So What Do We Tell the Children?
Following correspondence in recent SEA OF FAITH magazines on "What do we tell the children?", we were reminded by Iris Green that Ruth Robinson had contributed an appendix, "Spiritual Education in a World Without Religion", to her husband Bishop John Robinson's book The New Reformation in 1965.
The following is a brief extract.
A Christian parent said to me recently, "But a child's first questions are metaphysical ones", by which he meant that they need a religious answer. But do they?...(Such) capacity for abstract thinking is not developed in a child and he is incapable of understanding the statement "God made the world" except as a crudely literal statement of historical fact. He inevitably misunderstands us, and we know he is bound to.
Why are we so afraid of distinguishing between fact and myth, between history and interpretation? The child deserves an honest answer to his question. He is interested in the "how" of creation and we should give him a simple scientific or biological answer. He need not be deprived of the wonderful stories that have been told about creation so long as he is quite clear that we, while sharing his delight in them, understand them as stories.
We too easily think of myth as a falsification of what is true, thus belittling it and degrading it and casting doubt upon the eternal truth enshrined within it. How ridiculous it would be if we insisted that the Sleeping Beauty was a real princess or that the Emperor really did walk in the procession with nothing on. It would not only rob them of their magic as stories but prevent us, as we grow older and wiser, from seeing that they are telling us something true about ourselves.
It is worth noting that these words were written nearly thirty years ago and long before SoF. But Ruth Robinson now says of the rest of the essay: "It is a daunting prospect to have to stand by what one wrote 30 years ago, especially when one has moved so far since. It is not that I disown the general stance but I have shed so many of the pious assumptions I held then that some of it makes embarrassing reading now... There is so much I could no longer say - assumptions about prayer and the symbol of God the Father that I couldn't make. I trust that compassionate caring does (?) should (?) could (?) underpin our human existence but such trust falls apart without human commitment. These are the terms in which I understand 'incarnation'. To encourage children to trust in a caring Father God out there in a world where they are constantly threatened or betrayed by human violence and natural disaster seems like the ultimate cop-out and the ultimate betrayal. We owe them better than that if they are to understand for themselves anything of trust, hope, compassion.
"This has been brought home to me by receiving recently a synopsis of the report about evangelism and children (Ugh!) - All God's Children. I quote: 'It is tragic for the 85% of children setting out on the journey of life with little or no awareness of a loving Heavenly Father'. For me, the tragedy is the opposite: that we should even contemplate projecting on to yet another generation the hang-ups from which we are needing to free ourselves.
"It is our responsibility to give our children more than that to live by and to indicate that a Christian or 'religious' stance is more a question of attitude than belief. Perhaps what they need most from us is our co-operation in their exploration into what it might mean to be as fully human as possible."
Extract from "Spiritual Education in a World Without Religion", an appendix Ruth Robinson contributed to her husband Bishop John Robinson's book The New Reformation (1965), followed by her 1993 reflection on it.