Nurturing and Sustaining Children’s Faith in God: Part 3 – Strategies for Preserving and Restoring Faith.

How to Foster and Preserve Children’s Faith in GodA child’s soul, especially one reborn in the Sacrament of Baptism, has a natural ability to know God.

“>Part 1
How to Foster and Preserve Children’s Faith in GodWe move away from God and find ourselves alone in our egotistical life and with all the ensuing consequences.”>Part 2

In one American guide for religious youth leaders, I had a chance to read several tips on how to handle this. I won’t say that these tips were completely satisfactory. It said to teach children how to notice the presence of God in the circumstances of their everyday lives, both at home and at school, and you can preserve their faith. That’s not entirely true. Believing children undoubtedly always see the presence of God in their everyday lives, but the trouble is that this doesn’t stop them from losing faith at an older age. What they explained as obvious acts of God in childhood appear to them in a different light in adolescence, and they start to think of their childhood faith as a naïve delusion. Considerations that seem very well-founded and convincing in childhood cease to satisfy an adult.

When I was eleven or twelve, there was one time when I simply couldn’t solve one of my homework problems. I spent the whole evening on it in vain. When I went to bed, I prayed fervently for the Lord to help me answer the problem. That night, I had a dream about the solution, and in the morning, I jumped up from my bed and joyfully wrote it down, and my soul was filled with a deep feeling of gratitude to God, Whose help I never doubted. When I turned seventeen, this childhood experience did nothing to prevent me from considering myself an unbeliever, and I attributed what had happened to the unconscious work of a resting mind.

This case shows that our childhood conclusions about God’s involvement in our lives do nothing to ensure that we maintain faith as we grow up. Young people in general tend to be skeptical of everything, and especially of what’s presented by our elders as an indisputable truth that young people must accept.

They say: “Read children the Bible and that will teach them to know God.”

There can be no doubt, of course, that the word of God heard in childhood leaves its mark on the soul and bears fruit in due time. However, even in this case, what matters isn’t how persuasive Biblical truths are for the mind, but something else—the deeper change of heart produced by God’s word. If the Bible remains only the property of the mind and memory, it won’t help preserve faith.

Bible stories that we listened to and accepted with full confidence in childhood provoke distrust and rejection in adolescence, especially under the influence of negative, scientific criticism and current societal views. We need a deep and unshakeable faith in the Bible as the authentic word of God so as not to lose reverence for it, and such faith, as we know, is sometimes lacking even among professional theologians.

The same must be said about reading the lives of the saints. The lives of the saints, of course, can inspire us to feats of Christian life, but for this to happen, we have to see in the saints not only heroes of bygone times and exceptional circumstances, but our eternal companions, mentors, and helpers in the Christian struggle, living members of the holy Church of Christ with whom we can be in constant communion and whom we can prayerfully ask for help. In other words, the memory of the saints brings us real help only when we live a full Christian life, when we live in the Church in inseparable unity with the saints and when the saints aren’t just a distant historical memory for us.

All of these methods of religious influence on adolescents suffer from the fundamental disadvantage that they glide along the surface, they appeal primarily to reason and don’t conform to the inner state of a child’s soul that has already begun to decompose under the influence of sin.

To provide real, genuine help in religious life, we have to delve into this internal, spiritual process that occurs in a young soul and leads it to religious desolation. Only by clearly understanding this process in each individual case can we see a way out of this state.

The main thing in this process is the development of a sinful, self-contained disposition.

We have to fight against this, rather than merely addressing the mind with general arguments.

Both the loss of faith and the return to it never occur through a calm, theoretical, purely mental process. Both the loss of faith and the return to it are usually a difficult, internal drama, extremely painful, sometimes leading to despair, to a death wish, and this drama sometimes drags on for many years.

It’s impossible to cure such an inner state by talking and pious instructions or academic lectures alone.

We have to contrast the painful process of inner decay with another, creative process of inner healing through the work of some healthy, positive, creative force on the soul.

The main concern of religious education should be that a child’s connection with God be preserved not just in his mind, memory, or habits, but in the very depths of his spirit. This internal connection with God should be the rock against which all the temptations of sensuality and proud self-deception should be broken.

A child can be helped in this matter primarily through the beneficial environment of living religious faith and love for God. Just as a candle is lit from a burning candle, so in a child’s soul the fire of faith and love is kindled not from instructions and rules, but from the spirit of faith and love surrounding him.

Of course, the family has the primary and most important significance in the proper course of a child’s religious life. But for this, the family itself must be, in the words of the Apostle Paul, a small, domestic church—that is, not just formally Orthodox, not limiting itself to mere external observance of Church rules, but truly having the Lord Jesus Christ as the center of its life.

Only under this condition will the entire environment of an Orthodox home and the entire way of family life deeply penetrate into a child’s soul. The mother’s or father’s prayer, the icon or cross above the cradle and bed, the communion of the Holy Mysteries, the sprinkling with holy water and the lampada before the holy icon—all of this will then be not simply an empty, external form, but an expression of the family’s genuine religious spirit and won’t cause contradictions and doubts in the child’s soul.

Under the condition of the complete unity of the spirit and form of a family’s religious life, just as a sponge absorbs water, so the soul of a child absorbs the impressions of Orthodox domestic life.

A family’s religious customs—the celebration of the Preparing for the Nativity With ChildrenOur attitude should be this: In order to be with the Lord on this feast we should walk along this path together with Him.

“>Nativity of Christ, Theophany, Pascha, Pentecost, or How to Get Through Great Lent with Your Children. A Mother’s NotesWhat can we do to ensure that the whole family can live a Church life as one? Living in megalopolises out of touch with the tradition, we find this task very difficult.”>Great Lent—all of this certainly leaves a trace in the child’s spiritual life. From all of this, a stock of holy impressions, joyous and pure experiences accumulates in the soul, forming the foundation of a future conscious religious life. In later years, in moments of dangerous, critical inner crises, these experiences, this childhood religious experience resurfaces in the soul and is a source of salvation and rebirth.

The beneficial influence of a religious Orthodox family is irreplaceable—imperceptibly, organically, easily, and freely, it lays the foundation for a healthy religious life in a child’s soul.

The second environment, even more necessary for proper religious development, which includes the Orthodox family, is Orthodox churchliness, the center of which is the Lord Jesus Christ. It’s necessary that the soul of an Orthodox child have the strong feeling that he’s not only part of an Orthodox family, but also part of the Orthodox Church, to which he’s organically and forever connected and which is his spiritual nourisher and educator.

Such a sense easily arises in the soul of a child if the family around him lives by this sense. The sense of belonging to the Church is more important than the sense of belonging to a family. A family can collapse, but never the Church. A self-conscious member of the Church will never feel alone or homeless in the world—he senses that he’s in the strong hand of Christ, in the hand of God. He feels an unshakeable foundation beneath him. He lives in constant communion with Christ, with the saints, and with the departed.

Strengthening this consciousness in a child is a very important task of religious education.

To be continued…