Childhood is openness. Human childhood is infinite openness.

KARL RAHNER

THE TRINITARIAN COMMUNITY OF LOVE

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Spirit is Love’s Family, and children are on a journey of awaking to their membership within this family. Learning of and leaning into Love’s Family is at the heart of spiritual formation with children. Acknowledging and encountering the reality of God as the trinitarian presence is an important step toward developing a theology of children’s Christian spiritual formation.

Consider figure 2.1, which was drawn by Annie, an eight-year-old girl. Annie has grown up in a church that practices the prayers of the people in the name of the “Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” She heard these words first as a baby and now has learned to say them herself. These words accompany a bodily movement of making the sign of the cross. With each sound heard, each word spoken, and each bodily movement, she is engaging the reality of Love’s Family. To Annie, music speaks deeply of God, so when she was asked to draw a picture of God, she drew the three primary members of Love’s Family playing piano together. When asked about her drawing, Annie said, “God is like a musical chord. All three and all one.” Annie is in good company as sixteenth-century Christian mystic Ignatius of Loyola also thought of the Trinity as a musical triad. About her image Annie explained that music is not “by yourself,” everyone can play or sing or dance. Within Annie’s image of God there is community, there is connection, and there is invitation.

Figure 2.1. “God is like a musical chord. All three and all one.”

Out of the overflow of joy-filled music and in an act of invitation, which comes from the center of their communal existence, the trinitarian God creates. Whatever the trinitarian God creates is infused with God’s image. Since God’s image is good, what God creates embodies the potential for every good in the universe (Genesis 1:26-27). Let that sink in for a moment. Every human is created with the potential for every good in the universe. God does not create from a deficit but from wholeness. God is a Community of Love, and because children are created by that community, they bear the mark of their Creator. And that mark is the imago Dei.

The union of image and likeness, found in Genesis 1:26, has been known as the imago Dei. It is something like a homing beacon. In part the imago Dei is the breath of God breathed into every human person who has ever lived. It is deep calling to deep. Whenever a child encounters beauty, truth, or goodness in the world, this beacon sounds. It echoes in the souls of children as a reminder that they were created from loving community and belong in loving community.

Once when I was trying (and floundering) to communicate this idea to a group of adolescent boys, they met me more than halfway by offering a modern metaphor. “Lacy, it’s like when you lose your phone,” one explained. “You know how you can ping your phone with the computer and it will ping back? Is that what it’s like?” They were spot on. It is like that. Every child has been wired with longing and enlivened with the breath of God, so when a child encounters goodness, truth, or beauty, the child’s soul pings. There is a resonance that draws them toward the Community of Love.

Irenaeus, a second-century church father, has been paraphrased as saying, “The Glory of God is a human being fully alive.” God’s glory is revealed in a child becoming increasingly aware, increasingly alive. John reminds us, “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1:3-4). Patrick Henry Reardon explains that Irenaeus’s quote is not a treatise for self-fulfillment as it is often interpreted.1 Instead, Irenaeus is arguing that a growing awareness of Christ in the world coincides with greater human living. Every human being experiences some measure of this awareness. The imago Dei breathed into children continually calls them into a participatory awareness of the God who surrounds them. As Dallas Willard states, “We are, all of us, never-ceasing spiritual beings with a unique calling to count for good in God’s great universe.”2

This should not surprise us because the Trinity functions and conceives in love. A child’s experience of God is an expression of that love. As children are wired both to receive love and are themselves rich in love, they are especially able to experience God. Jesus made it clear that children are welcomed to experience God. Humanity’s beginning is not at the fall but at creation, where we are loved of God. Becoming awake to God, to their own belovedness, and the belovedness of others is a child’s lifelong journey into the heart of the Community of Love. An adult can participate in a child’s awakening by being a listening presence, but the adult cannot make the journey for the child. They can help a child recognize and respond to Love’s divine invitation, but they cannot force sight or connection.

Children’s spiritual formation is the journey of becoming aware of God and participating in the trinitarian reality. As Annie showed in her drawing and explanation, spiritual formation is learning to hear the music and accepting the invitation to participate. The modern term spiritual formation takes into account recent physiological and psychological understandings of three formative influences on human spiritual development. First, an outside influence, which can include training and teaching (often referred to as nurture). Second, the genetic predisposition to relationship children are born with (nature). Third, the outcome of the choices humans make throughout life (human will or agency). Every child is shaped by these influences. Thus, every child receives spiritual formation.

SHAPED BY ENCOUNTER

For over fifteen hundred years the Christian tradition has discussed, articulated, and prescribed training models, strategies, and doctrines that have emphasized knowledge about God. The goal of teaching children was to guide them into mental assent and moral knowledge. While knowledge about someone is good to have, it does not lead to friendship. For example, I know about Archbishop Desmond Tutu. I have read many of his books and listened to his lectures. His teachings have inspired me and directed my moral compass. But we don’t have a relationship; we don’t hang out. While I admire him greatly, proximity has placed limitations on friendship. However, God is not limited by proximity.

God is near and longs to connect with children. Experiential knowledge helps children develop a relationship with God. The children’s spirituality movement of the last hundred years has opened the discussion to include the direct knowledge of the Trinity’s presence, which children gain through experience. In essence we learn to play music with the Trinity not only by reading the music or biographies about the musicians but by grabbing our finger cymbals and giving it a go!

Children’s spiritual formation has four elements that shape and form a child’s relationship with the trinitarian Community of Love.

ELEMENTS OF SPIRITUAL FORMATION

God’s self. From a human’s birth and on, God is constantly inviting human beings into relationship. God has given God’s self to this relationship endeavor with humans. Through the homing beacon, through wired longing for connection, and through the pings lovingly woven within our world, God gives God’s self to every person. While goodness, beauty, and truth are God’s fingerprints in the world, God also has others. Whenever children experience wonder, as in I wonder why bees like pink flowers? we hear the ping of invitation. Children are born scientists hungry with curiosity. Whenever children feel a sense of awe or hallowed mystery, their souls ping.

Edward Robinson’s book The Original Vision describes some of the ways people have encountered God’s presence as children. In a study of over four thousand stories in which adults reflected on their religious experience or spiritual awareness, 15 percent of the stories told occurred in childhood and affected the life of the person. These participants interpreted their experiences of goodness, beauty, truth, wonder, mystery, and awe as encounters with the divine. Far from being spectacular, these experiences were woven into the ordinariness of life.3

It seems that these experiences occurred in three learning spaces. The space of tears, where there is...