Spirituality for children of a material world

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/sep/28/spirituality-children-material-world

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One of the oldest churches in Britain – St Andrews in Greensted, Essex – is a tiny, beautiful, higgledy-piggledy oak building surrounded by verdant lawns, and witness to 1,300 years of joy, sadness and hope. I was bursting to convey how special it was to my boys. "Imagine, lads: this was here when William the Conqueror was in charge – and look, a Crusader's grave; they think he was a bowman."

Quiet solemnity? Young heads bowed in sombre appreciation? Inexplicably, after a two-hour car journey, the little heathens just mucked around. Despite the fact that Caspar is six (a tad young for saintliness, admittedly), I began to fret. My children were devoid of spirituality! It was my fault. We are a secular household – kind, loving, yes, yes – but firmly focused on facts, science and sport. A bit of contemplation, awareness and, if you please, humility – that was what I was after.

Attending the barmitzvah of a friend's son recently, stoked my concern. Her boy's sweet voice soared and echoed, the sun streamed through the synagogue's stained glass windows bathing us in rainbows of warmth, and the father and grandfather proudly huddled close to the singer. I was struck by a sense of profundity, of being a tiny part of a great sweep of history and humanity. I dabbed at my eyes with my shirt cuff and wondered if, by forsaking the godly path, I'd banished my own offspring to a fog of unknowing.

In the 70s, children were exposed to religion, whether we liked it or not. My husband kicked along in the Cub scouts' church parade, and I, as a Brownie, promised to do my duty to God and the Queen. We fidgeted through preachy assemblies at school and sang hard-line hymns. I was made to attend Hebrew classes, and synagogue on high holy days. Aged nine, I found it all a bore and was disrespectful. When, on Rosh Hashanah, they blew the Shofar – the sombre tones of which are supposed to rouse the congregation to repentance and inspire us to re-commit to God – I started to laugh and had to run from the hall.

Still, from the happy distance of three decades, I maintain that being subjected to the grandeur of religious ceremony – or indeed, being shut in an airless room on Sunday mornings and being forced to learn endless passages of the Bible, Torah or Qur'an by rote – is good for the soul. I was eventually spat out with a little knowledge and understanding of my cultural history, and a sense of perspective, a respect for other faiths, and the notion that it wasn't all about me.

But in 2013, RE at primary school seems all very brief and academic. I'm sure Judaism was dispensed with in a couple of days. Meanwhile, when we visit my mother for Passover, and engage the boys with plagues of locusts, they fret about how much trifle they'll be allowed for dessert, and their kippot slide off their heads. Any religious event is delicately wrought with friction, as my mother tries to convey a sense of gravitas to a tough crowd. Last year, when she lit the Hanukah candles, the youngest affected to huff them out as if on a birthday cake – a jape poorly received. At times like these, I feel my offspring's irrepressible joy needs repressing.

"I want them to have respect," I growled to my husband, as we bustled them out of my mother's house, hot with mortification. "For something, for anything!" Of course, they do – when the eight-year-old bumped into Ray Davies at the seaside and got to shake hands with the singer and composer of Waterloo Sunset, he pronounced it "one of the 10 most exciting moments of my life!" But it seems that they decide.

I should add: my kids love animals, are sensitive to other people's pain, and love nothing better than communing with nature, in shorts, when it's one degree above freezing, and yet, outrageously, I am demanding more. I feel that they need a sense of the sacred to – in the nicest possible way – combat the materialism and ego of modern life. I don't claim that religious equals goodly – heavens, no! But it does prompt thought about life, eternity, the planet. If its influence is declining, do we gain our spirituality from love? And is that enough?

Possibly not, according to the Rev Canon Professor Leslie Francis – he believes religion has the edge. "In a sense, religion, spirituality, and character are very different concepts, but as a psychologist, I can see that in young people, those three things are correlated. Religion offers a kind of meta-narrative of what life is about, and a certain set of expectations about how individuals respond to opportunities and challenges in life."

He regards spirituality as relational, concerning a person's "relationship with self, with other people, their environment … and the transcendent, [or] at least a recognition that there might be some ultimate value or criteria against which transitory things can be judged." He adds that while there are other meta-narratives that can lead to a spiritual overview, "religion has been in business long enough to know something about what it's doing."

Perhaps what I'm blundering towards then, is not necessarily related to faith, but to that element of character inspired by the non-material – and I hope my children have this; but I suspect it's an ethereal quality, glimpsed when the conditions are right, like a rainbow.

As it happens, our education system addresses spirituality as a non-religious concept, and character is key. The British Humanist Association directs me to Ofsted guidelines that detail a school's duty to further children's "spiritual, moral, social and cultural development", which are actually rather poetic: "Some people may call it the development of a pupil's soul, others may call it the development of personality or character."

Also rooting for character is the philosopher and psychologist William James, who saw spirituality as independent of any specific faith. Psychologist Dr Stephanie Thornton – author of Understanding Human Development and a Catholic sceptic – says: "James would put every value that you have – like not poking someone's eye out – in the spiritual domain. In so far as your sons, and other children, have got those values, they are spiritual values."

It's a promising start. And it gets better. Dr Thornton cites Carl Jung, for whom spirituality incorporated values, but was also linked to a sense of "the numinous" – the sacred, almost magical. While you can't force wonder, Dr Thornton believes there are all sorts of everyday things with a dimension that is reverential and from which a respect arrives – and you can prime children to react. "A friend used to run a nursery," she says, "and they owned a piece of woodland. Every year, she took the children out there to camp. Round the fire, on the first night, in the darkness, she'd tell them about the pixies, elves and fairies that lived in the woods. And that if they walked in a crocodile, about five feet apart, very quietly through the wood, they would see the pixies. And they all did. They saw them.

"And after that these children had that sense of the numinous, about that woodland. It became a sacred grove. I totally approve. I think it gives a sacred dimension to reality that is not there in the prosaic, materialistic sense, and [is not dependant on] whether you believe God is going to come down and smite you or rescue you."

At last, I see it. I see it in my children's awe, caught last summer in a fantastically biblical thunderstorm on the beach. I see it in their tenderness towards our old cat. And I see it when they discuss how they miss their beloved great-uncle, who used to let them ride up and down the stairs on his chairlift. "How old was he?" asks the little one.

"Ninety-two," I reply.

"No he's not," says the eight-year-old. "Now he's zero, because he's in heaven and he's just started."

I suddenly feel rather foolish, and stop fretting.

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