Circle of Grace: Praying with and for Your Children

Introduction Is there anything more pure, more full of wonder and hope for the future, than the prayer of a child? We find it difficult to imagine what that might be. For a child's heart, when it forms a prayer of thanks or praise or petition, has none of the self-consciousness and ambivalence of adulthood; it is a laser beam of light and love--focused, clear, and burning with urgency. Prayer is natural to human beings, whether they are children or grown-ups. It takes place all the time, and not just in churches and synagogues. As Rabbi Hayim Halevy Donin has pointed out, we pray even when we don't realize we're praying. "Thank God!" we sigh in relief, on hearing that someone we love has begun to recover from a serious illness and is out of danger. Some prayers don't even invoke God's name: a gorgeous sunset might evoke a murmured response ("How glorious!") that is really an act of praise; a guilty conscience might bring us back to someone we've hurt ("Forgive me"), as our desire for reconciliation reaches upward as well as outward. But prayer, like many other human capacities, will atrophy if it is not used and developed. Children possess an innate ability to pray, just as they have a built- in capacity to learn language. Most people wouldn't dream of being silent all the time around a child; we not only talk in the presence of our children but we devote a great deal of time to teaching them words and their proper meanings, pronunciations, and grammatical relationships. As parents, we help our children learn to name and thus understand the world around them. Prayer is a particular form of language (though it often aspires to go beyond words) that children can pick up with the same ease as they do any other kind of speech. But the tragic reality is that those of us who live in the prosperous Western nations have largely failed, in recent generations, to teach our children the language of prayer. This failure, this neglect of our children's spiritual dimension, has had grave consequences for the moral and psychic health of our culture. If you are reading this book, the odds are that you care deeply for children and want to find ways to enrich their lives and deepen their hearts through prayer. The moral decay that now permeates our culture places children at greater risk than ever before: violence, drugs, teenage pregnancy, and suicide loom like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse over our children's lives. The number of incidents where children commit violent, senseless crimes is on the rise. As we write, the horror of the Littleton, Colorado, high school massacre is still sending shock waves through America. Even if the vast majority of our children will never directly experience the extremes of violence or criminal behavior, there is a widespread feeling that the innocence and idealism of youth cannot survive in such a cynical and materialistic society. We worry about a generation growing up whose emotions and moral sensibilities are blunted, and we say that something needs to be done. But what can be done? Our first impulse--an impulse that is quickly taken up by politicians--is to restrict children's access to bad things. So we propose stricter gun control laws and install V-chips in our TV sets. There is much to be said for such measures, but most people recognize their limits. In the long run it is what lies inside children's hearts--rather than externals like guns and violent movies--that will determine their behavior and their future. Nurturing a child's heart is a task that takes years of love and attention; it's not a task that can be accomplished by legislation, however well intentioned. That's why more and more parents are questioning the moral health of our culture. Now that they areWolfe, Gregory is the author of 'Circle of Grace: Praying with and for Your Children' with ISBN 9780345417176 and ISBN 0345417178.