At some point in everyone’s life, they’ve heard the phrase, “you need to grow up.” Usually, this phrase is not meant to be said as words of encouragement, rather, criticism for your behavior or your choices. It can often mean you are being too immature, too unrealistic, too imaginative, too emotional, too irresponsible or too sensitive.
Over time, as we grow from being little kids running around the playground, which was your school’s parking lot, we begin to associate growing up with becoming more serious and less like the younger versions of ourselves. When we were younger, the idea of growing up seemed so desirable: more independence, could make your own money, do stuff on your own and be more open to the world around you. But now it starts to sound less like becoming a better and independent person and more like becoming harder in our hearts and minds.
But what if the aspect of growing up was never supposed to mean losing that child inside of us but to still be the child that God sees us all as?
From a Catholic perspective, the idea of growing up looks very different from what the world often tells us. In Matthew 18:3, Christ says, “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven.”
What does this mean, though, in terms of growing up? Jesus did not say to become childish, to be irresponsible or to be selfish but to become like children. Children are trusting, humble, curious, forgiving and full of that childlike wonder, and I believe many wish they could have that again.
There is an important difference between being childish and being childlike. Being childish means refusing to take responsibility, avoiding the hard things in life and putting yourself and your understanding first. Being childlike means trusting others, believing in something greater than ourselves, finding joy in the simplest things and having the purity of heart. Somewhere along the course of our existence, people confuse the two and assume that to grow up, we must eliminate both sides.
The truth is that growing up is not just about taking responsibility and gaining independence. Growing up means realizing that the world is not perfect, and neither are we. As we get older, we begin to see more clearly that the people in this world and the world itself struggle. Not just with school, work or money, but deeper things. Things like loneliness, anxiety, anger, pride, addictions, jealousy and endless mistakes that follow people for years, wondering if they will ever find a way out.
In a Catholic sense, you could say that evil, sin and demons have a way of bleeding into our lives, our hearts and our souls. Dimming the once pure lights inside, to gradually become darker, less bright, less alive and less childlike. No one gets through life completely untouched from suffering or by their own mistakes; evil and sin always lurk in the most unknown places waiting to strike and continue to dim the light of our souls.
Growing up is often the moment when we realize that life is not a fairytale or a simple story of good and bad people. It is a story of people who are trying, failing, learning, making mistakes and constantly getting up to try again.
This realization can make people cynical to shake us into hardening our hearts because that’s what the world has taught us to be. It can make people stop believing in goodness, in the existence of good people and in the idea that people can change. This is the exact moment that being childlike matters the most.
A child believes that people can be forgiven, that tomorrow is a new day and believes that even if something is broken, it can still be put back together.
Maybe growing up is not about losing our childlike sense of the world, but about holding onto it after we have seen how broken the world can be.
Many Catholic saints understood this better than most adults. Saints like Therese of Lisieux believed in approaching God with the trust of a child, even while living through suffering and eventually passing at such a young age. Francis of Assisi lived simply and found joy in the world and the nature around him, giving up wealth and comfort to follow Christ. None of them believed that growing up meant becoming colder, bitter or joyless.
They believed that growing up meant becoming stronger, more loving, more trusting in God, more disciplined, more responsible while still keeping that joy and wonder of a child.
Maybe growing up is not straying away from that child in us but about protecting that child.
When we are young, we see good and evil, heroes and villains, right and wrong. We believe people can be good, that we have endless opportunities in the world and that life is an adventure. As we get older, the world tries to distort that narrative that those beliefs keep us naive. That the world is about earning money, gaining success and mostly survival.
Perhaps having true maturity means choosing to keep those childlike beliefs even after we see how badly the world wants us to harden our hearts.
A child sees the world with wonder. An adult sees the world with responsibility. A mature person should be able to do both.
Growing up should not mean becoming less human. It should mean becoming more fully human. Embracing that humanity we were given, which is God’s greatest creation.
The goal shouldn’t be to grow up and leave that child behind on your adventure through life, but to take that child along with us as we face both the good and evil of the world. To learn to become strong and wise enough to protect the wonder, hope and faith we once had.
And to remember to never let go of it, no matter what the world tells us.
Sienna Stephens is a freshman at Saint Mary's College and planning on majoring in secondary education and English. When she is not taking a hike from SMC to Notre Dame, you will find her listening to music 24/7 and trying to make her Pinterest boards aesthetic. Feel free to reach out to her at sstephens01@saintmarys.edu
