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To Walk With A Child
I HAVE A STORY TO TELL YOU—A TRUE STORY. A young man in his late twenties told it to me. When he was four years old, his grandmother took him with his older brother, age seven, to the hospital to see his baby sister for the first time. After having waited and heard for nine long months about the coming new baby, he could hardly sit still. His anticipation heightened when his grandmother told him in the car that "if he was good" he might even be allowed to hold his baby sister. When they finally arrived at his mother's hospital room and they brought the baby in, his older brother got to hold her first. Watching, he grew even more excited until, at last, his turn came. "They told me," he said, "to hold my arms up like this." He held his arms in front of him, as he had when he was a child, making place for his baby sister. I asked him what he remembered feeling. "I felt a great strength fill my chest and arms." As he spoke, his chest grew and his arms formed a sturdy cradle. He was preparing himself again, as he had when a child, to accept the responsibility of holding in his arms the very life of his baby sister. "Then," he said, "my mother placed her in my arms." "Can you tell me what that was like for you?" I asked. "I felt," he said, "as if I was being carried away to a place where I had never been." How common—and mysterious: a four-year-old child, carrying his new baby sister, finds himself being carried away to a place where he had never been. Later, we reflected on the influence that this childhood experience had in shaping his image of God. "To this day," he said, "my God is the one who carries me away to places where I have never been." For several years I have been exploring such childhood memories of adults in seminars on the spirituality of childhood. They provide a source from which homilists can learn not only about the spiritual life of children but also about the influences those experiences still have on the quality and character of adult spirituality. As obvious as it may seem, children already have a spiritual life. They already enjoy a relationship with God. Sometimes we forget: Jesus did not say, "Unless you become as adults, you shall not enter the Kingdom." Rather, Jesus observed, children already possess the Kingdom of God (Matthew 19:14). Moreover, only those who humble themselves as children can possess this Kingdom (Luke 18:17). If we keep this perspective in mind, we will probably need to change the way we, as liturgy leaders or catechists, relate to children. Look at it this way: What are we passing on to children if they already possess the Kingdom? Recall the young man's experience of holding his baby sister for the first time. With all of our formal religious education and theological training, many of us have forgotten our untutored childhood experiences of the sacred. We have erroneously concluded that such childhood experiences of transcendence have little if any significance. I have found that people who do treasure such experiences almost never share them with anyone because they do not want to be thought foolish. After all, what can someone so young know about such profound matters? More than meets the eye. Such experiences often provide us with the criteria by which, consciously or not, we evaluate the quality of our spiritual experiences of God as adults. Those early, original experiences reveal that we are more at home with the God we came to know personally through our encounters as children with the sacred than we are at home with the God we have come to know about through our encounters with institutional religion. In some cases, we may come to realize that we have substituted the practice of religion for the animated presence of a personal God whose self-revelation came to us so tangibly and with such simplicity in our childhood. As the psychiatrist Abraham Maslow has observed in his book Religion, Values and Peak Experiences, people who are churched often have a difficult time experiencing God outside of church. The question for the homilist, therefore, is this: how can we tap into those childhood images that conveyed to children and continue to convey to adults the personal God whose Spirit dwells within them and surrounds them with kindness and compassion? The answer is not as complex as it may seem. It rests within the rich imagery and universal human experience that we find in the biblical narrative. In the table below, column one outlines some of the basic characteristics of the spirituality of childhood and briefly describes their implications for reflecting on the Word with children. As noted, each of these implications has its biblical correlation. Column two provides an outline of a process or method for reflecting on the Word with children. It respects the intelligence of children and the life of the Spirit within the child. It avoids simplifications that, in effect, trivialize the scriptures. Rather, it engages the imaginations of children through which we encounter the mystery of the presence of God. After the table below, you will find a narrative description of the process. One final thought: it concerns a common characteristic of childhood experiences that adults recall and share. It reveals the biblical character of the child's experience of the sacred: such experiences are concrete, specific, and, one might say, exclusive; that is, during the experience, the person is conscious of nothing else taking place. Nothing else matters. Because through the particularity of the experience, like the four-year-old who is holding his baby sister, the person encounters the presence of God, that otherwise inexpressible sense of the harmony of the Spirit in matter, God's creative Word taken flesh in us. So with the psalmist we sing, "Such knowledge is too wonderful, too lofty for me to contain" (Psalm 139).
A NARRATIVE DESCRIPTION OF THE REFLECTION PROCESS
The process begins with hearing God's Word proclaimed with ritual care. A period of reflection follows in which we invite our children to answer a simple question: What did we (you) hear? This is a critical moment, especially when you are gathered with children who have been taught to wait for someone to tell them what they are supposed to hear. Our inclination is to fill the silence with our ideas, or to give obvious clues to generate a response, or to ask inauthentic questions to which the children know we already have the answers. Another inclination is to select experiences from the children's lives that we think relate to the text. If we restrain from responding to such urges, we will affirm our children's natural sense of God's self-revelation in each person's heart. Through sensing our trust in them, they learn to trust in what they hear God say to them, personally and in community. This experience leads to transformation and transcendence, to the shaping of a new heart within us. For when God speaks, God creates. This is the work of God's creative hand, not ours. Moreover, we are engaging the child's natural ability to wonder, through which we find access to the mystery of God's presence. Some might wonder: what about relating the text to their lives? How does one "make the connection" between the biblical experience and the lives of children today? Our children do that themselves. They bring their own individual experiences and perceptions to their hearing of God's Word. Moreover, in their varied ways and levels, they are able to enter into the biblical experience through which we believe God's self-revelation has and continues to occur through human history. + We Reflect on the Reign of God. After drawing from our children what they heard God say, we phrase
open-ended questions that invite them to look out of the biblical
experience at We avoid suggesting to our children what difference we think God's Word should make in their lives. Relating God's Word to our children's lives is not up to us. It is up to each child and the movement of the Spirit within the child. This requires that we trust in the power of God's Word and in the Spirit to create within our children and us a new heart. + We Respond to God's Word. Finally, we explore with our children their answers to questions that invite them to draw from God's Word guidance in making the reign of God's love and compassion a reality in our lives. How can we live in truth, heal the discord, and live in harmony with the Spirit? Again, only our children can, and must, make these decisions for themselves. By so doing, they take responsibility for their lives and recognize when their response resonates with the movement of the Spirit within them. We avoid turning God's Word into merely a code of conduct, or an admonition to behave in certain ways. Our focus places our response within the context of God's unfailing love so that our response is motivated by our gratitude. Everything else follows naturally. When we gather with children, we come as one of God's children,
with empty hands and open hearts. Then we can accept the place Jesus
has prepared for us here and now in the Kingdom. © Gerard A. Pottebaum / All rights reserved.
Duplication prohibited without permission. Order your copy of To Walk With A Child: Listening To The Word With Children
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