The Spiritual Life of the Child

By Royal E. Alsup, Ph.D.

The personality of the child is sacred. It contains the inner Christ or Buddha nature, the Goddess, or Holy Spirit. For the inner spiritual nature of the child to flourish it needs to be confirmed by the family and community systems. A family system that confirms its child brings forth a Martin Luther King or a Mahatma Gandhi. These great spiritual beings described their families and church or temple as one continuous system of confirmation of their personality in a loving crucible. Both his family system and his African-American community confirmed the sensitive personality of Martin Luther King. His family and Hindu community affirmed Mahatma Gandhi's more detatched personality. The personalities of parent and child and how they interface and align is crucial in the child's spiritual development and well being.

For a healthy spiritual life to emerge the child's basic needs must be met, starting with the physical needs of food, clothing and shelter. Love and belonging needs also have to be met through being unconditionally accepted by the parents in order for a child to feel like she lives in a loving, safe universe. A child who has not been confirmed by her parents, and perhaps was sexually or physically abused, does not feel comfortable in her body. Her shame interferes with her feeling safe and secure in the world. When personality differences between parent and child are not accepted and are not in attunement, this nonalignment interferes with unconditional acceptance. The child needs to feel personally confirmed in order to accept that there is a personal, loving God/Goddess in the universe.

This paper is not suggesting a hierarchy of needs because I have experienced poor children whose physical needs are not adequately met, yet they are accepted and loved and their self-esteem needs are being fulfilled. When a child's self-esteem is high and they feel competent, they can set good boundaries with parents, peers and strangers and are self-assertive. This brings about curiosity, exploration and the transcendent experience of being able to risk going beyond their limits because they have felt trust, autonomy and intimacy. Transcendent experiences lead to breakthroughs; and children between the ages of ten to seventeen years report such experiences of unity with the universe. Past lives are reported in detail by children, as are intuitions of a future that is being shaped and experienced by the spiritual/archetypal unconscious. Breakthroughs from the spiritual unconscious give them a conversion or a different orientation toward life.

When the child's culture does not have some sort of vehicle to express peak experiences, or ceremonies to trigger them, then the child searches for these experiences through alcohol and drugs. Worse yet, when a child's personality is not confirmed and they don't feel safe, secure or loved, or don't feel like they belong to family or are bonded to a larger community, we see these needs being met by gang membership. When a child has a ceremony that welcomes them to a family-the gang-they feel this peak experience and get their transcendent/spiritual needs fulfilled.

God-talk is usually masculine when God is conceived of as male. In this language environment the female feels discounted, her gender is negated and the child is humiliated as a human person. Women are not regarded as equal to men when the feminine is negated so they are forced into a more restricted life. The girl child's safety, security, self-esteem, competence and transcendent needs are undermined and subverted by cultural male ignorance. Cultures that favor God as male also hurt male children by giving them a sense of superiority which blocks them from feeling the feminine side of their own nature. The female child is relegated to second-class citizenship because the Great Mother/The Goddess is repressed and conquered by masculine consciousness. With the Goddess subverted to the unconscious it makes her a blind force living in us that is feared, not trusted, and is projected onto female children as inferior. Space, time and matter are represented by the inferior Goddess that has to be controlled and conquered as demonstrated by the rape of Mother Earth. The emerging Goddess consciousness, the new feminist theologians and feminist transpersonal educators are changing this oppressive paradigm.

The feminine Holy Spirit is lost to us for the immanent mystical experience because it is relegated to the unconscious and we hunger for transcendent values such as love, beauty and justice. We search for distorted transcendence in money and unhappy, hurt, broken relationships. With unconfirmed adolescents the hunger for the spiritual is expressed through the illusional transcendence of alcohol and drug experiences.

Especially in the materialistic United States the Goddess archetype is forced into the unconscious. As evaluated by survey, empathy and altruism with Anglo children are not values with high priority. While western democracy professes to be spiritual, surveys of children and adults rate love and helping of the poor as very low on value scales. Just recently a poll by CNN showed a majority of Americans to be tired of racist issues and programs for the poor. Western democracy is hungering for love and transcendence because the blind forces of the Goddess are relegated to the unconscious. The unconscious speaks in its own language making us live out in fate what is not recognized and brought to awareness. Our Ultimate Concern is in materialism as a distortion of the unconscious yearning for transcendence and spiritual abundance.

Western democracy has a fierce conforming unconscious, theoretically valuing individuality but demanding an unconscious conformity. The unconscious conformity is manifested in the weakest link of democracy-the children. The child is not encouraged to think or to feel about others. In fact, western philosophy has always feared the other and has volumes of books negating the other. The fear of the other person is seen when the child does not have a personality that meets the expectations of the parents and is forced to live a false self.

Adolescents and even a growing abundance of preadolescent children are being lost to gang membership because of the parents' rejection. The preadolescents see the gang members as parents, selecting an older gang member and identifying with them. In their family of origin these adolescent and preadolescent gang members experienced coercion and a lack of autonomy. Because of family non-acceptance of their personalities they experienced rejection and mistrust. These children experience the same mistrust, coercion and punishment by the agencies and institutions that have been appointed to help children when their families have failed them. Patriarchal leaders who have been successful in relegating the feminine to the unconscious run the agencies. These children then meet the cold, detached father who dispenses justice without mercy, justice without compassion. The agency children's physical, safety, security, belonging, love, self-esteem, self-actualization, or transcendent/spiritual needs of attaching to family or bonding to community are not met. The children feel a religious experience with the hard, ascetic rituals that bring them into the gang membership. The rituals of gangs are rites of passage where these lost children find trust, autonomy, identity, intimacy and love. The gang is a community of supporters that recognizes these children, makes them feel like they belong and gives them a bonding with a community that accepts them and their personality.

The spiritual needs of the child cannot be discounted, but they can be distorted. As parents, family members and community members we need to make sure to meet the basic needs and transcendent/spiritual needs of the child. This will help the child know that her personality is sacred and that she is a true, living image of God.