasie,
I wonder if some of this relates to trust and suspicion issues. Or, another way of reflecting on this might be to say that innocence is always lost and never redeemable, but this may be a good thing.
There is no recovery of innocence because it is always broken, like a cracked mirror that cannot be put back together. Maybe, however, there is a second innocence - might we say, a critical innocence, that becomes an entirely new thing.
I like very much the idea of a second innocence that is a new thing. Maybe part of sanctification is this new critical innocence? That may have something to do with the "innocent as doves, shrewd as snakes" thing. Hmmm...
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