By Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick
What percent of your happiness comes from your spiritual life? Three percent, would you say? Or is the percentage closer to 6.5?
I’m still puzzling over the question. For me the spiritual runs through relationships and moments the way blood circulates around the body, and trying to isolate and measure it as a percentage of happiness sounds as impossible as it would be pointless. But recently two researchers at the University of British Columbia concluded that 6.5 to 16.5 percent of children’s happiness can be accounted for by their spirituality. Mark Holder, associate professor of psychology, and Judi Wallace, a graduate student, asked 315 children aged nine to twelve to describe their daily spiritual experiences and private religious practices by rating statements such as “I feel a higher power’s presence,” and answering questions including “How often do you pray or meditate privately outside of church or other places of worship?” Teachers and parents described each student’s happiness level and the researchers made the correlations.
Considering that parents’ wealth accounts for less than 1 percent of a child’s happiness, the 6.5 to 16.5 percent results for spirituality took Wallace and Holder by surprise: “From our perspective, it’s a whopping big effect,” says Holder in a UBC press release. “I expected it to be much less – I thought their spirituality would be too immature to account for their well-being.”
So much for “and a little child shall lead them.”
Well, it’s easy to poke fun at the percentages. And it’s hard for many of us to understand how much statistics like these can possibly mean. The researchers’ definition of spirituality as “having an inner belief system” is sadly heady. It seems to ignore the natural, hands-on spiritual connection a child develops through loving relationships, nature, and play. And the scientists’ tendency to speak of spirituality as though it were no more than a happiness-enhancement tool is all too familiar these days.
Still, in discussing their research Holder and Wallace zero in on two aspects of children’s spirituality. One is a sense of thankfulness. As many parents recognize through table graces and bedtime prayers, in a loving home, the impulse to give thanks is a child’s natural spiritual expression. “The prayer of children up to the age of seven or eight is almost exclusively prayer of thanksgiving and praise,” noted the Italian Montessori educator Sofia Cavalletti in The Religious Potential of the Child over twenty years ago. “The adult who tries to lead the child to prayers of petition falsifies and distorts the child’s religious expression. The child feels no need to ask because he knows himself to be in the peaceful possession of certain goods.” When we share our own gratitude and encourage our children to do the same, we help them hold onto it as they grow.
What’s even more intriguing is that Wallace and Holder talk about the the anticipation of beauty as an important aspect of children’s spiritual lives. In my own workshops on children’s spiritual nurture, parents often tell me that their childhood and adolescence experiences of beauty — in redwood forests, under vast starry skies, at midnight mass — have been touchstones in their own journeys. Children are far hungrier for these moments than many adults recognize. I still remember how as a ten-year-old I saw Michelangelo’s Pieta’ under a spotlight in an otherwise dark pavilion at the New York World’s Fair. To this day I can picture the gleaming marble and the dramatic beauty of the figures, which took my breath away — and which had far less impact on me a decade later when I saw the sculpture again in St. Peter’s basilica.
Today, with children’s lives often structured and scheduled from breakfast till bedtime, many are growing up far removed from nature and immersed in a media culture of banality and violence. The habit of seeking that which is harmonious and inspiring in the world is one that must be nurtured. Children need to move beyond the television, the computer screen, the classroom and the sports field to discover that which is truly awe-inspiring in nature, art, music, dance and literature. Too often we think we need to justify such exposures by claiming they will lead to increased fine-motor development or higher SAT scores. Surely it’s enough to know that in sharing these experiences we are helping our children’s tender hearts stay open. When we learn to look around us for beauty, we tend to find it in our world, in one another, and in ourselves.
Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, L.P., a New York-licensed psychoanalyst and a member of the American Association of Pastoral Counselors, sees couples and individuals in her private practice. A layreader in the Diocese of New York, she is the author of numerous books and articles on the spirituality of relationships, including Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth and has a website at www.pastoralcounseling.net.