Mar. 14, 2026
Like A Child:
The Spirituality Of Curiosity
It is one of the most cherished stories in the Gospels. Children are brought to Jesus for his blessing, and his disciples try to keep them away. Jesus has important work to do; they don’t want him bothered. But Jesus catches wind of it and swiftly puts the men in their place. You should all be like these children, he tells them, if you will enter a new kingdom of justice and peace. And we nod and smile and lean back into years of sermons about the humility and trust and simplicity of children. But I wonder. Have we left out their most conspicuous quality? Children are curious.
I have moved in and out of formal religion a number of times in my adult years, despite having been raised as a P.K. – preacher’s kid – and obtaining two Masters degrees in theology and spirituality. During one of my “out” periods, I once said to a monk friend that I thought mine was essentially a spirituality of curiosity. I could tell by the look on his face that he was not at all sure what I meant, not sure there was such a thing, and I’m not sure I could have explained it to him. But I’ve had twenty years since then to think about it and pursue it, and I now believe that curiosity is the very groundwater of any authentic spirituality.
Curiosity is our ticket to the riches of the universe, of Being
itself, and there can be no greater affirmation of that than watching a child. From its earliest days, the baby is completely absorbed in exploring. As soon as she is able, she is crawling into her world’s corners, touching its contours and testing its flavors. In each chance moment of freedom, he is trying to escape its borders. There are boundaries, to be sure, and they will be learned. Other limits, though, will be created and enforced.
And therein lies a very fine line. A lifeline, in fact. For between what is and what is known lies a liminal territory, the landscape of becoming – of knowing and unknowing, of letting go and receiving, of the creative meeting of what is and what may be.
Beyond the Known
The chronicle of knowledge is a recital of orthodoxy transcended – over and over. Beliefs embraced for centuries are overturned in a historical heartbeat by the few whose engagement with the world pulls them into the lap of something new. And we are not finished: maps of stars and atoms, of bodies and minds, continue to be redrawn as the curious push past the bounds of the known.
Except, it seems, when it comes to religion; there orthodoxy reigns. We seem to demand it. Is it the lingering whisper of ancient cosmologies centered on a jealous God with the power to punish? Or the grasping for certainty in a world changing under our feet? Whatever the fear behind our resistance to a regenerating understanding of the Ultimate Reality we have called God, Jesus encountered it too.
It was to crowds shaped within the Jewish orthodoxy of his day that Jesus tried to reveal his discovery of the new kingdom at their doorstep. He spent his entire public ministry trying to coax them across the threshold, but the generations of humanity since have barely nudged their toes over the edge, looking out from the centuries-old ground of messianic expectation, onto a place to which they expected be transported tomorrow or the day after, rather than a world for them to step into today – the world of wonder toward which the bottomless curiosity of a child would be drawn, the world of the unknown into which a child would eagerly step.
Mystics of every tradition have not only respected the unknown, but courted it. An anonymous fourteenth-century monk titled his guide for contemplation The Cloud of Unknowing, and virtually every Christian mystic across the ages has insisted on the need to let go of what is known on the way to an intuitive and direct experience of the divine beyond. And they too were misunderstood by those who had a “box of the known” to defend
We are even more handicapped. In the lives of ancient Jews and medieval mystics, the box of the known was small, and surrounded by clouds of mystery. We live in a world of the opposite proportions; the mass of what we know has obscured our view of realities beyond theorems and measurements, has led us even to doubt their existence. But as our current box of knowledge threatens to destroy us, perhaps we may be persuaded to transcend it long enough to invite into it the means of our salvation.
Into the Cloud
We do it every day. We listen to music and we are moved. We read a book and step behind another’s eyes. We hear of discoveries of new galaxies or species, the exploration of dark energy or brain signals, and we reorient ourselves in the world. And just for a moment, a latch of wonder clicks open – wonder, the playmate of curiosity.
Human consciousness is one of the greatest mysteries scientists have tackled, and it has them flummoxed. Yet history as far back as we can see attests that the most elusive of its characteristics, curiosity and wonder, are the catalysts of creativity. Wonder and curiosity do not wring the world for results but scavenge it for possibility. Wonder and curiosity are vehicles of unknowing, of surrendering the present known in exchange for an ever-evolving knowable.
When, in conversation with my friend all those years ago, I pitched him a spirituality of curiosity, this is what I sensed but could not put into words. It was the recognition of the “beyond” that my spirit encountered whenever I offered my consciousness, fully and openly, to the handiwork of another creator. When I read the book whose contents enlarged my scientific understanding or stretched my theological perspective, or that entered the hearts and minds of characters whose experiences I will never have. When I learned about distant lands and cultures whose people have completely different but equally fulfilling ways of being in the world. When I sat in the theater to immerse myself in the drama or in the concert hall to be transported by the music – or did either of those activities just lying on the sofa in my home. When I visited the art museum not because I understood the exhibit but because I didn’t, and trusted that its language would yet speak. When I walked alone in the forest or on the beach and allowed myself to feel every breeze and smell every scent. When I reached out to a new acquaintance or an old friend to learn how their lives had built their beliefs and how their beliefs had shaped their lives. When I took a step here, a step there, and a spark leapt between them, synapses flashing in recognition as the infinite opened and tendrils of thought dissolved into the fullness of Reality. And left me speechless at the taste of it.
These are mystical moments, invitations into the borderless Ground from which everything springs. I cannot say with any certainty how readily people of earlier eras recognized the promise of such occasions; the record surely shows that people in all times are capable of closed-mindedness and resistance to change. But today’s almost constant bombardment of indiscriminate information and heated opinions, glitzy advertisements and superficial entertainment, fills the silence in which we might discern the call into the unnamable unknown. In a world where so much was still unknown, to be curious was essential to survival. It still is, though I fear we have forgotten how.
Some of these moments do break through the noise, though – we have all had them. That’s how powerful they are, these intimations of a greater Reality. Sometimes they arrive as a powerful emotion or a sudden revelation, but more often as a subtle opening of the heart, a simple summons to listen more closely and more consistently to its promptings. And I wonder. What might change – in each of us and in the world – if we were to learn a new respect for the vast web of life into which we are woven, if we were to honor and cultivate curiosity as the road into the realization of the divine whole that always and already Is?
Toward the Possible
Curiosity and wonder are not the search for something, but are the opening to everything. In their presence, we are reminded that what we know is and always will be but a small fragment of the greater Being we inhabit, however deeply we plumb it.. Curiosity and wonder remind us that the known must be continually transcended, including and especially when our gaze is aimed toward Spirit. For how do you calculate an adequate fraction of knowledge of the Infinite?
For within the occasions of the inbreaking divine unknown lie the materials – the intuitions, the insights, the ideas – from which new realities are created, from which salvation from the self-destructive boxes we build may be realized. Oh, they are not found just lying around to be picked up and tried; curiosity is not a problem-solving exercise. Rather, the events wooed by curiosity and wonder are gates into divine inspiration, opened when we give ourselves over to the “what abouts?” and “what ifs?” and “maybe evens,” when we make space and allow ourselves to be taught by realities beyond words altogether. And the more often we give curiosity free rein and room to roam, the deeper and broader the matrix from which we may draw the wisdom, the power and the purpose sprayed from the Fountainhead into prismatic drops of its manifestation. Us.
So yes, when Jesus rebuked his disciples by lifting up the promise of the children, he naturally lifted up their humility and simplicity. But he almost certainly saw this too: that curiosity and wonder are the keys to the kingdom.
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