The spirituality of children can be approached from a number of angles. In this chapter, I will draw upon the work of three scholars. I have not attempted to synthesise their approaches. I will merely lay them side by side on the understanding that no one paradigm can encompass all angles. Reality is best explored through a range of paradigms. I will look, in sequence, at the approaches of Anna Maria Rizzuto, James Fowler and Robert Coles. I will conclude with a brief comment on the potential children have for both self-flourishing and self-denial.

Anna Maria Rizzuto

Rizzuto's approach is outlined in her Birth of the Living God. Rizzuto, a Catholic, leaves aside the question of whether or not there is a God lying beyond our god images. It is not her purpose to prove God's existence. What she does contend, however, is that all persons, even professed atheists, develop a God-image.

Rizzuto credits Freud with germinating her thinking on this issue. Freud argued that young boys, around the time of the resolution of the oedipal complex, use their parental images, or imagos, particularly the father imago, to form their God-representation. This process requires the sublimation of libidinal wishes. Freud also contended that, where such sublimation does not take place, the child develops a libidinal attachment to either his image of God or to another father substitute. He conjectured that the individual's later relationship to God, whom he considered illusory, was influenced by his changing relationship to his actual father.

Rizzuto criticises Freud for offering no explanation of the God-representation in women or of unbelief and for excluding from consideration son-mother, daughter-father and daughter-mother relationships.

Rizzuto's thesis is based on the concept of object representation. Object representations result from the synthesising of compounded memories, visceral, sensorimotor, iconic and conceptual and are the result of multiple types of experiences. Such memories are sometimes retrieved, in experiences of harmonious interchange redolent with love, communication and shared meaning.¹

According to Rizzuto, the objects of early life are the primary feeling source of an individual's relation to God. It is out of exchanges with their parents, in the context of acts and fantasies, wishes, hopes, and fears, that God-images are concocted. ² The consistent beliefs and actions of believing parents help confirm the God-representation. [156]

The larger process within which we develop a god image is, according to Rizzuto, the psychic process of creating ourselves.

Rizzuto emphasises the importance of the mother in the initial formation of the God-representation. The child is known and read by his mother. The mother's face organises the child's experience. Rizzuto quotes Margaret Mahler, who argues that growing up involves a gradual diminishing of the child's symbiotic relationship with its mother.³ Rizzuto also admits to the presence of symbiotic components in the relation of the baby to the father and of the parents as a couple. The broader, ultimate context in which this occurs is the matrix of family romances and myths.⁴

The ego's adaptive and defensive functions, involved in the ceaseless process of maintaining psychic balance, ensure that the God-representation undergoes ceaseless change. There is a continual struggle to relate our object-representations to what we believe and are. Altering the God-representation often involves changing oneself. This process of "creating" God goes on throughout the life-cycle. Maturity is measured by the ability to engage in fantasy play with our remembered God images. Such play helps update, transform or repress the child's God-representation.⁵

The God representation of the young child comes under challenge when she arrives at the "house of God" with her pet God under her arm. It is then that the God of religion and the child's God-representation, moulded out of her experience with significant others, face one another. The threat of dissonance is also present when the God-representation, developed in infancy, is forced to relate to an emerging God concept, the product of secondary process thinking.

The God-representation, once created, becomes relatively independent of the parental imagos. It is also indestructible. While many other, fantastic representations, like fairies and Santa Claus, disappear, God remains. God is a transitional object that does not disintegrate away to nothing. While he may temporarily disappear from consciousness, particular experiences can reveal him in his hiddenness.

According to Rizzuto, the God-representation is also a universal phenomenon. The child, for whom an overt God is forbidden, will resort to his hidden God.

The principal function of the God-representation, Rizzuto argues, is to help the individual develop a sense of self. It is involved in the continual reshaping of the self, which it preserves. God and self, as Jung has suggested, are created and recreated in the one dialectical process.

The God-representation facilitates growth, though it can also retard it. It can become a target for libidinal and aggressive wishes and can be subject to superego control. It can also facilitate psychic separation from the adult. It [157] also fulfils a meaning-making function in ordering the incomprehensible. It is involved in the epistemology of human relatedness, enjoying a ceaseless potential for new meanings. The secret communication of a private God also strengthens the sense of one's reality, creating a private place of safety where one is loved.

According to Rizzuto, faith is "fidelity to oneself and to our mental representations of those to whom we owe our past and present existence". Furthermore, the ups and downs of an individual's beliefs are related, less to her intellectual capacity to synthesise and order her world, and more to her psychic ability to convince herself of the meaning of her relatedness to others and the world.⁶

James Fowler

Faith has to do with our relationship to life. It involves our wrestling some order, or sense, out of the reality we encounter, and our openness and commitment to that reality. For Christians, Christ makes sense of the world and our commitment is to him. But all persons view the world in a distinctive way and their faith is their commitment both to that view and to the reality that that view represents.

The way we come to and express our faith, our understanding and our commitment, develop over time. Mature faith does not materialise from nowhere, and we are always reworking our faith, reworking our view of reality and recommitting ourselves to it.

James Fowler has evolved a model of faith development which helps us understand the many crises and transitions through which our faith progresses. His perspective helps us map the increasingly complex ways in which we experience reality. This process begins in childhood and continues throughout life.

While this chapter is dealing specifically with the spirituality of children, I will outline the full range of Fowler's stages, because the paradigm can be adequately appraised only when we see it in its totality and because children possess, in potentiality, possibilities reflected in later developments.

For Fowler, faith is universal. It has to do with the making, maintenance and transformation of human meaning, and with choices which reflect operative attachments to meaning-giving images and centres of value and power. Fowler regards faith as a way of seeing and knowing, in the sense of acting on and composing the known. It is a constitutive knowing. Reality becomes for us what we perceive it to be in the process of our wrestling it into some sort of order. Fowler argues that faith is also a way of relating. He further contends that faith is developed through the influence of communities into which we are born, or to which we gravitate. This means [158] that trust relationships develop with others in communities of shared values and loyalties.

Fowler argues that faith, or ways of knowing and relating, involve forms of logic, role-taking, moral judgement, social awareness, sources of authorisation, forms of world coherence and symbolic functioning. A universal experience, faith engages the mind, the emotions and the will. Fowler further argues that faith also involves ecstatic and imaginative knowing.

Fowler's "stages of faith" build on each other and are "every person's story", despite the fact that few progress through all the stages. Transition between stages is facilitated when the equilibrium of any particular stage is upset.

Primal or Undifferentiated Faith is largely inaccessible to inquiry. Its beginnings can be traced to an amniotic symbiosis during the mother's pregnancy. After birth, bonding and attachment continue with the primary caretaker in the child's experiencing rhythms of intimacy and in the texture of his or her environment. Balancing this sense of being cared for, is the threat of negation, an "ontological anxiety", initially associated with passage through the birth canal. Trust, courage, hope and love contend with threats of abandonment, deprivation and inconsistency.

The first of Fowler's stages is listed as Intuitive-Projective Faith and is associated with children between three and seven. Cognitive patterns during this stage are relatively fluid and perception, imagination and fantasy embed images and feelings that at later stages need to be ordered and evaluated. Mirroring of reactions on the part of the mother gradually gives way to a rudimentary acquisition of language that further mediates between the child, others and her world. It is at this stage that the child first develops a degree of self-awareness, albeit almost exclusively ego-centric. Death and sex, with their societal taboos, also come within her view.

The emergence of concrete operational thinking prepares for the transition to the development of a Mythic-Literal Faith, where the child owns the symbolic stories, beliefs and observances of her community. Imaginative and episodic vestiges from the Intuitive-Projective Faith stage are ordered into a narrative form that unifies and gives value to experiences. The experience is not yet reflected upon and the meaning tends to be "trapped" in the stories. During this stage the school-age child begins to assess the perspective of others and becomes committed to a form of fairness and justice based on reciprocity.

With the development of formal operational thinking, contradictions begin to be perceived within the community's stories and between its narratives and those of alternative communities, whose meaning systems impinge upon the world of the older teenager. With a certain "cognitive conceit", former teachers and mentors are rejected. The sharing by teenagers of their [159] emerging perceptions about reality frequently lead to some form of religious commitment. With increasing contact with a multiplicity of worlds, and with increasingly diverse involvements, there is need for a more rigorous synthesis.

The Synthetic-Conventional Faith of stage 3 structures the environment in interpersonal terms. There is a certain conformity to significant others in the absence of a secure identity and autonomy. Beliefs and values, ideologies, while deeply felt, are tacitly held, with a lack of systematic reflection. Differences in perspective are traced to differences between types of persons. Deference is paid to those occupying traditional positions of authority or to peer consensus.

Stage 4, or Individuative-Reflective Faith, is ushered in by such factors as contradiction between authority figures, bureaucratic reversals of ideology and experiences that challenge cherished beliefs. Transition to stage 4 involves the late adolescent or adult in responsible personal choices regarding attitudes, beliefs and lifestyle and the resolution of tensions between individuality and group membership, subjectivity and objectivity, self-fulfilment and service, and between the relativist and absolute perspectives. Symbols, expressive of a relationship to the Ultimate Environment, are "demythologised" and expressed in terms more explicitly conceptual. An "executive ego" emerges from a discovery and claiming of the self behind relational and role masks.

Transition to stage 5, Paradoxical-Consolidative Faith, is facilitated when disturbing images and energies from childhood combine with a sense of sterility and flatness to upset the neat formulations of Individuative-Reflective Faith, which had been laid out with the aid of abstract concepts and precise distinctions. Truth begins to be seen as multi-dimensional and paradoxical. It is at this stage that the past is reworked, that suppressed elements from stage 4 are reclaimed and that a deeper self is discovered. The pervasive influence of a social unconscious also begins to be recognized. A new, resurrected, symbolic element is reunited with the conceptualisation that was responsible for its earlier demise, giving rise to what Paul Ricoeur has described as a "second naivete". Symbols, myths and rituals regain their power through a recognition of the depth of reality to which they refer.

Frequently associated with mid-life and beyond, though never reached by some, this stage is marked by an acquaintance with the "sacrament of defeat" and with recognition of the fact that the truth is most often found in paradox and apparent contradiction. Vulnerability to, rather than isolation from, the threatening other, is no longer perceived as a disvalue. A commitment to justice beyond the parameters of one's immediate class or nation develops alongside an allowing of others to contribute to the development of one's personal identity and world-view. Those who have reached this stage also recognize the possibility of an inclusive world community, which they have earlier known to be an urgent necessity. [160]

Fowler's sixth stage, Universalising Faith, like Kohlberg's sixth stage, is extremely rare and comprises those individuals who have reached beyond the fifth-stage tension between the vision of universal justice and community and the reality of an untransformed world. They are seen to embody the former. Their faith gathers all being inclusively into the Ultimate Environment. Such persons are marked by a subversive contagion that creates "zones of liberation" from the limitation of cultural world-views and from social, economic and political domination. Their actions, which are expressive of who they are, are experienced as graced. There is a simplicity and lucidity about them, a prophetic element, that is discomforting. They are more honoured after than during their lives. Socrates and Gandhi, and certainly Christ, illustrate this phenomenon.

Fowler's stages of Faith are illuminating and help us appreciate both the universality of faith and the manner in which our faith, which constructs and relates to reality, develops.

Robert Coles

In the opening chapter, I defined "spirituality "as the lived essence of our human personhood. I argued that the exercise of our spirituality has to do with meaning-making and communication and that spiritual development involves both self flourishing and self-denial. In exploring this definition, we will consider the degree to which this definition applies to children, and, in the process, we will explore their spirituality.

Robert Coles, Professor of Psychiatry and Medical Humanities at Harvard, spent most of his professional career researching the experiences of children by talking to them individually and in groups. He concluded, after a lifetime of investigation, that children are involved in meaning-making from the time they become conscious of the distinction between themselves and their environment. In their unselfconscious exploration of their spirituality, they wrestle with psychological and philosophical themes as rigorously as many adults do and with a greater degree of openness.⁷

Early in his career Coles was led to draw a distinction between the religious and spiritual lives of children.

The formulation of this distinction resulted from his meeting with Connie, an 8 year old, whom he encountered at a children's hospital in Boston. He was informed, before meeting her, that she had alluded to certain "bad habits." A Freudian orientation caused him to assume that Connie was having difficulty managing her sexuality. As a result of advice from his supervisor, who counselled him to explore her spiritual psychology, he later discovered that Connie was attempting to open up discussion about her religion. Coles had been in too much of a hurry to arrive at what he [161] assumed to be the truth underlying her comments, that he had missed her meaning altogether.

Connie came from a poor, but deeply religious home, and the religious faith to which she had been exposed furnished her with a range of concepts and experiences that were helping her make sense of the world. Her spiritual life could be discerned in the individual way in which she negotiated this world, using, re-formatting and sometimes rejecting the myths, stories and symbols that were part of her religious experience.⁸

Coles contended that children are immersed in the religious life of communities that nurture them. They are introduced to religious symbols, rituals, traditions, stories, mental constructs and elementary theologies. This occurs even in the case of children raised in secular or blatantly anti-religious environments. This exposure to a religious, or quasi-religious ambience, however, is to be distinguished from the spiritual journeys of these same children, from their individual attempts to make sense of their worlds. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the religious and spiritual lives of children can be separated. The child's spiritual pilgrimage does not occur in isolation, but in the context of communal networks, whose religious imagery, understandings and supports they draw upon in their mapping of reality and in their negotiation of life's challenges.

From his years of working with children, Coles concluded that for children, spirituality makes up the very warp and woof of psychology.⁹ He went on to explain that, for children from religious homes, spiritual values are integral to the emotional life they strive to consolidate for themselves.¹⁰

In his work with children, Coles also discovered that a child's attempt at describing God was, at the same time, a venture in self-definition. In describing God we describe ourselves.¹¹

Coles was also impressed by the skill children demonstrated in mapping their worlds and by the depth and penetration of both their questions and answers. Commenting on one young man's passionate search, he argued that he exhibited analytical and linguistic skills and the sort of passion for truth that was characteristic of philosophers. In the process of analysis, this young critic of ideas developed his own "system" and set of principles.¹²

Initially influenced by Freud's comment that religion was a universal obsessional neurosis,¹³ Coles was later persuaded by D. W. Winnicott, Anna Maria Rizzuto and Abraham Fineman, who was his supervisor and a Boston colleague of Rizzuto, to view religious symbols as the conceptual tools we use to make sense of our experience and our world.

Coles, like Rizzuto, was concerned to explore ways in which children used elements of their religious formation to develop a personal spirituality. He discovered that, for some children, it was only their religious life that kept [162] them together psychologically. A particularly poignant example of this was the experience of black children in newly desegregated schools. One young girl, recounting her experience, commented that, alone and threatened by screaming segregationists, she found comfort in God, whom she saw smiling at her.¹⁴

It was Ana Freud who influenced Coles to adopt the methodology that later characterized his work. She urged him to avoid imposing pre-conceived categories on the human data and to adopt a phenomenological/existential, rather than a pathological approach.

As a result of this more open approach, Coles was able to explore the way in which children, in imaging God and formulating their own identity, pick and choose from the total range of religious experience available to them.¹⁵

The latter part of Coles book, The Spiritual Life of Children, is devoted to verbatim reports of conversations Coles had with children of different religious traditions in which theological parameters framed the sacred space in which children wrestled their way towards a personal endorsement or refutation of the central tenets of their tradition. Their struggle is reflected in separate chapters on "Christian Salvation," "Islamic Surrender," "Jewish Righteousness" and "Secular Soul-Searching."

There can be little doubt that children are involved in meaning-making, or, making sense of their world and locating themselves in it.

They are also involved in communication, with themselves, with others, and, in-as-much as they are encouraged to acknowledge a deity, with God. This self-communication is open, undisguised and unselfconscious. Where the human environment is nurturing, their stance is also trusting. It is through this constant dialogue that the child develops an identity.

I argued, in looking at human maturation, that it involved, not only meaning-making and communication, but also the development of increasing self-transcendence. The beginnings of this self-transcendence were evident in what Coles described as children's "visionary moments", that they frequently spoke about, either softly, tersely or with eloquence and compelling power. Their experiences represent a combination of psychological surrender and philosophical transcendence.¹⁶ In their visionary moments, they exhibit a passion to reach and influence the entire universe.¹⁷

Self-Flourishing and Self-Denial

If the emerging spirituality of children can be seen to involve meaning-making, communication and self-transcendence, it is also clear that children are on a developmental path that, if pursued honestly and with [163] purpose, will lead from a passion for self-enhancement to a capacity for self-giving and self-denial.

Self-enhancement is concerned with their cognitive, moral and faith development and with the emergence and strengthening of a sense of their identity. It may also include initial contact with archaic layers of the unconscious.

Carl Jung, in his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in recounting the earliest dream of which he had any memory, indicated that, even at a very young age, children could be influenced by deep strata in the collective unconscious.

In this dream he found himself in a meadow adjacent to the vicarage where he lived with his parents. Walking across the meadow, he came across a hole in the ground. Approaching it, he found that it was lined with stones. He descended a stone stairway. Reaching the bottom of the steps he found a doorway with a rounded arch. It was closed off with a green curtain. Pulling the green curtain back, he stepped into a rectangular chamber that was thirty foot long. It was arched and lined with hewn stone. A red carpet stretched from the entrance to a platform in the centre. On the platform was a chair and on the chair was a one and a half to two foot thick phallus that stretched almost to the ceiling. It had a rounded head that was without hair. It had a single eye on top of the rounded head and was illumined by a light shining on it from above. He was suddenly aware that his mother was beside him. She almost shouted at him, Yes, just look at him! That is the man-eater. For Jung, this ithyphallically¹⁸ enthroned phallus was a mythological vestige that had surfaced from the archaic residue of his collective unconscious.¹⁹

Children are at a stage of their development where their almost exclusive attention is on the emergence of latent capacities. These need to be nurtured before they will be capable of denying themselves from a position of strength and healthfulness. Self-flourishing is a necessary preparation for self-denial.

While children's behaviour occasionally indicates that they are capable of self-denial, we need to be careful not to encourage them to exhibit excessive or inappropriate self denial. This could include anything, from pressuring them to say that they are sorry before they have had time to experience their anger to encouraging commitments that are beyond their capacity to understand. Because of their deep need for acceptance, children are particularly vulnerable to manipulation. Some years ago, my youngest daughter, who is now in her mid-twenties, asked if I remembered how, on one occasions when the family was celebrating, she had offered me her cider. She explained, [164]

Dad, I don't know whether you realized it or not, but the reason I gave you my glass was not that I didn't want the cider. I love cider, and I desperately wanted it, but I gave it to you because I wanted you to love me.

Children are spiritual pilgrims, no less than adults. They are involved in meaning-making and communication and experience moments of vision and self-transcendence. They are at the centre of communication webs that help them develop a sense of who they are. They enjoy moments of vision and exhibit a capacity for both self-flourishing and self-denial. [165]

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