The Prayer of Children

 

One of the greatest gifts of being in the atrium with children is to experience how they pray.  To receive this gift, the catechist must make an enormous pedagogical shift from traditional methodologies of transmitting the faith.  We must begin by understanding on the deepest level:  We do not teach prayer.

When we understand that prayer is a means of knowing God (allowing him to reveal himself to us and a means for us to respond), we see that in many ways, the child’s prayer is more profound than our own.  The job of the catechist is not to fill an empty vessel but to create conditions for prayer.  Prayer is an experience.  Think of a roller coaster ride.  I can define it, explain it, give language to express how it makes one feel, even show pictures or videos of my own ride. But I cannot share the experience.  It is something one must do for oneself.  All I can really do is present to the child the roller coaster, and if I am blessed, experience it with him.

To aid in the child’s prayer, we must first look at how they pray.  Through many years of observation of the three- to six-year-old child, we have seen the primary characteristics are:  Silent and meditative; short and spontaneous; praise and gratitude; song and movement.

The first condition we meet to aid the child is to give them something to respond to.  We call this Kerygma or Proclamation.  The richer the content, the deeper and more meaningful the response.  But I must be careful to never impose my own ideas onto the child’s response. 

Let me give an example.  After reading a passage from scripture, we will ask the children some open-ended questions:  What did you hear?  What might this mean?  In the beginning, it took an enormous discipline to sit in the silence that often answers these questions.  But then I came to truly understand the profound response that IS their silence.  Perhaps it is because they don’t yet have the language or perhaps there is no language sufficient to express what is in their hearts.

Normal behavior of three- and four-year old’s who are bored or confused or frustrated is not silence.  They will ask a million questions one after the other, they are picking at their shoestring or poking the child next to them, they are telling a completely unrelated story about their dog or throwing something at you.  It is a big joke of parents everywhere:  The only time your children are silent is when they are absolutely doing something they want to do that they absolutely don’t want you to know about. 

And so too with their prayer:  They are absolutely doing something they want to do and, at that moment, they don’t need me to know about it.  It is between them and God.

How can this gift from the youngest child aid in our own prayer life?  I think often in the season of Lent, as we focus on our prayer lives a little bit more, we can get caught in the rut of thinking there is only one right way to pray.  Or that there is a particular way that prayer should make us feel. Perhaps you were told you should say a rosary every day, perhaps you were told you should do a weekly holy hour.  These are not bad pieces of advice.  But they are merely conditions for prayer, they are not the prayer themselves.  The rosary gives us the proclamation of events in the life of Christ and the words to respond. The Holy hour gives us the environment of being in the Presence of our Eucharistic Lord and the opportunity to respond.  But our experience flows from these. And the experience can be found in a carpool line, a laundry room or while washing the dishes.

Sometimes the experience is like a roller coaster. 
Sometimes it is like rocking in our mother’s arms.

Sometimes it is like standing alone in the desert.
Sometimes we respond in the poetry of a rote prayer,
Other times in our own voice of praise or in shouts of frustration,
And still other times with no words at all.

But what the child teaches us is that prayer is an experience between us and God.  It is our own unique response to what He has to say to us personally.  

And if we can become like little children, whatever He has to say and whatever the nature of our response, it is ALWAYS accompanied by peace and joy!  And will allow us to more fully realize and participate in the source and summit of our faith this Lenten Season.

"Our prayer is both a preparation and a vehicle for arriving at the greatest prayer of thanksgiving:  The Eucharist."  (Listening to God with Children, p. 117)