"In sharp contrast to the pharisaic perception of God and religion, the biblical perception of the gospel of grace is that of a child who has never experienced anything but love and who tries to do their best because they are loved. When they make mistakes, they know they have not jeopardized the love of their parents. The possiblity that the parents might stop loving this child is he/she doesn't clean their room never enters the child's mind. The parents may disapprove of the behavior, but their love is not contingent on the child's performance.
For the pharisee, the emphasis is always on personal effort and achievement. The gospel of grace emphasizes the primacy of God's love. The pharisee savors impeccable conduct; the child delights in the relentless tenderness of God.
In reponse to her sister's question of what she meant "by remaining a little child before the good God" Therese of Lisieuz said,
It is recognizing one's nothingness, expecting everything from the good God, just as a little child expects everything from its father. It is not getting anxious about anything, not trying to make one's fortune...Being little is also not attributing to oneself the virtues that one practices, as if one believed oneself capable of achieving something, but recognizing that the good God puts this treasure into the hands of His little child for it to make use of it whenever it needs to; but it is always the good God's treasure. Finally, it is never being disheartened by one's faults, because children often fall, but they are too little to do themselves much harm.
Parents love a little one before that child makes his or her mark in the world. A mother never holds up her infant to a visiting neighbor with the words, "This is my daughter. She's going to be a lawyer." Therefore, the secure child's accomplishments later in life are not the effort to gain acceptance and approval, but the abundant overflow of her sense of being loved.
If the pharisee is the religious face of the impostor, the inner child is the religious face of the true self. The child represent my authentic self and the pharisee the unauthentic. Here we find a winsome wedding of depth psychology and spirituality. Psychoanalysis aims to expose clients' neuroses, to move them away from their falseness, lack of authenticity, and pseudo-sophistication toward a childlike openness to reality, toward what Jesus enjoins us to be: "unless you become like little children."
The child spontaneously expresses emotions. The pharisee carefully represses them. The question is not whether I am an introvert or an extrovert, a sanguine or a subdued personality. The issue is whether I express or repress my genuine feelings.
John Powell once said with sadness that as an epitaph for his parents' tombstone he would have been compelled to write: Here lie two people who never knew one another.
His father could never share his feelings, so his mother never got to know him. To open yourself to another person, to stop lying about your loneliness and your fears, to be honest about your affections, and to tell others how much they mean to you---this openness is the triumph of the child over the pharisee and a sign of the dynamic presence of the Holy Spirit. "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." (2 Corinthians 3:17)
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From ABBA'S CHILD: The Cry of the Heart for Intimate Belonging Brennan Manning (Colorado Springs, CO: NavPress, 1994) pages 88-90.
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