Parenting & Family Quote by Frederick Buechner

The line lands like a gentle rebuke to grown-up dignity. Buechner doesn’t flatter immaturity; he punctures the adult habit of treating “childish” as a synonym for “beneath me.” His pivot is surgical: if the impulse feels childish, don’t automatically suppress it. Do it, but do it “in remembrance” - not as regression, but as recognition. You are, at bottom, still a child: needy, wonder-prone, easily bruised, hungry for play, comfort, and being seen.

As a clergyman, Buechner is working inside a Christian anthropology that resists the modern fantasy of the self-made adult. The word “remembrance” carries liturgical weight (echoing ritual memory, the kind that reorders a life). It suggests that the act isn’t justified because it’s cute, quirky, or good for your inner child’s brand. It’s justified because forgetting your childness makes you brittle: you confuse sophistication with wholeness, control with character.

The subtext is also pastoral: permission can be a form of healing. Many people come to faith communities carrying shame around “small” desires - to sing too loudly, to cry, to ask for help, to be delighted without irony. Buechner’s counsel reframes those impulses as honest rather than embarrassing. It’s not an invitation to irresponsibility; it’s an insistence on humility. The most “adult” thing here is admitting dependence, and the most spiritual move is refusing to exile the parts of yourself that still reach out with a child’s open hands.