The Spiritual LIves of Children

I'm in Chicago now so I can hang out with my friends Kathy and Heather before Heather's wedding next week. While I was on the plane, I was reading The Spiritual Lives of Children by Robert Coles. Basically, he interviewed 500 children from different countries, cultures and religions and had them tell him about their inner spiritual life. The stuff he writes is good, but what some of the children have to say is breathtaking sometimes. I kept crying. I couldn't tell you exactly why.

One ten year old Hopi girl said this:

Our people spoke to the Anglos and told them what we think, but they don't listen to hear us; they listen to hear themselves, my dad says, and he hears them all day. [He was a truck driver.] My grandmother says they live to conquer the sky, and we live to pray to it, and you can't explain yourself to people who conquer - just pray for them, too. So we smile and say yes to them all the time, and we pray for them.

I worked with children and youth for a long time, and most adults just listen to children to hear themselves, as if a child couldn't possibly have anything to say worth listening to. We tell them that they should arrive at our exact destination and they must come the way we did. Too often we conquer their souls and call it salvation. What would happen if we looked at spiritual development as nurturing what is already there, rather than trying to instill something that isn't?

Many children have a deep spirituality. I have a friend with a young son. He is a precocious child with a deep sense of the right thing to do. Sometimes it's funny, like when my friend had to interrupt out phone conversation because of the persistence of her son. When she came back on the line, she said, "Sorry about that. My six year old son wanted to tell me that I'm drinking too much coffee and he thinks I might not be getting enough fiber."

Sometimes it's humbling. He came to his mom before his sixth birthday and said, "Mom, I think I have enough toys, so you don't have to get me any presents. I think I'd rather give presents to kids who don't have any." My friend asked him if he was sure he didn't want any presents at all. He said he was sure, so at his birthday party, all the kids had cake and brought a present to be sent to an orphanage in Honduras.

My friend said, "I was really proud of him, and it's not like he's hurting for toys, but I still couldn't believe he didn't want any presents at all."

I learned a lot from one particular girl in my youth worker days. There had been a big, nasty brawl that broke out between four girls. The tension between them had been an ongoing problem for months, and in a desperate attempt to generate a more peace-making type of attitude, I had assigned them to read from the Sermon on the Mount, particularly the turn the other cheek and love your enemies part. I didn't have high hopes, but I'd tried everything else.

I talked with three of the girls about it, and they all smiled at me and said that Jesus wanted us to love each other, and look at me all full of love and can I come back to the program now? (They had all been suspended from our after-school program since beating the crap out of each other was not conducive to a productive learning environment.) I was hanging out with one of the girls at her house and asked he if she'd read it. She is probably the most spiritually sensitive kid I've ever worked with. She said she had, and said that Jesus was asking her to love Carmela (not her real name) and that was just craziness.

As a bit of background, Carmela was near the top of the social pecking order in the brutal world of middle school, and she had systematically used her power to bully and torment this girl for months, and had enlisted other girls to help her. She still had a bruise on her cheek from getting punched, and she interpreted Jesus' commands in a very non-metaphorical manner. She knew what it was to get hit - and not just by Carmela - and knew that turning the other cheek would mean bruises on both sides of her face.

She knew that "loving your enemies" meant loving this girl, who - let's face it - I wanted to strangle half the time. I've liked 95% of the kids I"ve worked with, but this girl made me question my views on corporal punishment. Angry I can handle, but she wasn't just angry - she was mean and a bully. She would say the right Jesus words when it suited her purpose and smile sweetly to fool gullible adults. She would look you dead straight in the eye with her hand on a stack of Bibles and lie and lie and lie. Absolutely nothing worked with her - not compassion, not confrontation, not prayer - and she was never ever even a little bit sorry. Oh sometimes I wanted to find a bigger bully to teach her what it feels like to be on the beat down end of reality. Maybe that would have an impact when all else failed. [She has since turned into quite a decent adult. Only God knows how that happened. ]

All that to say, when I sat in a room with this other girl who knew that when Jesus was asking her to forgive and to turn the other cheek when she'd already been hit plenty, when it seemed like the whole world was bigger and stronger than her, when there was no one but Jesus to protect her, and quite frankly, he'd been doing a lousy job. The only possible honest response was to look at me and say, "What is this guy - crazy?" Anything else would have meant she wasn't paying attention.

That's the kind of thing we educate out of them. That would have been the wrong answer in Sunday School, when the truth of it is that she grasped the absolute radical absurdity of Jesus the first time through, with no one to tell her. We teach kids to sit and smile and say "Ahh, yes" and then go home to eat Sunday dinner and become the guy sitting across from me in the airport yesterday reading 30 Days to Victorious Living.

Coles talks with a Muslim boy named Haroon in the book. Haroon had been having trouble with a bully at school. He told Coles that he prayed to Allah for help. Coles asked him what he prayed for. Haroon said this:

I hope Allah will remember me. I hope He will speak to me. I hope He will call me when I am too near the edge, so I won't fall down too badly. I hope He will keep me from becoming a bully. I would not like to join the ranks of [the world's bullies.]

I've prayed for a lot of kids over the years. All this time, maybe I should have been asking them to pray for me.

Comments

[Jon]

Some links I promised a long time ago:

http://www.centar-za-mir.hr/engonama_misija.php

http://www.cwwpp.org/Institute.htm

My friend who actually visited these groups along with others working in the same spirit probably has a lot more to say about all of it. If you want to, you can reach her at melissa.fischer@gmail.com

[Mike]

Nice one, Christy. Thanks.

[kimj]

Just beautiful. Thank you.

[Ms D]

I'm a comment fairy today (in the still hetero sense of the word)... I loved this post. I think I will give it to my team to explain what child rights really means when you put it into action. Listening would be a start.
And, sorry to use this for personal messages but a big Hello to Kathy and a big Congratulations! to Heather from me. Thx

[jen lemen]

the spirituality of kids is huge for me, so i love so much of this post. it does push my non-violent atonement buttons though, somehow. i get worried when our theology makes too much space for the suffering of already oppressed people, but that does sound like jesus at times, so what to do with that.

[Christy]

Jon -
Thanks for the info.

Ms. D -
They say hi back.

Jen - The whole sermon on the mount bit does read very very differently if you are in a dominant group vs. an oppressed one, and I think we have to be really careful about interpreting it for someone else. I think there is a way to read it so that it doesn't just reinforce the way things are, but I haven't entirely figured it out yet.

[Francis]

Jen said: "i get worried when our theology makes too much space for the suffering of already oppressed people, but that does sound like jesus at times, so what to do with that..."

Christy said: "I think there is a way to read it so that it doesn't just reinforce the way things are, but I haven't entirely figured it out yet..."

Walter Wink says the King James and its modern-English counterparts get this _fundamentally_ wrong: that Jesus was in fact a powerful advocate of nonviolent resistance and never condoned passive acceptance of wrongs & injustices; that KJV makes him out otherwise is simply bad or self-serving mistranslation.

From the article "Jesus and Alinsky" at
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/1216-30.htm

"When the court translators working in the hire of King James chose to translate antistenai as "Resist not evil," they were doing something more than rendering Greek into English. They were translating nonviolent resistance into docility. The Greek word means more than simply to "stand against" or "resist." It means to resist violently, to revolt or rebel, to engage in an insurrection. Jesus did not tell his oppressed hearers not to resist evil. His entire ministry is at odds with such a preposterous idea. He is, rather, warning against responding to evil in kind by letting the oppressor set the terms of our opposition.

A proper translation of Jesus' teaching would then be, "Do not retaliate against violence with violence." Jesus was no less committed to opposing evil than the anti-Roman resistance fighters like Barabbas. The only difference was over the means to be used.

... Now we are in a better position to see why King James' servants translated antistenai as "resist not." The king would not want people concluding they had any recourse against his or any other sovereign's unjust policies. Jesus commands us, according to these king's men, to resist not. Jesus appears to say say that submission to monarchial absolutism is the will of God. Most modern translations have meekly followed the King James path..."

[Camassia]

I'm going to really sound like a Mennonite here, but I think the other key point in Christian non-retaliation is that it's a communal thing. That is, you not supposed to just tell the poor picked-on kid, "Love your enemies!" and leave her to her fate. If just one person turns the other cheek they'll look like a chump, but get a whole bunch of people to do it on the same principle and you've got yourself a movement.