When he grew to adulthood, wrote Paul the Apostle, “I put away childish things.” Yet his teacher, Jesus, advised that “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
We tend to think that experience destroys innocence. But the koan of contradiction presented by Jesus and Paul suggests that both innocence and experience play essential roles in the search for meaning, and that experience can feed a wisdom that may nurture a renewed innocence. As the Buddhist teacher Thanissara narrates in this Summer issue of Parabola, the Buddha needed to experience the sights of aging, illness, and death before he could gain enlightenment.
Philosopher Jacob Needleman contributes to this issue; so do Buddhist scholar Mu Soeng, Taoist master Solala Towler, author John Shirley, Jungian thinker Helen Luke, and others. While their spiritual paths differ, all manifest an understanding that it is through an awakened acceptance of the experiences of life, accepting them as a child accepts the dawn of a new day, that life is best lived.
That kind of openness is easier said than done. To learn how to accept, we can turn for help to all sorts of guides and companions—even a fallen angel, Lucifer, considered in Tracy Cochran’s contribution, and even animal guides, as we see in Joan Chittister’s entry about a new puppy, and in a photo gallery of wonderful animals gone forever.
We also remember Jean Sulzberger, a pillar of Parabola for forty years, who died this past February. A brief memorial to her can be found in this issue, which we hope will be of benefit to you along your way.
—Jeff Zaleski
