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talking to children about god — an Enlightening Experience

Story and photos by LIZ QUIRIN
Messenger editor

Where is God? What is life all about? What am I doing here? Why do people die? Does Jesus really, really love me?

Ah, the questions children ask can turn parents upside down and inside out as they try to answer them honestly and in a way their children can understand. It’s certainly not easy, but it can be great fun and a learning experience for both children and parents.

The trick — and it’s not really a trick — is to stand beside the child and walk on the journey of faith and discovery with him or her.

That was a message Dr. Ann Garrido, D. Min., from Aquinas Institute of Theology brought to parents, grandparents and anyone interested in the subject at St. Nicholas Parish in O’Fallon.

“A child’s spirit is rooted in joy,” Garrido said. “It’s not about rules; it’s not about regulations; it’s about enjoyment of the person.”

Talking to a child about God can bring adults back to their own experiences of God as children and help them refocus their own attention on what is essential.

“Part of the challenge,” Garrido said, “is to find a language to articulate a child’s experience of God.”

Children, it would seem, have more depth and are more contemplative than adults generally give them credit. In their own ways, they think deep thoughts and they work to make connections between themselves and their world and their God.

Parents have an exciting role to play in the child’s exploration of his or her relationship with God. And that’s really what it’s all about, Garrido said.

Garrido outlined three “major mysteries a child wonders about from the beginning.”

She hastened to add that these mysteries follow a child into adulthood so that no specific or explicit answers to these questions can be given.

First, a child wonders about they mystery of relationship. An early image of God a child has is an “image of light, and then the image of Jesus as the Good Shepherd,” she said.

The second mystery for a child is the mystery of life and death: “What does it mean to be alive? How did I come to be here? Will I die? Will you die?”

The third mystery is the mystery of time: “What was before God was? What is the purpose of all that exists?”
These are not questions that are asked in exactly that way although some are, and they are not easily answered by a parent still thinking about those questions too.

Garrido told the group gathered that if they did not know the answer to a child’s question, the best answer was: “I don’t know the answer to that question, but I’ve wondered about it too. Where can we go to find out about it or look it up?”

That way, the parent and child travel together, side by side, not authority over underling but two people “wondering” together.

It’s important for children to have time to wonder about things, Garrido said, and sometimes the fast-paced lives families lead can be a hindrance to that time of wondering.

“If we race through life so fast, we don’t have time for questions to emerge,” she said. And “one of the most important questions is ‘what is life?’”

If a parent sees a child staring, not engaged in some activity, maybe it would be a good time to ask: “What are you wondering about?”

Speaking about children from 3-6 years old, Garrido said children enjoy rituals, the rituals that families have. Families may have special meals for special occasions or a special place to read a story. Perhaps they have a “prayer table,” or a time to say family night prayers together.

If a special place or time is reserved for prayer, give small children a chance to say what they feel, she said. “Ask children to pray in their own words, to pray out loud. The primary goal is not to teach them what we know but to sit alongside them and let them lead.”

As children grow, their needs change, and their need for information changes and the need to understand relationships grows.

For instance, 9-year-olds and older are drawn to the saints and prophets, Garrido said. Knowing about the lives of real people and how they related to God and Jesus appeal to older children.

Garrido said when Jesus talked about death to those around him, he talked about seeds. When the seed is placed in the ground, it appears to die but then grows anew just as “death yields to ever more abundant life,” she said.

For more information, Garrido suggested a number of sources, including Krista Tippett’s radio interview “Being, with Rabbi Sandy Sasso.

“(W)e do know that, from research, that all children by the time they are age 5 have a conception of God, whether or not we’ve talked about God to them as parents. And we also know that children ask these really large questions,” Rabbi Sasso said in the interview.

For more of that interview, go to: http://being.publicradio.org/programs/2010/spirituality-of-parenting/transcript.shtml.
Another resource: “Parenting: A Sacred Path” is for parents to reflect on their experience, with all of its joys and struggles as an invitation to grow in faith, love, trust and compassion.
For more information go to www.cctheo.org/catalog1.html#Parenting.