Nurturing and Safeguarding Children’s Faith in God: Part 2 – Understanding Why Children May Stray from Their Beliefs

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

Why are some people able to know God and believe in Him until the end of their days while others lose faith in their youth? How does this loss of faith occur and what means can be used to preserve or return it?

Before answering this question, I would like to say a few words to those who say that that we shouldn’t “impose” religious beliefs on children.

Religious faith can’t be forced upon someone; it’s not something extraneous to us, it’s a necessity of human nature—the most important content of a man’s inner life.

When we take care that a child grows up truthful and kind, we develop in him a proper understanding of and appreciation for beauty; we’re not imposing anything alien or uncharacteristic on his nature, we’re only helping him to extract, as if unwrapping from swaddling clothes, and recognize within himself those qualities and movements that are generally inherent to the human soul.

The same must be said about knowledge of God.

Following the principle of not imposing anything upon a child’s soul, we should generally refuse any assistance to the child in developing and strengthening his mental powers and abilities. We would have to leave him entirely to his own devices until he grows up and figure out for himself what he should and shouldn’t be.

But this wouldn’t protect the child from outside influences, it would only give these influences a disordered and arbitrary character.

Let’s return to the question of why some people preserve a constant, unshakable faith in their soul until the end of their days while others lose it, sometimes for good, and sometimes they return to it with difficulty and suffering.

What is the reason for this? I think it depends on what direction a man’s inner life takes in his early childhood. If a man instinctively or consciously manages to preserve a proper relationship with God, he won’t fall away from faith; if his “I” occupies an unsuitably dominant and ruling position in his soul, faith will be obscured in his soul. In early childhood, one’s own personality doesn’t usually take first place yet, doesn’t become an object of worship. That’s why it’s said that unless you’re converted and become like children, you won’t enter the Kingdom of Heaven. With the years, our own personality grows more and more within us and becomes the center of our attention and the object of our gratification.

And this self-centered, egotistical life usually moves in two directions—in the direction of sensuality, serving the body, and in the direction of pride, narrow trust, and devotion to reason in general and to our own reason in particular. It usually happens that both directions don’t combine in the same man. For some, the temptations of sensuality predominate, for others, the temptations of rationality. With age, sensuality sometimes transitions into sexual unhealthiness, from which rational and proud natures tend to be free.

Sensuality and pride, as two types of service to our own personality, are precisely the qualities that manifested themselves, as we know, in the original sin of the primeval people and erected a barrier between them and God.

What happened to the first people also happens to us.

The unhealthy direction of our inner life from childhood, which leads to the development of either sensuality or pride within us, defiles the purity of our inner, spiritual vision, and deprives us of the opportunity to see God.

We move away from God and find ourselves alone in our egotistical life and with all the ensuing consequences.

This is the process of our falling away from God.

For those who manage to preserve a proper relationship with God, the procession of developing egotistical, sensual, and proud dispositions runs into an obstacle in the memory of God; they preserve within themselves both purity of heart and humility of mind; both their body and mind are kept within their boundaries by their religious consciousness and duty. They look at everything arising in their soul as if from a certain height of their religious consciousness, make proper evaluations of their feelings and aspirations, and don’t allow themselves to be mastered by them uncontrollably. In all temptations that befall them, they never lose the fundamental religious direction of their life. Thus, the task and difficulty of religious guidance lies in helping a child, boy, young man or woman maintain a proper relationship with God, to prevent the development within them of the temptations of sensuality and pride, which cloud the purity of inner vision.

Reflecting on my youth, I must admit that it was precisely by this internal process I’ve indicated that I lost my religiosity at the age of thirteen or fourteen. The impulses of sensuality and excessive trust in my mind and the pride of rationality that developed in me deadened my soul.

And it wasn’t just me—many of my friends suffered from the same.

If there had been an observant and experienced guide around us, and he looked into our souls, then perhaps he would have found something good there, but mainly he would have found laziness, gluttony, deceit, secrecy, arrogance, excessive confidence in our strength and abilities, a critical and skeptical attitude to others’ opinions, an inclination to hasty and rash decisions, stubbornness, a trusting attitude to all kinds of negative theories, and so on.

He wouldn’t have found in our souls the remembrance of God and the inner stillness and humility it generates.

We had no such guide. Our Law of God teacher, a very venerable archpriest, barely had time to quiz us on our Law of God lessons and explain things to us. And these lessons had the same external and indifferent character for us as all other lessons. Outside of lessons, we didn’t and couldn’t see our teacher. We approached Confession, which happened only once a year, with little awareness.

And nothing prevented us from fading and dying spiritually.

To be continued…