Rev. Edmund Robinson
Unitarian Universalist Church of Wakefield
February 6, 2000

Emerson said, "We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body." In a sense a sermon topic like children's ideas of God is almost too rich, because I know that we could entertain ourselves all morning just reading their descriptions in their own words. I'm going to get to some of the words of the children in this church before I finish, but first I need to set some context.

Part of our attitude is a sentimental reaction to childhood that is in the culture. We are inclined to see children in their incompleteness as innocents, as somehow more virtuous than the rest of us. It is sort of like the stereotype of the noble savage, which holds that so-called simple peoples like Native Americans have an inherent moral superiority to us. The stereotype has a grain of truth, but it probably hides more than it reveals about its subject.

Similarly, to ascribe to children a state of total innocence and moral virtue is easy for those who don't have daily contact with them. My own memories of my children are fading, but I can certainly recall times when they fell short of perfect virtue. I vividly recall the day when my son Luke was four, about six months after his sister had arrived and shattered the exclusivity of his claim on the attentions of his parents. One afternoon this young angel looked up from his coloring book at the kitchen table and said "mom, when Sally dies can we bury her in the backyard and burn her grave?"

Now we know this pronouncement is not quite as bloodcurdling as it seems, or as it would be coming from an older child. We know as parents what psychologists confirm, that the first child's feeling of displacement by the second is intense and disturbing and it is natural for the older to entertain wishes that the newcomer would just go back to where she came from.

But we have this myth of childhood, and I think we inherit in from Victorian times, from some of the same forces that we talked about in December as making our modern concept of Christmas. The Victorians put children on a sort of pedestal. I don't know exactly what Jesus meant in the passage we read today, but the Victorians would have interpreted it as asserting the moral superiority of children.

Dylan Thomas to some extent perpetuates this sentimental view of childhood in the poem I recited today. He is not idealizing children, but he is idealizing his own Welsh childhood and speaking to the yearning and longing that exists in all adults in the realization that we can't ever return to the country of our childhood because we are prisoners in the stream of time. In the hymn we just sang, Rabindranath Tagore is doing much the same thing.

Yet the more modern psychological perspective says that we are prisoners, not of time, but of that very childhood and indeed that our childhood not only can be visited, but is visited upon us in our adult lives whether we like it or not. The experiences we had in growing up, good, bad or indifferent, shape the way we approach the world in the present. We recognize this when we create support groups called Incest survivors or adult children of alcoholics. Childhood traumas stay with us, as do childhood blessings. As Wordsworth said, "The child is father of the man;" each of our adult selves was begotten by what happened to us in childhood.

I want to talk this morning about a particular take on childhood, the perspective of developmental psychology. Developmental psychology sees the human being as going through stages in the life-cycle. The idea is found in seminal form in Freud, but was first developed on the emotional scale by Erik Erikson, who is best remembered among the general public for coining the phrase "identity crisis." Jean Piaget did pioneering and rigorously experimental work on the child's cognitive development – what the child understands of the world at different stages. In the 1970's Lawrence Kohlberg applied the idea of a developmental scale to moral ideas of children, and thus we got a sense of moral development. And in the early 1980's James Fowler synthesized Piaget, Erikson and Kohlberg to devise a theory of faith development. Fowler's theory has wide prominence today among religious thinkers.

The recent book by Scotty McClennan, Tufts Chaplain and a college classmate of mine, called Finding Your Religion, is based conceptually on Fowler's stages, though it is much more friendly and readable than Fowler. I was inspired to this sermon topic by Scotty's book, and recommend it to all of you, but I found its focus is much more on the late teen and adult years, as befits a college chaplain, and I wanted to talk about children. So I had to return to Fowler.

But before I plunge into Fowler's stages, I'd like to step back to consider the whole idea of faith development. It may not be obvious to all of you that our ideas about God, morality, justice, the purpose of life do change over our lifetimes. I think it's particularly true for some of us who have rejected some of the religious ideas of our childhood that we don't stop to think how our rejection may stop those ideas from developing. In my science and religion dialogues I often hear theological opinions from scientists that sound very juvenile. Yes, if you say that God has to be the guy on the cloud with the long white beard hurling thunderbolts I guess I'd have to say I don't believe in that one either, but surely your ideas about God have developed along with your ideas about how the world works. I have great respect for Chet Raymo, the science columnist for the Globe, but last year I read his Skeptics and True Believers and found that in rejecting his childhood Catholicism, he had basically thrown the baby out with the theological bathwater. His reasoning was something like, I quit believing in Santa Claus, I quit believing in elves, so I eventually quit believing in God.

Let me give you an overview of Fowler's stages of faith; I'm going to give you a thumbnail sketch of all seven, then go back and look in more depth at the first three. First there is a pre-stage called Undifferentiated, which occurs from birth until the child begins to acquire language. The first real stage is what Fowler calls Intuitive-Projective which typically takes the child from age two to six or seven. Scotty calls this Magic, for it is dominated by imagination uninhibited by logic. The characteristic mode of thinking is in images and feelings, but these are not sorted out. Fowler's second stage is called Mythic-Literal, and McClennan calls it Reality; it lasts from seven or so until puberty. The child takes on for him or herself the stories beliefs and observances that symbolize belonging to his or her community. The mode of thinking is narrative – have you ever sat dumbfounded while a 10-year old recites a movie plot at you for 20 minutes in excruciating detail?

Well, along about puberty the child passes into the stage Fowler calls Synthetic Conventional Faith, and McLennan calls Dependence. The adolescent is acutely aware of self, but self tends to be defined by significant others. The child adopts a religious stance of his parents or her church or her peer group. This submersion of self in the group lasts until late teens or early adulthood, when the person moves into the fourth stage, which Fowler calls Individuative-Reflective faith and McLennan calls Independence. The thrust here is for the person to find his or her own way in the world, to distinguish the self from the social and cultural environment from which it sprung. People in this stage typically reject or strain against the religious styles with which they grew up. Some people advance beyond this to a Fifth phase which Fowler calls conjunctive faith and McLennan calls Interdependence, where one learns to accept the incongruities and contradictions and paradoxes inherent in any serious search for truth and become comfortable with a variety of religious approaches. The sixth stage, which is reached only by a few mystics, Fowler calls Universalizing faith and McLennan calls Unity; it is a profound acknowledgment of the unity behind the apparent diversity of the world's religions.

One caution about developmental psychology or developmental theology or developmental anything else: the stages are not absolute. There is a lot of wiggle room and different people will pass through different stages at different ages. Also, you shouldn't think of this as strictly linear. Rather than a line, one's progression through the stages might be graphically depicted as a pendulum swinging back and forth between self-generated and other-generated systems of meaning. Or one could conceive of it as a spiral, where you come at a later time to a point near a point you've been before, but you're further along in a different dimension. Sort of like walking the Guggenheim Museum.

After that general overview, I'd like to go back and focus in on the prestage and the first three real stages. Of the prestage, before the child acquire's language, we obviously don't have anything verbal to report from the field, but that doesn't mean we don't know anything. The child is an emotional being from day 1 and very soon develops an emotional memory for the good and bad feelings he has and the sensory stimuli associated with them. Long before the child has words, the child knows pleasure and pain, and learns affection and trust. It will be hard for a child who has been deprived of love in the first months of life ever to really believe in a loving God.

Let's move on to stage 1, the Intuitive-Projective or Magic phase. This is marked by a relative fluidity of thought patterns. This is the stage of first self-awareness, but the self awareness is of an egocentric nature. The imagination runs wild, and does not have a clear boundary between fact and fiction.

One of our seven-year-old girls, asked who or what is God, said "I think God is invisible. He made the Earth. He is everywhere." Asked what God looked like, this same girl said "He is clear." Another six-year old girl said " I know he's a boy. My babysitter showed me a picture of him. He wears gold, white and red clothes." Asked what would happen when we die, this same girl said " We'll go to heaven, but we won't be able to see God."

These last two responses I think show the six-year-old mind at work. We know what God looks like because my babysitter has a picture, but when we get to heaven we won't be able to see him. At a later stage in life, the inconsistency between these two statements will result in one of them being driven out or disavowed.

Stage Two, the Mythic-Literal or Reality phase, is marked by acceptance of and involvement with story, and concrete thinking. The child learns to narratize his or her experience. Unlike the stage one child, the stage two child can step outside his or her own role in the story and see it from other's points of view.

Let's have a few quotes from our little darlings in this age group:

A seven-year-old says that God "is the voice you hear in your head telling you it's a good thing to do, and sometimes you listen to him, sometimes you don't."

A nine-year-old said "I believe God is a good spirit who lives between the skies and space. I believe that he has a brother who is evil. The evil brother makes wars and fights and God ends the wars and fights that his brother started."

I asked, "How did God get an evil brother?"

She replied, "I don't know how God got an evil brother, but he has always been evil. I believe that there are good spirits working for God and evil ones working for his brother"

This child had placed God squarely in a narrative context and woven her own myth about him. One characteristic of the myth was reciprocity – for every good spirit there was a bad one. This is often the case with religious ideas of this age – every bad act gets punished, every good deed rewarded.

When asked what God looks like, the children in this age group gave these answers: (A boy, 12) "He's just there! He can be whatever he wants. Like Mist. He can change." (A boy, 8) "Looks Like Jesus with wings." (A girl, 10) "I think he looks just like a person." (A boy, 8)"I think he can make light – like hot and cold."

The child of this age is apt to take Bible stories quite concretely and literally. The following story, which came to me through the UU humor line on the internet, illustrates the point: At Sunday School they were teaching how God created everything, including human beings. Little Johnny, a child in the kindergarten class, seemed especially intent when they told him how Eve was created out of one of Adam's ribs.

Later in the week, Johnny's mother noticed him lying down as though he were ill, and said, "Johnny what is the matter?" Little Johnny responded, "I have a pain in my side. I think I'm going to have a wife."

The third stage is the synthetic-conventional or dependent stage, starting typically in adolescence. Here's how Fowler describes the difference between this stage and the one preceding it:

Stage 2 constructs a world in which the perspectives of others on the self are relatively impersonal. Lawfulness and reciprocity, as we have seen, are the principal characteristics of such a world. In its construction of God or an ultimate environment, Stage 2 typically employs anthropomorphic images. These anthorpomorphisms, however, are largely prepersonal, lacking the kind of nuanced personality in relation to which one could know oneself as being known deeply. With the emergence of mutual interpersonal perspective taking [in stage 3] God undergoes a recomposition. Both the self and the chum or young love come to be experienced as having a rich mysterious and finally inaccessible depth of personality. God – when God remains or becomes salient in a person's faith at this stage – must also be re-imaged as having inexhaustible depths and as being capable of knowing personally those mysterious depths of self and others we know that we ourselves will never know. Much of the extensive literature about adolescent conversion can be illumined, I believe, by the recognition that the adolescent's hunger is for a God who knows, accepts and confirms the self deeply, and who serves as an infinite guarantor of the self with its forming myth of personal identity and faith."

I didn't get any responses from our children that filled this description thematically, though one 11 year old girl described God as "the feeling of love you feel for someone else," which I think reflects something like the needs described here.

Well, I don't need to belabor this point. Some of these sayings of our children will fit into the boxes the Fowler describes, and some won't. But the important thing to keep in mind is that the child's conceptions of God are going to change as the child's ability to define the boundaries of his or her self against the world change.

I hope I've given you some food for thought this morning, and I want to leave you with one more idea, one expressed by the person that introduced me to this whole area of thought, Brita Gill-Austern, Professor of Pastoral Psychology at Andover-Newton. The course I took from her was, like Fowler, rooted in scientific assumptions, studying God-beliefs as a psychological phenomenon, a purely secular, academic task. But in a church group a year after I had taken this course, I heard my professor arguing from a religious perspective, and her is the essence of what she said: the child begins life tuned in to the Spirit; the child's connection to the larger currents of creativity in the universe are innate, immediate and natural. However, as the child learns to formulate internal meaning and as this internal meaning augments and then starts to replace the sense-data, the child begins to lose the direct connection with the spirit. As adults we need to keep in mind that our children may be more spiritually attuned to the world than we are.

Maybe this is what Jesus meant in saying that, in order to enter the kingdom of heaven, you must become like a little child. Maybe this is why the great mystics of Stage 6 turn out to be so child-like. And maybe this is why we should all listen to ourselves now when we sing Hymn 338 and "seek the spirit of a child."

Amen.