Soul Signal

By Victoria Rowan

Picture a person who has lived long enough to be the one everybody asks for advice. Now picture that person turning to a baby, barely a week old, with a question about life.

That is the strange scene in saying 4 of the Gospel of Thomas. The baby cannot answer. The older person asks anyway. For anyone who has spent years being the dependable one, that may be the hardest part of the saying to imagine.

What the saying actually gives us

In Stephen Patterson and Marvin Meyer’s translation of the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus describes someone advanced in years who is willing to ask a seven-day-old child about the “place of life.” The saying promises that the older person will live, then speaks of the first becoming last and becoming one.

The text does not tell us what the baby says. It does not even give us a reply to imagine. That leaves the reader with the older person’s willingness to ask and with a reversal of who we expect to know something. The exact meaning of “place of life” is open to interpretation. My reading is that the scene asks us to pay attention to life where we least expect to be taught by it.

What a baby can show without explaining

Imagine sitting beside a newborn who has finally fallen asleep. There is no conversation to fill the room. Nobody needs you to settle what God is, explain why the world hurts, or make a convincing argument for a belief. There is a small chest rising and falling, and you can sit there long enough to notice it.

That image does not make babies little sages. They are people who need feeding, warmth, and someone to hold them when they cannot settle. Their dependence is part of what makes the saying arresting. The person with years of experience can still learn from someone who has no standing in the world and cannot earn anybody’s attention by being impressive.

There is a lesson there for anyone who has learned to count a day by what got done. We can spend a whole afternoon making ourselves useful and scarcely notice the people we are doing it for. A child who cannot give you anything in return can bring that habit into view.

Keep the wisdom. Loosen your grip on the answers.

Age and experience have real value. You learn which promises are reliable and which arguments are best left alone. You may know exactly how to help a frightened person because you have had to sit beside fear before. None of that needs to be thrown away.

But experience can also teach us to finish a sentence before someone else has said it. We hear the first few words and assume we know what comes next. We read the opening of a familiar passage and skip straight to the explanation we were given years ago. Sometimes the very thing that helped us understand yesterday keeps us from listening today.

The older person in Thomas can bring every year of experience to the encounter and still ask a question. That is what I find hopeful about this image. You do not have to become younger to become teachable again.

Try asking before you explain

Pick a conversation in which you usually know what you are going to say before the other person has finished. The next time it happens, let them get to the end. Ask what they mean by one word you think you already understand. You may discover they are asking for company when you were preparing to offer advice.

You can do the same with a text. Read saying 4 slowly. Write down what it actually says, then write down what you bring to it. Those are two different things, and both are worth noticing. If you have been taught that an ancient saying must yield one correct answer on first reading, try leaving the question open overnight.

For more reading, visit Soul Signal’s Lost Library. If the connection between asking and speaking interests you, Finding Your Voice Without Turning It into a Weapon looks at the other side of the conversation: how to speak honestly while leaving others room to think.

The child in the saying never delivers a sermon. The older person has lived a long time and is still willing to turn toward someone who cannot tell them what they want to hear. Maybe that is a good place to begin when you feel you have heard it all.