For
many years it has been assumed that children's religious education
must be matched to their capacity to think and reason. They have their
fantasies and games of course, but they don't have real spiritual
or religious experiences, so it's best to concentrate on learning
prayers and telling them bible stories, and leave exploration of the
capacity to have deep spiritual encounters with the divine to later
on in life. But it has also long been known, though perhaps by too
few, that this is nonsense.
Have you ever heard of the Alister Hardy Trust? Well, it was set
up in 1969 by the Oxford biologist Sir Alister Hardy FRS, as the Alister
Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre. It continues to flourish
today and can be found on the internet at www.alisterhardytrust.org.uk.
Sir Alister believed that the capacity to be spiritual is genetically
inherited and he set up the Research Centre to collect information
about people's religious or spiritual experiences, which he hoped
would add support to his theory. After all, if the capacity is inherited,
we all have it in our genes from birth and would quite likely have
had spiritual experiences from a very early age, predating our capacity
to use language or to think and reason.
The Research Centre rapidly built up a large data bank of reported
spiritual or religious experiences, and it continues to add data to
its files today. You can get on to the website yourself, and add your
story if you would like to.
Now here's the interesting snippet I have been building towards.
As the databank grew, it became increasingly obvious that many of
the reports were of early childhood experiences, clearly contradicting
the previously received wisdom, and supporting (though not quite proving)
the Hardy theory! It was Edward Robinson, a later Director of the
Research Centre who eventually wrote a book about it called The Original
Vision in 1983.
Perhaps many of you already knew this? Maria Bindl certainly did.
As early as 1965 she studied 8000 drawings by Roman Catholic school
children in Freiburg between the ages of three and eighteen. You don't
need much cognitive intelligence or language to do a drawing, so drawings
are a good medium to use to find evidence of spiritual elements in
a young child's experiences. Maria used a type of graphological procedure
originally developed by Ludwig Klages in 1927 to do her work. She
noticed that up to the age of about six or seven, children have a
"naive relatedness" to God after which there is a noticeable
decline in "spontaneous experience of the numinous".
This, and more recent research seems to show that our social development
and the growth in our use of language to "create" our adult
meanings in life effectively blots out spirituality. No doubt, that
is why, in this secular society, we need a new baptism of the Spirit
in our adult lives, to restore our capacity for the simple relatedness
to God we were all born with.
Shaun Growney
(Much of the above has been gleaned from an article in Research in
Religious Education by David Hay, Rebecca Nye, and Roger Murphy entitled
"Thinking about childhood spirituality: review of research and
current directions" (Smyth & Helwys 1996). What I have written
is my responsibility alone, but I am grateful to these authors for
their article. I should also point out that research into childhood
spirituality has lately made substantial advances, much attributable
to Hay, Nye and Murphy, and is at last beginning, but too slowly,
to influence the way religious education is organised.)
