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	Toddler Theology

	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.