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Education - Give us this day our day-old bread!
Mary Travers

We know so little of the thought that lies back of the shining of those childish eyes.
This is true in any context, but perhaps never more so than in the sphere of religious education. We really do know very little of what goes on in a child's mind; the little girl who prayed Give us this day our day-old bread, surely did so in all sincerity; probably she had never seen the Lord's Prayer in writing and had a mother (like my own) who held that fresh bread was bad for the digestion! This misconception was probably less damaging to her relationship with God than the prayer of the boy who said Harold is thy name and later decided it was a weird God who would pick such a name for himself!

Young children can only think in the concrete; manna described as bread from heaven will be understood in terms of crusty rolls (or vacuum packed sliced loaves) tumbling down from the sky with God opening a window upstairs and saying Catch! For many Christian children misunderstandings multiply if the words of consecration for the Eucharistic bread: This is my body! are not very, very carefully explained (I had a 21 year old student teacher tell me he had given up receiving Communion in his early teens because: I am not a cannibal!) Young children are very accommodating; they accept the words without demur and give them back to us parrot-fashion, but the mental image conjured up by the words may sink into the unconscious and only surface at a later stage in the form of a doubt. We are all matter/spirit complexes and therefore depend on the use of analogies taken from the visible world to help us understand the invisible i.e. the spiritual. But the ability to understand the use — and limitations — of analogy is to a certain extent dependent upon general intelligence and this has to be remembered in our religious teaching.

Other natural religious traits are animism and magic mentality. The first is an attitude of mind which treats material objects as if they had intelligence and will and can take a hand in our reward or punishment. The second is the mentality which seeks to coerce God by the use of the proper rituals or, to put it bluntly, thinks that if the right words are said the right number of times they will work. Both these traits reach a peak in middle childhood and while the former can vitiate a child's whole approach to prayer, the latter is particularly lethal in the Christian sacramental context. The whole concept of prayer as thanksgiving to God is of the utmost importance here.

Natural moralism is the scourge of the early teens. Youngsters make a false identification of religion with morality and have not yet had sufficient experience of life to realise that religious belief does not always give rise to moral behaviour and very moral people do not necessarily believe in God. It is only in the Jewish/ Christian revelation that morality is seen as man's free response to God's free gift of love. The problem is that parents, pastors and teachers, both by word and example, sometimes reinforce this natural moralism in adolescents instead of helping them to grow through it.

To return to my student who in his teens had rejected the Eucharistic bread because in childhood he had accepted the words of Jesus in their crudest literal sense: the whole process of growing out of childish ideas into more mature ones must involve same form of doubt, even if it is unconscious. Adolescence is a growing-up period, a time of transition from childhood to adulthood. Young persons have to grow up physically, emotionally and intellectually; this is often an acutely uncomfortable process, both for themselves and for those around them! Unfortunately, many people mature in these spheres and yet remain childish (not to be confused with child-like!), or at best adolescent, in their relationship with God. Yet growing out of childish religious ideas into more mature ones is necessary to achieve full adulthood in a faith community and we should never forget it! How many young people say I don't believe in God when they should really be saying I no longer believe in my childish misconception of God, so at last I am growing in true faith! Perhaps the greatest single fatter which can help out young people weather this particular storm is the example given by parents, pastors and teachers who are still growing in their own faith and who show in their lives that they are ready to put their hand into the hand of God and step out into the darkness.

One final word. As adults, we all have remnants of these different stages of religious development in our own lives. In real inter-faith dialogue we need to be able to break for each other the bread of truth about our own belief and practice; perhaps a little self-examination makes as good a starting-point as any!