Quieting the child within

Some nights I enjoy putting on my reading glasses, slumping into a big overstuffed chair and plopping open my old 1885 edition of "The Library of Religious Poetry."

It makes me feel like a character from Dickens.

Heck, it makes me feel like Charles Dickens.

The book of verse is one of those old 19th-century beauties with sharp, woodblock prints of various poets mixed in with about 4,000 poems. And like a prospector panning for gold dust, I sit and sift the pages, looking for some glittery nugget I hadn't noticed before.

The other night I caught the gleam of John Newton's poem "The Child."

Newton gave the world "Amazing Grace" and many other hymns, but "The Child" reads like a quick glimpse into his very soul.

The poem begins:

Quiet, Lord, my forward heart,

Make me teachable and mild;

Upright, simple, free from art,

Make me as a weaned child.

They say coincidence is God's way of making a pun, and a few minutes later — when I put away my anthology and opened the Bible to the Psalms — my eye fell on Psalm 131 and the words "weaned child."

Surely I have behaved and quieted myself,

as a child that is weaned of his mother;

It seemed to me a child who wasn't weaned would be more appropriate — a child completely dependent on its parent for its daily nourishment.

Why "weaned child?"

I decided to launch an investigation.

Here's what I found.

The word "weaned" shows up a dozen times in the Bible. In the ancient Holy Land children were weaned around age 3, so we're not talking a babe in arms here, but a child with a personality and a sense of who he is. Such a child, some say, will turn to his mother not out of necessity but out of love. He doesn't need her for physical nourishment, he needs her for spiritual nourishment.

Writer John Gill claimed the child in the Psalm was weaned from the "riches, honours, pleasures and profits" of the world.

The preacher James Vaughan claimed being weaned meant being "disciplined."

And Charles Spurgeon saw the child as mature enough to still feel love for a parent who denied it what it wanted.

As I read all this, sitting in my chair, I realized I was acting like the child in the Psalm.

I had "behaved" and "quieted" myself.

In my big, soft chair with my book I was trying to get comfortable and cozy.

They say every scripture is personal. And Newton's poem and Psalm 131 suddenly seemed to be about me.

I was the one hoping to connect with a loving parent.

I was trying to become the child I was reading about.

We are what we read.

e-mail: jerjohn@desnews.com