That Innocent Age

That Innocent Age

The 45 rpm record dropped to the spinning turntable, and the needle found its groove. There were some scratches, but the music came through loud and clear: “A, B, C / Easy as one, two, three . . .”

My sister and I listened to this song and countless others like it in the living room of our suburban house throughout our elementary and junior high school years. It was, by and large, happy music, and the singers who performed it did not seem tormented. This was when the people behind the music performed it on TV variety shows, not in multimillion-dollar music videos. The artists seemed real then, almost like ordinary people.

When we listened to the Jackson 5 sing “ABC” or any of their other hits, we danced—and imagined we danced like Michael. We didn’t, of course—nobody could dance like that. But we had fun trying. It was an age of innocence, and to this day the first few notes of these songs can still cause an involuntary smile to creep across my face.

I wish that innocence could have lasted. I think maybe the man who made the music wished it could have too. It looks as if he tried for the rest of his life to bring it back—but the clock keeps moving forward. Isn’t it a wonder, then, that Jesus told a grown man he must be born again? That phrase has become a cliché at best, or at worst a defamatory grenade lobbed with a sneer. But I’ll bet it would have had an almost irresistible appeal to the pop star who died a mere shell of the clear-eyed child he once was.

“You must be born again,” Jesus said. You must come clean and start anew, wiping the slate clear. You must go back to the beginning, back to the age of innocence, he seemed to say. And he claimed to be the one to take us there. Forget nostalgia, antiaging serums, wrinkle creams, and grainy Ed Sullivan videos. There’s only one way back to the age of innocence: a true innocence, not an imaginary one. He’s it. There is no other.

Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.”

John 3:5, NASB