Spirituality of Children

I have been to Kentucky and back working on a Godly Play enrichment weekend for people who have been doing Godly Play for a long time and just want a weekend of going deep in the stories for themselves and their spiritual practice. It was so good! I have beautiful images in my mind of the verdant green horse farms and beautiful spring hills in that beautiful part of the country. I will post more about this "going deeper" in days ahead.


I have recently been putting together some resources on children's spirituality. I am aware of my own long journey in even beginning to really, really be present to children - convinced of their innate and deep spirituality.

Here are a couple of stories that have been helpful for me.

Do you have a similar story of your own? It was when I heard Madeline L'Engle's story below that I connected with an experience of my own - climbing a tree when I was five years old.

We talk about children's spirituality but it still so often is within the context of "adult measures". I wonder if someday we will look back at children in the church the same way we look back now at women in the church 100 years ago and realize how far we have come (hopefully!)

Madeleine L’Engle, From: Glimpses of Grace, p 2

One time when I was little more than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors, where I had my first look at the stars.

It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.” The night sky, the constant rolling of breakers against the shore, the stupendous light of the stars, all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small child’s world which was all that I had know thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation; I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension, beyond any human comprehension.

I had been taught to say my prayers at night: Our Father, and a long string of God-blesses, and it ws that first showing of the galaxies which gave me an awareness that the God I spoke to at bedtime was extraordinary and not just a bigger and better combination of the grownup powers of my mother and father.

And here's one more story:

From: To Leave Before Dawn by Julien Green

quoted in The Religious Potential of the Child by Sofia Cavaletti

In the course of these dim years, I can remember a minute of intense delight, such as I have never experienced since. Should such things be told, or should they be kept secret? There came a moment in a certain room when, looking up at the windowpane, I saw the dark shy and a few stars shining in it. What words can express what is beyond speech? That minute was perhaps the most important one of my life and I do not know what to say about it. I was alone in the unlighted room and, my eyes raised toward the sky, I had what I can only call an outburst of love. I have loved on this earth, but never as I did during that short time, and I did not know whom I loved. Yet I know that someone was there and that, seeing me, loved me too. How did the thought dawn on me? I do not know. I was certain that someone was there and talked to me without words. Having said this, I have said everything. Why must I write that no human speech have ever given me what I felt than for a moment just long enough to count up to ten, at a time when I was incapable of putting together a few intelligible words and did not even realize that I existed? Why must I now write that I forgot this minute for years, that the stream of days and nights all but wiped it out of my consciousness? If only I had preserved it in times of trial! Why is it given back to me now? What does it mean?