Sure Foundations

What it is and Why it Matters

Rebecca Nye

• Publisher: Church House Publishing
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780715140277
• eBook ISBN: 9780715144121
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christianity

An introduction to the increasingly popular topic of children's spirituality, showing how choices made in churches and homes can stimulate or stifle a child's spiritual development. Suitable for anyone who works with children.

1 Children’s spirituality: what is it?

What is spirituality?

delighting in all things

being absorbed in the present moment

not too attached to ‘self’ and

eager to explore boundaries of ‘beyond’ and ‘other’

searching for meaning

discovering purpose

open to more?¹

Spirituality is like a bird; if you hold it too tightly, it chokes; if you hold it too loosely, it flies away. Fundamental to spirituality is the absence of force.

Rabbi Hugo Gryn

Spirituality is not something that likes to be confined in words – which makes writing (and reading) about it horribly difficult! It is more ‘felt–sense’, drawing on non-verbal insights, vision, sound, touch and so on. It can be a powerful kind of knowing that is less worried about proving how you know.

Because it is powerful, literally inspiring, spirituality also shapes our ways of being. This far-reaching combination of deeply motivated knowing and being ends up in what is referred to in the monastic traditions as a ‘rule of life’, that is, it potentially affects everything.

This gives spirituality an interesting relationship with verbal language and, of course, religious language. Attempts to define or theorize spirituality are often frustrating. Perhaps this is because a single definition can only capture one part of the whole picture, or because when a definition tries to take in the whole picture you need to stand so far back to see it that there is not much to focus on!

You might already have a favourite way of defining or thinking about spirituality. If so, it will be useful to be aware of that as you read on. Or you could try now to make up a definition – and perhaps discover how hard it is to get the words to say what you feel about this topic. You could also begin making a collection of other people’s ways of defining spirituality, starting from the few given below, and thinking about what you like and dislike about these.

Spirituality is . . .

From theologians

living fully with nothing excluded from our hearts

Gerald May

each believer making his or her own engagement with the questioning at the heart of faith . . . constantly allowed to challenge the fixed assumptions of religiosity

Rowan Williams

the search for God in response to God’s search for us

Jo Anne Taylor

a conscious involvement in the project of life integration through self transcendence toward the ultimate value one perceives

Sandra Schneiders

From educators

spirituality ranges from sensing of divine presence to the recognition of a heightened quality in an event or encounter and a response of awe and wonder

David Dixon

signals of transcendence that are normal aspects of life but all at odds with a materialistic understanding of the world, they point to something other – something more . . . can lead people to an awareness of religion

Brenda Watson

the sense making activity that both children and adults necessarily carry out as a result of the life experiences they encounter

Clive Erricker

From psychologists

an awareness, response or ability to reflect on areas which are beyond those of individual/ego interest, that is not concerning the individual’s own survival or fortune. To this extent spiritual interests could be termed (apparently) pointless ones

Margaret Donaldson

a belief that there is an unseen order, and that our supreme good lies in harmoniously adjusting ourselves thereto

William James

Just jargon?

Words connected to ‘spirituality’ often crop up in everyday conversation:

keep your spirits up

she gave a spirited performance

that was mean-spirited

I don’t think I’ve got the spirit for this anymore

that’s the spirit!

(there’s even a supermarket own-brand deodorant called ‘Spiritual’!)

Recently it has been fashionable for many outside the Church to describe themselves as ‘spiritual, but not religious’. So when trying to work out what spirituality means, we also need to think about how far we need this to be tied to formal Christian language. Or whether the ‘Christian’ element is more about the outworkings in practice, and not the words or concepts in themselves.

Christians are certainly used to hearing spirit-related words all the time – in psalms, in choruses and in prayer. Again and again we refer both to God’s Spirit and our own spirit:

‘. . . and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit’

‘The Lord be with you. And with thy spirit’

‘My spirit faints within me’ (Psalm 143.4)

This ‘everydayness’ makes it hard to get spirituality into focus. It’s a struggle to engage with critically and let it inform our practice. It seems so vague that it could mean anything – rather pointless then?

But perhaps this everyday quality is key to the challenge, especially the challenge of understanding spirituality in childhood. Language connected to spirituality is everywhere, reminding us how wrong it would be to shut spirituality into an exclusive box. Its everydayness in both secular and church language makes the point that spirituality is meant to entail all that we are called to be. So how we think about its meaning must include children.

Think and discuss . . .

Are children (of any age) in danger of being excluded by any of the definitions given here, or by ways of defining spirituality known to you?

What is children’s spirituality?

The following three definitions approach children’s spirituality from three perspectives:

1. A very simple definition of children’s spirituality might be:

God’s ways of being with children and

children’s ways of being with God.

For Christians, this definition helps us to remember that children’s spirituality starts with God – it is not something adults have to initiate. God and children (regardless of age or intellect) have ways of being together because this is how God created them. The difficulty comes in trying to appreciate, and support, the ambiguous forms these ways can take.

2. An evidence-based approach to defining children’s spirituality lets us take things further. My research study of the varied expressions of spirituality evident in children’s lives pinpointed their remarkab...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Children’s spirituality: what is it?
• 2 Children’s spirituality: how important is it?
• 3 Encountering children’s spirituality
• 4 Nurturing children’s spirituality 1: some general principles
• 5 Nurturing children’s spirituality 2: spiritual practices
• 6 Christian thought and imagery about children
• 7 Frequently asked questions
• Further reading and resources
• Notes
• Index