Forming The Spirituality Of Children

As children grow and develop, it is the privilege of both parents and the church to foster their spiritual sensitivity. This article describes how both the life of the home and public worship are vitally important in this process. This article is written from a formal liturgical perspective, but can easily be applied in every worship tradition.

A Religious Home Our first task is to learn how to maintain religious homes, homes which cherish and nurture the religious dimension of life, instead of denying or ignoring it. By religious, I mean that answer to the human need to concur on a set of symbols and rituals which create order, give identity, and provide motivation. More and more people are being raised to ignore this dimension of their lives, to deny the need for symbol, and to survive somehow without order, identity, and motivation. Thus in the first place, the home must be a religious place. Are meals shared in common? Are there rituals particular to the needs and strengths of the family? Is that which is beyond human comprehension given its respectful place? Is nature reverenced? Do we as parents teach our children to stand humbly before great works of art? Are we able to stand before one another and, weepingly, say good-bye? How do parents help their children deal with the monsters of the night? (Telling the children that there are no monsters does, I am convinced, no good; the monsters seem to return as soon as the adults leave the bedroom.) How is death explained? Do the children attend funerals and visit grave sites? We can learn from fine children's books, like those by Maurice Sendak, in which monsters are faced and dreams are relived, in which the rhythm of the text and the magnificent illustrations allow the children a religious response to these forbidden fears of life. One of my criticisms of the Roman eucharistic prayers for masses with children is that they are in the first place poor religion. They trivialize children's experience. The prayers depict children as happy-go-lucky and innocent; they describe the world as a wondrous place of sunshine; they offer prosaic explanations, instead of vivid images; the language of the prayers is not in any way incantatory; and the prayers have no illustrations! The children I know are more deeply aware of the religious dimension of life than these prayers would suggest. One further opportunity for the religious home is to use those very early years to talk about God as one far other than a big daddy in the sky. Small children have not yet seen the history of Western art, which gives us all the indelible mental image of God as an old bearded man on a mountain. Especially in those early years, we can speak of the mysteries of God: God, our treasure, our rock, our cup, our river, our bread, and our fortress. Before the onset of logical and discursive thought, children are able to talk of God in the same creative ways that the Psalms do. Our respect for the mystery of God demands that we use this stage to its religious advantage. A Sanctified Home Our second task is to sanctify the religious home with the Christian faith. In such a home. all the religious longings and the human terrors are turned to the Cross. It is not that there are no monsters—for there are—but God is bigger than the monsters. The primary manner in which the home is sanctified by faith is by responding to the call to praise; that is, by participating in the life of Christian worship. Do Christian families visit churches before moving so that the location of the parish will help them decide where to live? Are family activities and commitments based around the centrality of the Sunday worship experience? It is my firm resolution that children belong in the Sunday Eucharist from baptism on. Yes, this requires dedication on the parents' part and no small understanding of the liturgy themselves, as they play the role of sportscaster for their young ones—"?Look here, see this, there's the important thing.?" We can share with one another ideas for helping small and growing children understand and participate in the liturgy. For, granting children's ability to take in complex stimuli, to tune in and out at their own attention level, to sense the meaning of symbol, and to flow with the movement of ritual, children are readily able to worship with the parish long before they can verbally demonstrate this ability. Children enjoy the mingling of images that is in the liturgy, and even a very small child can learn to say, "?Lord, have mercy.?" Beside worship in church, there is worship in the home. I resist the despair which groans that contemporary homes cannot sustain a devotional life. Patterns formed when the children are still infants, a good night prayer at the crib, can be maintained. Good Bible story books (a trick to find, among all the poor ones on the market) can be read. Perhaps the parish can give such books as baptismal gifts. Sacred songs can be sung. The historic responses of the faithful—"?O God, come to our assistance, O Lord, make haste to help me?"—can be incorporated into meal times. Times of family significance, trips, reunions, parties, and mournings, all can be offered to God on the family altar. This essential task, the sanctification of the religious home by the Christian faith, has a parental focus. The issue is not so much the education of the children of believing parents, as the education of parents of believing children. If the faith is experienced as integral also to adult life, if the parents continue to grow also in their spiritual life, the children will see this faith as part of a healthy human experience. The parents ought not merely to recite kiddie prayers with their children, but use devotional times to offer their own prayers also, so that children see their parents pray. Do the parents discuss the homily? Do they debate moral issues? Do they sing the sacred songs? Do they recall the saints' days? All too often, we encourage children in religious education until they are pre-teen age, but then ignore any further development. This only suggests to children that religious training, like Saturday morning television, is kids' stuff. The faith must be lived by the parents as something that remains significant for maturing human life. How does Deuteronomy 11:19 suggest we teach our children? "?And you shall teach them to your children, talking of them when you are sitting at your house and when you are walking by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.?" Children and Liturgy Our third task is to incorporate the children into the liturgical life of the parish. In the first place, we must make the liturgy and the children more amenable to another. This suggests a host of considerations, from training children to be lectors to giving toddlers their own service orders, to redesigning our seating arrangements. But it also implies several more significant changes in our practice, the most important being the age of first Communion. The time has come to end the church's seven hundred year old separation of baptism from first Communion. It was not until the twelfth century that, because of an over scrupulous concern that the body and blood of Christ might be dropped or spilled, nursing infants were first deprived the bread, and later all the laity deprived of the wine. Small children were then left not communing at all. Subsequently, we drew up logical reasons to explain the situation we had inherited. As the culture becomes increasingly pagan, our parish life must be more inclusive for all its baptized members—and we become members at baptism. All baptized members should be encouraged to eat and drink at the Table of the Lord. My four year old daughter said, "?We drink God in the wine,?" and I could not have said it better. The wine is not like the liquor of a cocktail party, but like milk for all who are nursed by God's Word. Another major concern is the American practice of confirmation in early preteen years. We have not been true to the intent of the rite in our language and practice. If we say that confirmation is the adult renewing a promise made during infancy, then we are fooling ourselves to give such a decision to children. We are in fact encouraging perjury. If we say that confirmation is a puberty rite, we can design one more appropriate to our culture without suggesting that an adult has more of the Holy Spirit than a child. If confirmation is, really, a kind of graduation from the parish's formal religious education, we do the maturing life of faith an enormous disservice. Confirmation was historically the bishop's prayer over the baptized child. Indeed, we need much more study on how history and present practice can help us shape the ritual into one which enlivens both the children and the church with the Spirit. Perhaps periodic public reaffirmations of faith at times of life passage might be shaped liturgically as parish celebrations. Meanwhile, the bishop's prayer might be restored to its original place, baptism. In conclusion in my experience, the people who sit with toddlers in church, the parents who have prayed their children through childhood, can tell story after story—some almost incredible—that point to the religious nature of small children, to their ability to catch images as they fly by, and to their delight in participating in liturgical action. These stories testify only to what we adults observe: surely much is going on that we do not see. Alexander Schmemann has written of his despair that some Orthodox Christians in the United States have adopted the pattern of conducting Sunday school during church. He rails against the incongruity of rearing children in the faith by keeping them out of the divine liturgy. For to be a Christian is to be called to worship God. That call comes to all of us who are baptized, at whatever age we are. When we baptize our children, we are accepting the responsibility of training them in the practice of the faith. Such formation is not easy, but neither is it nigh to impossible. Such formation is a way of life, the way of life of the Spirit.