Defining spirituality is not straightforward, but for good reason. 

You only have to look at the wide ranging attempts over the years to define spirituality across various fields of study like psychology, sociology, theology and more to realise that any definition only holds part of the truth.

I can only scratch the surface here, but I encourage you to do some further reading around this topic of spirituality. A good place to begin is by reading a book by Rebecca Nye called Children’s Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters and beginning to formulate your own definition of spirituality. 

As you do that, remember this: whatever definition of spirituality you settle on, it does need to be big enough and robust enough to incorporate the spirituality of the whole of life – from early childhood right through to old age. Because God is with children as well as adults.

When finding a framework to talk about spirituality, where better to start than in Scripture?

At that time the disciples came to Jesus and asked, “Who, then, is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
He called a little child to him, and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.
_{Matthew 18:1-5}

Jesus, here, strikes at the heart of what it is to be fully human, created in the image of God, made to love and live with God.

And Jesus does not point us to the middle-aged religious leader or philosopher sitting in his chair surrounded by his books looking very wise and learned. (Maybe this is closer to the kind of person that the disciples had in mind.) That would certainly fit with our ever-upwards, always-progressing models of human development. 

Instead, it is a young child who Jesus places in the midst of the competing disciples. 

Why? What is it about children and childhood that, for Jesus, is key to knowing God and living with him?

Many have interpreted this as Jesus saying that we need to emulate certain characteristics of childhood: innocence, trustworthiness, accepting without question, obedience.

Now maybe Jesus was pointing to some or all of these, but it’s interesting to note that none of these things are universal characteristics of childhood. For sad reasons, not all children are innocent. And not all children find it easy to trust adults. 

So, Maybe Jesus was pointing to something deeper and richer about what it means to be human that is most profoundly evident in childhood. 

But what?

Well here’s one possibility…

Openness

The Catholic Theologian, Karl Rahner, says:

Childhood is openness. Human childhood is infinite openness. The mature childhood of the adult is the attitude in which we bravely and trustfully maintain an infinite openness in all circumstances and despite the experiences of life which seem to invite us to close ourselves. Such openness, infinite and maintained in all circumstances, yet put into practice in the actual manner in which we live our lives, is the expression of man’s [person’s] religious existence.¹

Perhaps the presence of children in our midst points us to the state of human childhood, which Jesus calls us to, which is infinite openness. This openness is a gift from God that we can choose to exercise or not. Perhaps this is God’s greatest gift to us: the potential for infinite openness.

But openness to what? 

Mystery

Rahner insists that learning what faith means comes from a person’s own lived experience and existence and not merely from knowing stuff in our head.

By surrendering to the mystery that embraces all of life – including the mystery of childhood – one opens oneself to the encounter with God.²

So, by placing children among us, perhaps Jesus is pointing us to a need for openness to mystery.

Faith, perhaps, is less about knowledge and more about knowing. And knowing comes from experience and a way of being. It comes by being open to those things that are implicit, hidden and even unknown, as well as those things that burst up from the centre of all we do.

The novelist, Philip Pullman, believes that an appetite for the unknown is an important part of human awareness.

The sense of not knowing is a profoundly important component of whatever we do that is interesting. A scientist doesn’t know and makes experiments to find out, they speculate and imagine. An artist doesn’t know what the effect of this colour will be against that until he or she puts them on the canvas… it’s all a matter of exploration and not knowing.³

Development scientist, Alison Gopnik would agree. She would say that this is exactly what children are designed to do. Her research points to the fact that babies and children are actually more conscious or more aware than adults.

Adults' attention and consciousness is generally like a spotlight. We decide that something is relevant and important and so we focus our attention on that one thing to the extent that everything else fades into the background. Our prefrontal cortex sends a message to keep one particular part of the brain alert and highly active but shuts down activity in the rest of our brain. Most adults have a very purpose-driven, focused kind of attention.

Babies and young children have more of a lantern of consciousness as opposed to a spotlight. They are not very good at narrowing their attention down to any one particular thing, but they are very good at taking in lots of different information from lots of different sources all at once.

So when we say that children are bad at paying attention, what we really mean is that they are bad at NOT paying attention. 

This is the kind of consciousness we might expect from children who are naturally open-minded: open to mystery, imagination, innovation and learning.

So, by placing the child amongst us, it may be that Jesus is pointing to an openness to mystery for which children seem to have a natural capacity – an openness to the unknown, to the things that cannot be fully understood or reduced to some theological formula. A capacity which perhaps the true scientists and artists amongst us have not altogether lost.

In the end, Karl Rahner says, childhood is a mystery.

It is both the beginning of our lives but also the beginning of our openness to God.

The presence of children with us invites us to be reacquainted with this same openness where we welcome the unexpected, the incalculable, the creative.

The spirituality of children matters because it is also our spirituality.

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To learn more about guiding and nurturing the spirituality of a child, watch Paul's class, Children's Spirituality.