Nurturing and Sustaining Children’s Faith in God: Part 4 – Discovering Christ

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
How to Foster and Preserve Children’s Faith in GodWe 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.”>Part 3

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I have said that the focus of churchliness is the Lord Jesus Christ. He should also be the focus of family life.

A child should learn about Christ not from picture books, but from the disposition, mindset, way of life, and mutual relations of family members.

If he learns about Christ this way, Christ will become close and dear to his soul for his entire life.

This is exactly how ancient Christians, martyrs, and Church Fathers were raised in their Christian families. It’s enough to recall the upbringing that the sisters Sts. Faith, Hope, and Love received from their mother St. Sophia, or of Sts. Basil the Great, Gregory the Theologian, and John Chrysostom from their mothers.

Thus, the foundation of a proper religious upbringing is to put positive Christian content into a child’s soul from the earliest years, not as something external and temporary, but as the answer to the deepest queries of his spirit. With this positive content in his soul, it will be easier for the child to overcome the dark, sinful attractions and temptations that arise within him.

How Young People Depart from Christ

And yet we must acknowledge that only a few fortunate, strong-spirited souls manage to stand firm on the positive Christian foundation of their spirit, while the majority of young people experience the difficult and torturous process of leaving God and then returning to him.

I will try to describe this process in brief.

The sensual attractions and proud self-delusion that arise in a young soul and gradually develop eventually become the dominant elements of the soul. The young soul becomes their obedient instrument. Young people even place their freedom in obedient service to their desires and passions and ardently protest against any attempt to limit this imaginary freedom of theirs.

We can’t say that these idols erected in young souls bring them real satisfaction. They carry them around but find no peace. They suffer and yearn, searching for something better, more truthful, pure, and beautiful, from which arises that thirst to find the meaning and purpose of life that’s so inherent to youth.

From this flows the passion for visiting great people or writing them letters, hoping to hear from them a saving, guiding word or a ready recipe for true life.

From this comes the fascination with all sorts of teachings and theories promising universal happiness and bliss.

Having lost the religious foundation of early childhood, young people make every effort to establish themselves on some other foundation.

However, for the most part, all these beautiful impulses and aspirations are no more than dreams.

There’s a lack of will for really doing good, for overcoming sensuality, for renouncing fruitless intellectualizing.

In the end, a heavy internal drama is created: dissatisfaction, anguish, discontent with yourself, a desire for death. Seized by this mood, young people become immersed in themselves, forgetting those closest and dearest to them and experiencing profound loneliness. And in this loneliness, they create the most fantastical, unhealthy plans for themselves. Neither intensive work nor noisy fun can disperse this heavy state of spirit.

The Turning Point in Religious Life

During this period, a turning point in religious life may follow. There’s nowhere left to go along the previous path. Your own internal state appears repugnant, although a young man or woman may not yet be able to call it sinful. There’s a desire to find the authentic, elevated, beautiful, and undying meaning of life, because to live without finding such meaning means to drag out a miserable, colorless, aimless, boring existence.

At this fateful moment of the turning point of a young person’s life, suddenly, in some inscrutable and mysterious way, a certain light begins to shine in his soul, some fresh and joyous feeling arises, a certain hope appears: Life isn’t meaningless.

Where does this confidence that life isn’t meaningless come from? What is life? Until now, the young person’s thought has inclined towards a mechanical worldview—life is a collection of atoms and forces and their continuous movement and interaction; life is a causal chain of phenomena forming the whole picture of earthly and human existence. And suddenly, in this vast, limitless, and soulless mechanism, the young soul begins to feel the presence of something living, great, intelligent, and beautiful—the presence of God. Where does this feeling come from? Many circumstances can contribute to this; the main thing is that faith in your youthful infallibility has been broken and your inner inadequacy has been deeply felt. Your inner support is gone. Now you need another, stronger support.

The soul stands at a crossroad. It’s in a state of unstable equilibrium. The old healing influences have lost their power over it. New forces haven’t yet taken shape in it. Every impulse, even the smallest, can have an extraordinary, decisive significance for its entire life at the moment.

Sweet, religious childhood experiences that surface from the subconscious area of the soul, an unexpectedly heard church bell, a book that unexpectedly falls into your hands, a meeting and conversation with a deeply and sincerely religious man, a visit to a monastery, the mysterious and silent beauty of nature, a vivid artistic image, and many other things can contribute to a turning point, already prepared in the soul, suddenly finding its resolution. Childlike faith awakens, brightly and sweetly burning in the soul like a guiding star. Life suddenly gains meaning, there appears a desire to live, to work in the name of the ideal that has flared up in the soul. The old materialistic worldview proves untenable. The new religious worldview warms the soul and gives meaning to life.

Looking back at my own youth, I discover evidence that this very path—through years of inner struggle—was how I too found my way back to the religious outlook and ideals I had lost. The religious feeling awakened in my soul immediately illuminated the world and life in a different way. The young soul begins to see the beauty and grandeur of the world, faith in the supreme meaning and significance of life appears, and the heart opens to accept the Gospel.

The young person begins to feel drawn to the Church, to worship, to Confession, to Communion, although his thoughts often remain heretical.

And when these other feelings and demands begin to speak in a young soul, after the previous chaos, then it can safely be said that the soul is already saved. Here begins a new period of spiritual life, when, having established himself on the rock of faith acquired through bitter experience rather than rational learning, a person begins to consciously build his life on this foundation.

Conclusion

All of the above can be formulated in the following terms:

1. Every man, as the image and likeness of God, is naturally capable of inner, experiential, direct knowledge of God—that is, of faith in God. People incapable of religion, atheists by nature, don’t exist.

2. Knowledge about God, about His properties and activities, about His relationship to the world and men’s attitude towards Him must be inextricably linked with knowledge of God, that is, with living faith in Him. Otherwise, it becomes an external, dead knowledge, the property only of the mind and memory, and has little significance for a genuine religious life.

3. Knowledge of God is preserved and grows in a man provided he has a proper attitude towards God, purity of heart and humility, and it happens within a favorable spiritual environment, family, and Church.

4. The main reason for the loss of faith is an unhealthy, sinful direction in life, when our own personality, with its egotistical aspirations, comes first and obstructs the proper attitude towards God and man. This is precisely what happened with the first-created people.

5. The process of sinful living and alienation from God that has already begun can’t be stopped by any rational means until it hits its limit, until the meaninglessness and impossibility of living without God is clearly revealed to the young consciousness through bitter experience. This was the case with pre-Christian mankind.

6. The sinful process is overcome in the young soul by its spiritual resurrection, by the emergence of a soul-seizing religious, holy ideal that attracts and gives strength to a new life direction in the name of God. This is how Christian culture arose.

7. Favorable points that return a young soul to religious life are: religious memories of childhood, the influence of nature, the influence of fiction, encounters with truly religious people, visits to centers of religious life (monasteries, elders, holy places), and reading religious literature.