Column: Children teach us how to listen for — and to — God

I was 6 years old when I experienced my divine contravention.

That’s how I express it. It’s when the eternal crashes unexpectedly (from our perspective) into the day-to-day.

I’ve had many spiritual moments since, though not a raft of existential mind-blowers. As an unremarkable and flawed Christian, suffice it to say that spiritual pyrotechnics have not been de rigueur for me.

I’m no Augustine of Hippo. I’m an egg salad sandwich with watercress kind of guy. Ho-hum.

I was 6 when my confluence with “enlightenment” occurred. I can tie the episode to the house in which we lived at the time. The experience has since been a lifelong memory, though I’ve never spoken of it to anyone. Until now.

I haven’t really been able to describe it.

I remember my moment of “intersecting dimensions” — God’s ocean of magnificence flooding my rain puddle. I was sprawled on the living room floor playing with a favorite toy as my mother prepared dinner in the kitchen.

I recall a flash of insight that streaked through my gray matter and held me captive for what seemed an eternal millisecond.

What prompted it? I have no answer.

It was an awareness, mostly, and at that moment I knew beyond a shadow of doubt that I was both mortal and immortal: animated in this moment of time and alive for eternity.

Further, I was aware that someone far greater than I — God, perhaps? — existed. And I received the stunning revelation that I was known — beyond my immediate family — by the deepest mystery of the universe: the unfathomable Godhead.

How could those thoughts assail me? They soared far above my intellectual capacity.

I also knew that I was a not-yet-fully-developed being. To that point I’d never considered my mortality. I at once was drawn to it — and to much more.

I believe children possess unique insight into matters of faith.

“I’m 6,” I remember thinking. “I’ve been in the world six years. But it feels longer. I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t. I feel as if I’ve always been.”

Preexistence didn’t figure into the equation.

“‘Where was I seven years ago? Was I a being at all? What does it mean to be nothing? And how did I get here from there?’”

Those questions so unnerved me that I sprouted gooseflesh and felt a churning in my stomach. I shook my head to clear the clutter, and breathed deeply.

It was surely my first spiritual conversation: “I feel as though I’ve always been … yet there was a time — a very long time — when I wasn’t. Was I known by him when there was no me?”

The questions this 6-year-old posited were not as articulate as those above. I asked them mostly without words, while drinking from a fire hose.

Thoughts of being/not being haunted me throughout childhood. Since puberty, however, their intensity has faded. It’s too bad, really. I rather enjoyed being overwrought by supernatural ponderings.

“To be or not to be” was my core question long before I met the Melancholy Dane. Whenever I considered that conundrum my stomach would tighten and I’d feel detached from reality. I couldn’t ask my parents to enlighten me because I didn’t know how.

“‘Maybe I’ll have an answer when I’m 7,’” I concluded. Some questions aren’t answered in a lifetime.

I continue to believe that what happened to me at 6 was powerful.

“Truly, I tell you,” Jesus instructed his disciples, “unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

Permit yourself to be gobsmacked by the king of kings and lord of lords.

Children play important roles in the kingdom and deserve thoughtful responses from adults. They’re capable of experiencing deep spiritual feelings, longings and even woundings. They’re more easily reached by a loving heavenly father than are their ego-driven parents.

Children teach us how to listen for God. They don’t dismiss ideas that are contrary to their own. They thrill at being stupefied, and they speak truth.

“From the mouths of babes,” my mom used to say.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.