Children as Mystics, Activists, Sages, and Holy Fools: Understanding the Spirituality of Children and Its Significance for Clinical Work

And so, having identified some of the issues that make spirituality a complex matter to discuss, I will now dare to discuss it! Eugene Peterson (2003, p. 30) from his perspective within Christian spirituality notes that the current usefulness of term spirituality is not in its precision but rather in the way it names something indefinable yet quite recognizable: “transcendence vaguely intermingled with intimacy.” Peterson and other participants in the current conversation concerning to what exactly spirituality refers agree on at least this one feature: it concerns everyday lives, material reality, and close relationships, at the same time that it concerns some depth dimension of reality that transcends all of these. David Hay and Rebecca Nye, British researchers at Nottingham (UK) University Children's Spirituality Project, study six- and ten- year old children in primary schools, presenting them with photographs of what they call “existential situations”—a child crying, a person observing sunlight breaking through clouds—in order to stimulate reflection from children about spiritual issues that the researchers believe are not necessarily religious in content. Their subsequent analysis of these interviews (primarily with Muslim and Christian children) defines children's spirituality as “relational consciousness,” exhibited in four dimensions: between self and God or some horizon of transcendence; between self and other people; between self and world; and last, children's consciousness of relationship with themselves (Hay & Nye, 1998; Hay, 2000). I will expand on some further nuances of what spirituality means, but for now, I take Hay's very simple statement that relational consciousness is the core of children's spirituality as a good working definition when we keep in mind that the four dimensions of relationships named by Hay (God/Mystery/Transcendence, others, world, and self) point us to spirituality as concerned with the deepest levels of human experiencing, the places of ultimacy, value, and deepest meaning in and for our lives. What exactly does it mean to speak of spirituality defined as relational consciousness? As is the case with art, the language of spirituality is an attempt to give expression to something that defies or resists language. The image of the child as Mystic comes to mind, as that term connotes one who possesses an awareness of things that are intangible, cannot really be spoken of with clarity, and yet are experienced as real. For years, persons working with children in various clinical settings have noted the preponderance of stories in which children articulate some sense of awareness or of connection to a reality not contained within the realm of their immediate sensory world or within themselves. This transcendence has been variously called a “big dream, “the numinous,” an experience of mystery, or simply a child's awareness of some power beyond himself or herself. One ten year old child I interviewed who attended a Sufi school in California spoke of an early childhood experience of her awareness upon looking out upon the ocean's horizon, of a “big out there” existence that she felt small in comparison to, and yet connected with, nevertheless. Mystic children have a spirituality strongly marked by such experiences, which may often be dismissed by adults as simply the products of overactive childhood imaginations. As I attempt to flesh out Hay and Nye's notion of children's spirituality as relational consciousness, then, I discover five elements within this notion crucial to my working understanding of children's spirituality that, taken alongside the four images described above, offer a kind of phenomenology of children's spirituality. (These may well apply to an understanding of adult spirituality too, but I am restricting my focus to children for purposes of this discussion.) First, children's spirituality is based in experience. It is not primarily words about a phenomenon that mark spirituality, but the experience itself. Second, there is some sense of heightened awareness involved, a level of attention to the experience, a sense of “being in touch” with something big or important or ultimate. Hay (2000) chooses the word “consciousness,” as in relational consciousness to speak of what I am calling heightened awareness. Of course the problem with both terms is that they may give a cognitive-sounding tone to something that may or may not involve rational cognition. The third feature I will name here concerns the particular kind of experience and awareness had by children. Children, along with adults offering retrospective reports of childhood experiences, refer to their awareness of an encounter with transcendence or mystery, awe, and wonder. Descriptions in fact generally point to an experience of a horizon or a presence that cannot be reduced to rational cognition or even to the language attempting to express it. Spirituality refers to creative, imaginative dimensions of human selfhood, and while it can and must be reflected upon directly through language, certain “alternative languages” such as art, music, drama, and dreams also come to the foreground in expressing the ineffable. Fourth, spirituality positions persons in relation to these encounters: it is about relationships. It concerns one's sense of relatedness to self, to others, to those “centers of value and power” (Fowler, 1981) that shape meanings in the lives of persons. And last, children's spirituality involves reflective symbolization, or the ability to have a perspective upon and make meaning of the relationships and experiences featured in the child's awareness. However, these capacities relate more to the cognitive-rational dimension of spiritual experience and as such may appear quite different than they do in adult spirituality. One final comment about definitions: there is a tendency in the literature of children's religious and spiritual lives, to put forward a particular construction of childhood and of their spiritual experience as normative—namely, the picture of the child as innocence, and of childhood spirituality as principally about some ethereal and otherworldly but positive sense of awe and wonder. I have written elsewhere (Mercer, 2003) about some of the sources of these spiritualities, as found in Jung and Freud's constructions of childhood. Many of these perspectives sound very middle class, perhaps very “Anglo” in tone. While children's spirituality certainly may include those things, there is also a “shadow side” to spirituality that is a large part of the lived reality of many children, and that is at least some small part of the experience of every child. Children across various ages and cultures experience some version of “monster fear,” for example, and must deal with an inner world and perhaps an external environment as well, populated by frightening powerful creatures. The shadow side of children's spiritual experience concerns chaos and struggle, resistance, fear, evil, and suffering. For children suffering the effects of poverty, relational deprivation, violence, or serious illness, encounters with mystery and ultimacy may relate more to being on the edge of survival than to the brightness and light often imaged in the language of awe and wonder. Sometimes the relational consciousness of a child's spirituality comes through in their struggle amidst seriously dysfunctional relationships in a family, or struggling efforts to find adequate mirroring in the eyes of a parent addicted to chemicals. When we are attempting to learn about or understand the spiritual lives of children, then, we need to listen not only for angel's footsteps but also for the ways children wrestle with demons (figurative and existentially encountered).