Truly I tell you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.
— Mark 10:15 NRSV

I was in McKenzie Bridge, Oregon, leading a gathering of women. One evening one of the younger participants, a beautiful young mother, asked me to look over a book she was rereading for the third time. I read enough pages to understand why its words were important and supportive to a busy wife and mom. As I put the book down to record its title and author, it fell open to the following paragraph:

On our way to school last week, [five-year old] Julianna sat in her car seat, looking thoughtfully out of the van window. Then she called out my name.
"Mama," she said.
"What sweetie?" I asked.
"The whole world is inside of you."
I looked in the rearview mirror at her smiling face.
"The whole world is inside of you," she repeated. "And inside of me."

When Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God and admonishes that "whoever does not receive the kingdom as a little child will never enter it," the words imply that you must be like a young child, filled with wonder, openness, and trust. But what if he meant something very different?

What if Jesus was speaking, not of chronological childhood and its characteristics, but of a state embodied by children until they pass into adulthood. A state of sight. A state in which perceiving things means to know them in direct contact, as a child does, not needing to experience them as symbol or idea. A state where you know yourself to be complete, and you make no discrimination between a clothespin and a diamond. You simply see spirit in all forms, residing in all things.

It's startling to think that our access to the Kingdom might not be through knowledge, but through imagination. Imagination might be the language our life's events seek to unearth. And the way we perceived life as children can speak to us again, and once more we will see the miracle in all things.

What if the child is the one for whom everything is possible, and to be a child is to know that nothing is separate from God? To be a child is to see. It is a state of consciousness that allows us to know the world with the eyes of our true self. To be a child is to be led by an inner awareness.

— Paula D'Arcy, Seeking With All My Heart