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Childhood memories...

WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM OUR CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCES OF THE SACRED?

Some religious educators are growing more aware that children already have a spiritual life—a relationship with God. What happens to this relationship as children participate in religious education programs and parish liturgical celebrations? How influential are our own childhood experiences of God in our spiritual lives as adults? You might want to explore some of these questions with your staff and prime your discussion with this article.

We tend not to dwell much on our childhood memories. Some of us cannot even recall experiences of when we were young. Or, if we do, we don't place all that much importance on them. Nevertheless, in the soil of those experiences rest the roots of our spirituality as adults.

Busy dealing with the demands of daily living, we don't think much about how we first came to know God, as distinct from when we came to know about God. Or, even though we may pray regularly to God, as a recent survey (Newsweek, March 31, 1997) reveals about people today whether churchgoers or not, we don't think much about just who the God is to whom we pray.

Talk about who God is with almost anyone these days and you'll soon hear stories that reveal a tension, if not alienation, people feel between, on the one hand, the relationship they have with their personal God and, on the other hand, the relationship they have with God as conveyed by the institutional church.

While each denomination has its disgruntled membership, consider briefly some of the reasons why one-third of the 60 million Catholics in the United States, according to a national survey conducted by Notre Dame sociologist Richard Lamanna, do not participate in parish life: Young people leave the family habits of church-going behind when they leave home, as part of the experience of growing up. Women find the institution oppressively male dominating. Gay persons achieve a sense of belonging by creating separate communities that "attach" themselves to the larger church. Married couples find themselves in conflict with the church's teaching on birth control. Divorced men and women find little support within the institution for building new lives in new sacramental relationships.

Nevertheless, when these same people have children, most of them return to church to have their children learn and participate in the very same religion that they either have abandoned or practice only occasionally on high holidays or for marriages and funerals. For whatever reason they return, their children have probably already experienced, that is to say inherited, their discordant (albeit subliminal) relationship with the institution. Children are quick to pick up such clear mixed messages—which, later, in the truth-telling time of adolescence, they "stick in the face" of their parents.

In our society people often abandon their practice of institutional religion, while continuing to have faith in God. If we ourselves are not one of these people, we know others who are. The question is: What are the origins of this enduring faith in God? That question is fruitful for religious educators and parish liturgists to explore because it brings us to the heart of the matter: the child's natural experience of the sacred. Such an exploration can reveal the quality and character of our spirituality as adults and help us to identify who, through personal experience, is our God.

At a recent seminar, a young man told the story of when he was four years old, his grandmother took him and 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 he might even be allowed to hold his baby sister.

When they finally arrived at his mother's room and they brought the baby in, his older brother got to hold her first. Watching, he grew even more excited. At last his turn came. "They told me," he said, "to hold my arms up like this." And he held his arms in front of him, making a place for his baby sister.

I asked him what he remembered feeling, and he said, "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 put her in my arms."

Can you tell us 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, as we reflected on the significance of this experience, and those of other seminar participants, in shaping their image of God, he observed, "To this day, my God is the one who carries me away to places where have never been."

Such childhood experiences of transcendence are often lost or dismissed as of little value. 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. Nevertheless, 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 with the sacred as children than we are at home with the God we have come to know 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.

Once we come to understand the action of the Spirit in the lives of children (and in our own childhood), we might rediscover the Spirit within us and be able to envision and create the kind of community that embodies the ready compassion and playful hospitality characteristic of the Kingdom of God—which is the Kingdom, Jesus tells us, children already possess (Matthew 19:14) and that can be possessed only by those who humble themselves as children (Luke 18:17).

As parishes struggle to "create communities," we might ask ourselves: how respectful are our parishes of the spiritual lives of our children, not only in parish assemblies at worship but also in religion programs designed to "pass on the faith"? What are we passing on to children if they already possess the Kingdom? If children already enjoy a spiritual life and relationship with God, what are we drawing children into when we "initiate" them into the life of our ''communities of faith''?

We can perhaps get the most honest answers to these questions by asking (who else?) the children. Though least consulted, they are our best soul-searchers. Why not invite them to tell us what our communities of faith reveal to them of God? Their observations might lead us to wonder:
How can we provide our children with the chance to be heard in our parishes? What practical influence do children have in shaping our communities of faith? How many children serve on the parish council? Worship committee? Religious education staff? Social action board?

Walt Whitman, the poet, observed that the father does not make the child; the child makes the father. Might not the same be said of the spiritual life that children bring to the church?...that is, if we will embrace it. Then, perhaps, we too will be carried away to places where we have never been.

Gerard A. Pottebaum

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