The Child’s Relationship to the Divine Spirit
Children are by nature religious: they are fully and continuously open to every impression, every experience, and every human being. They are at one with their environment.
Only gradually do they create boundaries for themselves. They begin to say “no”; they want to do everything themselves, to develop their individuality. Yet even up to the beginning of the school years, something of this open devotion remains.
In The Christian Community, there is a service for children who have started school, which they can attend until Confirmation (age 14).
What is the form of this Children’s Service, and what is the meaning of this short, beautiful, and concentrated celebration?
Entering a Quiet Space
Children need times when they can play freely, setting their own boundaries. They also need to learn the value of quiet spaces.
In the Children’s Service, children learn how special a quiet space can be when it is filled with inner substance. When they enter the chapel, a server in vestments receives them at the door. In pausing there, the children experience not only an outer threshold but an inner one: Now I am entering a space that is filled with soul and spirit.
Praying Alone and in Community
By the time they are enrolled in school, the children have not only heard of God but have also experienced something of Him. In the image of the Christmas tree with its lights, they have seen how a heavenly light begins to shine in the darkness of nature. In the image of the Easter egg, they have experienced how all of nature is secretly imbued with the power of resurrection, through which new life, new nourishment become possible. Celebrating the festivals of the year has introduced the children to experiences of the reality of the spirit, far stronger than any abstract explanation.
Perhaps the children, in praying before meals and at bedtime, have also come to experience how God’s life enlivens our world and pulses through it: through nature and through us.
To pray at home or alone is one aspect of the religious life. Prayer can acquire a greater power when, from time to time, it is united with the prayer of others. In the Children’s Service, the children begin to learn how one can turn to God together with other people, outside of the family setting.
Christ, the Spirit of God who Permeates Nature with Life
When the children come to the Children’s Service, they encounter something familiar in a new way. They already have a connection to God; they have already perceived Him, more or less unconsciously, in their environment, in nature, in human beings, and in their parents.
In the Children’s Service, they find this experience again. They hear of the “Spirit of God” who is alive, living, and potent in stone, plant, and animal as well as in all human beings. But now He becomes a Spirit we can address with “You,” a being who accompanies us. Above the altar is a picture of the Resurrected One, the human face of God’s Spirit, toward whom the priest gestures. The children stand before the altar and pray together with the priest, raising themselves inwardly to this Spirit of God.
Dying and New Life – The Child’s Relationship to Death
Christ appears in the Children’s Service not only as the God who sustains the life of the world but also as the loving mediator between Life and Death.
Children’s relationship to heaven until they reach puberty is a given; their relationship to death is also different from that of adults. In the natural way of things, they do not experience death as threatening but rather as a transition into the familiar world in which they existed before they were born.
For this reason, Christ is spoken of as the one who leads all living things into death so that they may find new life. And all that is not living He leads to life so that it can find entrance into the divine world. In the Children’s Service, death and dying are addressed in a form appropriate for children.
Christ, the Teacher of Human Love
The children hear that Love is the central power of Christ, who works in every human relationship. Love makes all learning, all life, and all work possible. “Duty without love creates annoyance,” Lao-tse said. The Children’s Service tells us that without love, human existence becomes ‘desolate and empty’ – a fact we can all experience. It is also shown, however, that the love that human beings show each other enlivens all human work and life. Christ Himself is the ‘teacher of the love of man.’
“I Will Seek Him”
The children are not spectators at the service – they are active participants. They pray together, and the priest goes to each of the children, takes their hand, and tells them that the Spirit of God will be with them when they seek Him. Each child gives the same response: I will seek Him.
Repeating this simple sentence, ‘I will seek Him,’ is no formality: it is the deepest commitment to being human, to being Christian. There is nothing more human than the commitment to develop ourselves, to accept that we are on a path in life. With time, we can feel how we are not alone on this path: Christ accompanies us; the Spirit of God is with us.
The relationship to Christ, to the Spirit of God, is not a passive state or vague feeling, but rather an activity, a path, a commitment to seeking.The Gospel
Every Sunday, the children hear a different reading from the gospels. Christ speaks of the reality of the divine world and teaches human beings how to understand the earth and the world of heaven. He gives them the power to reconcile themselves with their destiny and to welcome those who are despised and cast out from their communities. He brings healing and wholeness where there has been disease and fragmentation.
Hearing the gospel, ‘the good news from the realm of the angels,’ the children get to know Jesus, who, as God, joined us on the earth as a human being and who remains connected with the earth and with us.
The Children’s Service as Preparation for Confirmation
The Confirmation at age fourteen, toward which the children are moving, would be excessively demanding without the preparation and practice of ritual events. Religious instruction can achieve one part of this preparation for Confirmation. It is not a question of merely imparting information in these lessons, but of finding an orientation towards the spirit. Nevertheless, even the best religious instruction can never replace the practice of communal prayer before the altar.
In the Children’s Service, the children receive the best preparation for Confirmation. They learn the place of stillness, of prayer, and of community, which they will experience in a more intense form when the Confirmation leads them into their first experience of the Act of Consecration of Man.
Written by Claudio Holland, edited by Tom Ravetz