The Spiritual Life of Children
Robert Coles
358 pages
Mariner Books, 1990
$14.00
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From the Publisher
In this profound book, Coles speaks to and for the religious and spiritual lives of children, whether Christian, Jewish, or Islamic. He evokes from their words and pictures children’s views of salvation and righteousness, their experience of God and spirituality, their ways of understanding the ultimate meaning of their lives, both in their own terms and in the ways that the adult world prescribes.

About the Author
Robert Coles, professor of psychiatry and medical humanities at Harvard University, has won numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, for his earlier books about children. The most recent, and one of the most acclaimed, of his fifty published books is The Call of Stories, now available in paperback.

Review
Do you remember the first time you became aware of yourself as a spiritual being? Were you 6 or 7 years old? Maybe younger? The memory had been almost 40 years lost for me until I read Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Cole's book, The Spiritual Life of Children.

Decades of work as a child psychiatrist led Coles to a search for the childhood roots of spirituality. Through interviews with children as they embrace, personalize, and sometimes reject their families' religious traditions, Coles bids us to stand close to these young people and feel a reflected light and warmth of the Divine. Coles uses his professional skills as an observer and listener to gently guide children from Christian, Jewish, Moslem, Hopi, and secular households to a comfort zone where they can talk about God, and then stands back as powerful, vibrant, and palpable religious experience pours out.

It is astonishing how eager the children are to share this inner life, and where there was shyness at first, Coles found that asking children to make a drawing about God, heaven, miracles, or Bible stories was sometimes a catalyst. Some of the drawings included in the book are masterpieces. My favorite is that of Lot's wife after she is turned into a saltshaker with arms and legs and a plaintive last word: "Help!"

The variety of religious, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds of Coles' young subjects makes clear that he is bringing forth something universal in childhood human experience. Reading The Spiritual Life of Children led to some recovered memories of my own childhood. I was taken back to the moment when my reflected image in the window of my father's car led to a flash of self-awareness and, instantly, to my first spontaneous prayer. From the coat I was wearing, I knew that I had been no older than 6 years old at the time. And like Coles himself, toward the end I found these accounts impossible to observe from a vantage point of "adult" detachment.

Although this book will have special resonance for parents, teachers, religious educators, health care and hospice professionals, and anyone who lives or works with these blossoming spirits, it is for all of us who are on the journey. It's not so much that it takes us back, which it does powerfully. But even more so it takes us inward to find not only the inner child, but the inner God as well.

Thomas Good is a musician, composer, and vocalist at the Catholic Information Center in Grand Rapids, MI. In addition, he works for the National Labor Relations Board.

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