Helping Children Find God: A Book for Parents, Teachers, and Clergy

by Helen Oppenheimer

Overview

A realistic, straight-forward approach to exploring one's faith and doubts, and talking with the next generation about important spiritual issues.

A child's spiritual pilgrimage begins from the earliest moments of life and is shaped by the significant adults in the child's ever-expanding world. Yet often adults have an inadequate or unclear understanding of their faith, and are unsure how to impart their own Christian beliefs to their children in a credible and meaningful way.

Oppenheimer offers guidance for adults who seek ways, for themselves and for their children, to "live with the questions" with a faithful openness and deep sincerity. She presents the possibilities for adults to "become as little children" in their faith, without naivete, and for children to "grow in wisdom and stature," without the need for dogmatic certainties.

An encouraging book for those who face the challenge of living out the Christian commitment--of maintaining the balance of being true to Christ while being true to one's self and one's children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780819229687
Publisher:	Church Publishing
Publication date:	12/01/1995
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	176
File size:	1 MB

Read an Excerpt

Helping Children Find God

A BOOK FOR PARENTS, TEACHERS AND CLERGY

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By Helen Oppenheimer

Church Publishing, Incorporated

Copyright © 1994 Helen Oppenheimer
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8192-2968-7

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CHAPTER 1

Children Finding God?

... it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.

Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass

Could do better

This book is indirectly for children. It arises from a mixture of faith and concern. The faith is Christian faith. I am setting other faiths respectfully aside, because one cannot explore every question simultaneously. There are questions which need to be explored about how to understand the Christian faith and commend it to the next generation. It is part of Christian faith that people matter, because they are "children of God." To treat children as children of God is not as obvious as it sounds. It ought to rule out patronizing them, pacifying them with soothing stories, stereotyping them, or using them for our own greater glory.

The concern is not despondency or alarm, but has an urgency none the less. It is a concern about the responsibility we all have for each other, to honor one another and indeed to cherish and encourage one another. For people who are fortunate enough to have faith, part of this responsibility is to pass on their faith in good order to the next generation. I do not think that at the moment we are doing this very well.

This is not, at least not directly, a judgment about what is going on or ought to go on in schools, still less a criticism of actual schools, many of which are happy, humane, well-organized places from which to begin to explore the world. Even less is it a judgment on parents, who on the whole get too much blame when things go wrong with their children and too much credit when things go well. Easy stereotypes of success and failure sap the self-confidence of people in the thick of the struggle and feed the complacency of people who are able to stand back and look on. Preconceived notions about "Christian families" versus the world are apt to be distinctly unhelpful.

Christian faith ought to be a strength, not a hindrance. It should be a matter of concern to all of us who call ourselves Christians that so many people are being crippled by inadequate notions of the Christian faith, both in their own attempts to live as they should and in their hopes of imparting credible beliefs to their children.

Taking sides

"Impart" is notoriously problematic. We know that indoctrinating children is wrong: we must not condition them into belief, especially religious belief. So ought religious teachers to be neutral, setting the options out plainly but objectively, and then leaving the children to choose for themselves, all in good time? To introduce Christianity like that without taking sides would certainly be a difficult challenge.

In fact religious neutrality is an impossible challenge. Religious belief is a live option. If I am not religious, the only practical alternative is to be nonreligious. Even if I evade the likely question "Do you believe this?" I cannot leave open the question, "Does it matter?" If it matters, the question of truth cannot be by-passed for ever, or even for long. To leave children to decide for themselves is to come down on one side of this fence. Whatever message they are meant to receive, the message they will receive is, "If this were the Truth, it would matter enough for me to give you more help." If religious teaching does not move even one step toward saying, "Oh taste, and see, how gracious the Lord is," it has missed the point of the faith it purports to teach.

The demand for neutrality is a demand for agnosticism: it ought to rule out all the people who think they know the answer, believers and atheists alike, as teachers of religious knowledge. But the message which will come across is the atheist message. Belief will go by default, since the agnostic message in practice converges upon the atheist "No." Is indoctrination inevitable then, for or against? That would be defeatist. There is a true objectivity which does not claim an impossible neutrality, but plays fair and declares an interest. It is hopeless to try to pretend to have no opinions. Even to children it ought to be possible to say, "This is what I believe. Lots of people disagree. Ask them what they think." If that is going to confuse them, it must confuse them still more to say, "This is what children ought to believe but never mind: it doesn't have anything much to do with grown-up life."

Stories for children

Children have plenty to confuse them. Because they are supposed to be too young for theology, they are offered a curious mixture of myth and morality. The myths as taught are plainly in conflict with the facts of science, and the facts of science are more interesting because they are more mind-stretching. Much of the morality is plainly in conflict with common sense and is easily characterized as "goody-goody." The world is made in six days; two famous people called Adam and Eve are disobedient; God suddenly decides to destroy everybody except one family and a menagerie of animals: that is the Old Testament. Baby Jesus comes; when he grows up he goes about doing good, which mostly means curing everyone's illnesses by magic; he tells us to turn the other cheek and to ask him for everything we want: that is the New Testament. None of this is connected with dinosaurs or spaceships or what to do when somebody is unkind to a friend of yours. Of course this caricature is not what anyone plans to teach children about Christianity, but when what they happen to learn is more chance than plan, assorted half-truths can gain a kind of arbitrary ascendancy.

Any Bible story with animals in it is irresistible to grown-ups who want to feel that they are doing something about the religious education of the little ones. So God creates all the animals and saves them in Noah's Ark, and the shiny picture-book which tells the story is classified as "non-fiction." Jonah is swallowed by a whale and sicked up again safe and sound. Mary rides to Bethlehem on a trusty donkey, and is encouraged by the ox and the ass when she has no comfortable place for her Baby to be born; and at last Jesus rides into Jerusalem on another donkey for the children to cry "Hosanna." Add a few sheep and a kind Shepherd, and we have described a selection of the most readily available theological equipment with which children are expected to face the troubled world in which they will have to live.

Protecting children

Civilized people like to think that they value and cherish children today more than they were valued and cherished in earlier times. The ideal of progress includes a kinder appreciation of children and childhood, compared with tougher and harsher attitudes in the past. The instinctive determination to love and protect one's offspring is not new, but now there has developed the perception that children ought to be happy here and now. Of course we want them not to be hurt; but also we want them not to be sad or frightened. We hope to protect them not only from damage but also from distress and alarm.

Old attitudes to childhood are not abandoned but combined with the new. The new conviction that children have the right to happiness is superimposed upon the old conviction that children must depend upon their elders. The upshot is the belief that the elders can and should filter the facts which children are to be told, and even the experiences which they are to be allowed to have, through a mesh of suitability.

Late twentieth-century civilization has been skilled at inventing ways of cushioning people from unpleasant facts. It is only too tempting to imagine that we can keep children, at least, in naive unawareness of anything nasty. Since so many aspects of the world are still by any standards "unsuitable for children," and since children are naturally fascinated by what the grown-ups deem unsuitable, this hope itself is naive. Unrealistic cushioning makes a precarious basis for establishing a faith to live by.

The Christian faith is founded upon the cross and the resurrection. The cross, of all events in history, is unsuitable for children: but it happened. Those of us who believe that the resurrection is real too will never explain what we mean by it if the cross has to be left out. Adults who have formed the habit of using suitability as a criterion are tempted to evade the issue, skimp the foundations, and set up instead various more or less pleasing superstructures without adequate protection against storms.

It is easy to affirm as an elementary summary of what Christians believe, "Jesus loves you," or "Jesus is your Friend." But on the whole children are not given to talking much about "love." To be loved is to be tucked up with a cuddle at bedtime and kissed better when you have hurt yourself. Loving means giving people beautiful surprises on their birthdays, and minding about the things they mind about. Talking about love is both unnecessary and embarrassing. Meanwhile a friend is somebody you play with and look forward to seeing, who argues with you and has the same ideas of fun. Children can see for themselves, although they may be too well-behaved to say, that Jesus does not love you like that and that a Friend is quite different from a friend. So they learn to make tacit distinctions between the different kinds of things that grownup people tell them. Religion lives in a region of its own, where everything is a bit misty compared with the real world of nice and nasty people and places, where there are things to eat and switches to press, houses and shops and cars.

This lesson about religion and real life has been learned by most of us and many of us never entirely unlearn it. In E. Nesbit's story The Phoenix and the Carpet the children mend the wear and tear in the magic carpet with heather-mixture fingering, which naturally has no special properties, so that people who travel on the thin places are only partly there. Their predicament could be an image for the patchy faith which half-supports a good many Christians, young and older. This kind of unreality bedevils communication between the laity and the clergy, who find it baffling that lay people do not appear to apply their religion to their daily lives.

Wrapping up reality

Almost two thousand years after Christ came, Father Christmas can seem more real than the heavenly Father, and a good deal more cheerful. Curiously enough, the reduced Christian faith which is easily imbibed by children is not characteristically a happy faith. Attempts to filter out anything frightening or painful seem to filter out anything really delightful as well. Shielding people from being alarmed may merely give them plenty of scope for being bored. When fears are kept under, hopes are smothered too. Human emotions, positive and negative, are like wheat and tares, too closely entangled for simple weeding. So we have an odd reversal: Christianity comes across as soothing where it should be strenuous and gloomy where it should be joyful.

Among grown-up people death may be less of a taboo than it was, but even devout Christians would prefer to protect children from thoughts about human mortality. If death is too fearful to mention and yet has to be faced, of course it is tempting to translate it as "going to heaven." So heaven, like most euphemisms, loses its own meaning and is down-graded into a synonym for something unpleasant.

Christian reluctance to think about heaven may have a more creditable explanation. Besides unwillingness to face fear, there is a wholesome reaction against oversimplified hope. Too much "heavenly comfort" has been naive, cloying, macabre or even manipulative. To outgrow shallow otherworldliness may be uncomfortable but is not faithless.

When confidence is in short supply, for better or worse reasons, a sort of vague reverence takes over, which half-affirms the angels on their clouds, the harps and the waiting around all in white, but fails to recognize any future for beloved pets and childish fun. Instead of looking hopefully at real life to find live images of heaven, grown-ups feel obliged to discount children's everyday doings as babyish. Meanwhile they remain reticent about their own real hopes and fears, partly because they have not thought them out. Their negations come through strongly, as more sophisticated than their expurgated faith. It is no wonder that what the children pick up is the skepticism which is meant to be hidden from them.

If the Christian faith were only an assortment of euphoric legends, it really would be unsuitable for children and adults alike. It must be wrong to feed children upon insincerities about our deepest beliefs, where the very heart of grown-up truthfulness ought to be. It must be stupid to think that the little ones are too stupid to notice. Part of growing up is realizing that grown-ups are not all-wise. To join an adult world full of fallible human beings is an enfranchisement; but to discover that the people who say they know best are cheating is a disillusionment. There is a world of difference between "They don't know" and "They don't care." What Christians of all ages need rather than naivety is a kind of faithful agnosticism which says "There's a great deal we do not know: but all things are possible with God."

CHAPTER 2

Behaving

The antidote to sin is not duty but praise.

David Jenkins

Caricatures

There is a half-truth that religion is "better caught than taught." Of course example is far better than precept: but first a foundation has to be laid. To believe is to believe something, and we do need to know what. "Caught not taught" is misleading if it suggests that faith has nothing much to do with facts and that becoming a believer is like coming out in spots.

What is the meaning of Christian faith? At least three questions are packed up in this: What do Christians affirm? Are these affirmations true? and, Does it matter? A little girl who had been an angel in a nativity play was asked whether she knew what Jesus did when he grew up. She thought for a moment and answered, "He walked on the water." Whatever her elders believe about miracles, they would surely all agree that walking on the water was not the main thing Jesus did: but what was? This is where people start to say to children, "He went about doing good": that is, he told people to be kind to each other and he cured their troubles by doing miracles. But when the grown-ups do not see fit to add, "And they killed him," they have left themselves nothing much to say about his rising from the dead, except that he is up in heaven now, keeping an eye on us. So Jesus looks after us by answering our prayers and is always watching to see that we keep the rules.

This caricature of Christian faith is a junior version of a familiar, and misleading, set of assumptions about how faith, providence and moral values fit together. God looks after us, so everything that happens to us must be according to plan; likewise our ancient values are safe so long as God provides backing for morality at the highest level; and the reason why Christianity matters is that without it people, that is other people, will not know the difference between right and wrong. We know our religion is true, because it gives meaning to our lives. We have to believe in Christianity because "only such a faith can outlast the death of old cultures...." C. S. Lewis' devil took the point: "You see the little rift? 'Believe this, not because it is true, but for some other reason.' "

Faith and values

What sort of faith is it which has in fact lasted through twenty centuries? Jesus loves us, God looks after us: but how? The caricatures, junior and senior, have taken such a hold lately, like bindweed, that they are obscuring the view and need to be dug out properly: which will be hard work and may appear quite negative at first. Why not let the weeds grow, especially when they have such pretty flowers? Enjoying a quick crop of goodness and kindness mixed up with trust in providence seems more rewarding than a back-breaking struggle to cultivate theology.

More seriously, many people think of theology itself as a thorny growth strangling true religion. They ask what the niceties of dogma matter compared with moral values. Looking around, they see on the one hand pedantic traditionalists, concentrating on correct belief, and on the other hand woolly liberals, concentrating on giving people what they want. Either way, "Christian standards" seem to go by default. Surely the heart of true religion is doing what one ought? When children grow up not understanding the difference between right and wrong, it seems obvious that the churches must be to blame. The cry goes up, "Back to the Ten Commandments."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Helping Children Find God by Helen Oppenheimer. Copyright © 1994 Helen Oppenheimer. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing, Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,
1 Children Finding God?,
2 Behaving,
3 Believing,
4 Cornerstone,
5 Finding God in Creation,
6 Finding God in Providence?,
7 The Creator Who Takes Risks,
8 Finding Grace,
9 Enough to Go On,
10 Finding God in Christ,
11 God With Us,
12 Finding God in Church,
13 Belonging,
14 Finding God in the Bible,
15 Finding God in People,
16 Finding God in Things,
17 The Breaking of Bread,
18 God the Holy Trinity,
Notes,
Index,