Suffering the Little Children

I have often felt guilty at being perturbed by the noise of children during the sermon. The crying of infants, and worse, the talking of older children, makes me think unfriendly thoughts about their rude parents--rude in the sense of uninstructed, or even, in some cases, as committing a deliberate affront by way of making some kind of “statement.” I am aware of the importance of having children in God’s house, to learn its ways and to receive instruction, more than cognizant of our Lord’s instruction to allow the little children to come to him, and of his rebuke to his disciples that would prevent it.

The essential question, though, has to do with a church’s choice, not immediately related to this mandate, about how the ministry of the Word is to be carried out in the congregation. If there is to be a sermon that is a reasoned discourse of some length that requires close, meditative attention, it is also necessary to have an atmosphere relatively free of distracting noise--human noises, since they are heavy with human meaning, being the most distracting of all.

A baby cries to alert its mother to its needs, and when people hear a child in need, not only virtue, but the race’s fundamental sense of self-preservation cannot help but recognize it as a concern that needs tending to before listening to words, even good words--for the ears that are made for hearing must be preserved. Thus the terrible dissonance thrown up at an almost autonomic level by a baby crying during a sermon. I think it best resolved by having the mother take the child from the room and care for it elsewhere.

I remember a graduate school where the high admissions standards and intense competition made its library a place where much hard intellectual labor was carried on. Mind you, its patrons were members of a generation (mine) that constantly preached freedom from restraint, “doing one’s own thing,” as a fundamental human right--a clamorous, infantile, superficial generation, idiotic in the original sense of the term. Thus it was also a supremely self-centered generation, always attentive to its own best interests, so that when a library in which one could concentrate intently on difficult material was understood as having a direct connection to its users’ academic survival and professional future, no wizened nanny of a traditionalist librarian was needed to keep it quiet. The flower children enforced it all by themselves, as anyone who decided that the reading tables were good places for a conversation, even a whispered one, quickly discovered. A fortiori, one would think, in a place where what is being said is discerned by the hearers as intimately connected with the soul’s salvation.

One can solve this problem as many churches have by reducing the sermon to a brief, piddling moralism, or a long drone (or holler) of predictable, pre-approved cliches. The worth of these is not diminished by any amount of noise, and the kiddies might as well strike up dwarf-bands in the aisles. In churches that have sermons worth hearing by people of adult understanding, though, I am for bringing children into the service at certain points and dismissing them at others, telling them that cannot stay for the whole until they are old enough quietly to pay attention. This treats them as the catechumens they are, and gives them an adult privilege at which to aim.