I started writing these reflections in Lent, in response to a need I saw in my 5 and 6 year old boys (their 2 year old sister just tags along with everything they do, anyway). If they help other families, great, but what I believe will help the most is if YOU write the reflections yourself, or use the same principles in whatever way works best for your family.
Why? Because arguably the best possible preparation for life (and eternal life) is a strong relationship with Jesus the Good Shepherd, and this cannot be formed without prayer. And it's hard to know how to pray if no one shows you! This is where reflections can help: as a guide and basis for further prayer.
Why should you prepare the reflections yourself?
Firstly, because nobody knows your child better than you. You might think you don't know much about your child's religious life - and fair enough - it's pretty hard to see what happens in the soul! But with the right tools and awareness you can guide them enough to form a relationship with God that you don't need to know exactly what's going on. (I'll help you with the tools and awareness bit - or you could search out some Catechesis of the Good Shepherd training - it is SO worth doing.)
Secondly, because it will feed and nurture your own prayer life and relationship with the Good Shepherd. Most of us were not fortunate enough to learn to follow and love the Good Shepherd before we were 6, and many of us still struggle with it now. Trying to see God with the eyes of children is incredibly beneficial to our own ability to "be as a child" before God.
In this post I will explain why it's so important to help children form a solid relationship with Jesus the Good Shepherd, ideally before the age of 6.
In the next one I will give an overview of the themes that children most relate to at different ages.
With that in mind, we will look at observation of children with a view to catching a glimpse of their interior life.
Then I will talk more about the different themes, why they are important at certain stages, why others might be important to avoid at a certain age, and different ways to do this.
Why Jesus the Good Shepherd?
All of my work with the religious formation of children is based on the work of Sofia Cavalletti and Gianna Gobbi - who started Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Sofia was a Bible scholar and extremely knowledgeable on matters of faith, and Gianna was a Montessorian, so had a wonderful background in understanding how children work and what they need. Their guidelines are based on countless hours of observation and reflection, noting how children of different ages react and relate to different religious themes.
The theme which they found most spoke to children before the age of 6 was the unconditional love of Jesus the Good Shepherd. Without going into too much detail about the developmental and religious characteristics of this age group (you can google these topics for your own further research, or ask me if you need help finding material), children of this age have a deep capacity to love, without question, and a corresponding deep need for a reciprocal love even greater than theirs. The only person who can meet this need is God, and the "face of God" which most embodies this unconditional and limitless love is Jesus the Good Shepherd.
(Gobbi and Cavalletti speak often of adults needing to understand which "face of God" the child is needing to be shown.)
As parents, we have a natural tendency to want to make sure that our children know the rules, so they know which path to follow. This extends to the religious sphere - we worry that if they don't know the rules, if they don't know that Jesus died for them, if they don't know that there is evil in the world that they must avoid, that there will be dire consequences. And we can try to instill this knowledge before all else.
In Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, a different approach is taken. We start with allowing the child to experience and enjoy the unconditional love of God. Children have such a great capacity for joy, and we try to allow them to have that for as long as possible. The themes in the 3-6 atrium focus on what God does for us, the gifts He gives us, the wonder of the Kingdom of God, the Mass (in digestible pieces), Baptism, Jesus' infancy. The Cross is briefly mentioned, but only ever on conjunction with the Resurrection (what need have children before the age of reason to know about the reality of sin?)
Not until we are sure that they understand that they are loved conditionally do we start to introduce a moral aspect to the children's formation. This is usually around 6, but some children may be earlier and others later. And even then, there are many themes which are reserved for 7 or 8 year olds.
The way morality is introduced is extremely gentle. With the firm conviction of their place in the eyes of God, the children are introduced, piece by piece, to the image of the True Vine, to the fact that there can be blockages in the sap, and that God's mercy has given us such an easy and wonderful way of removing those blockages. Slowly, the children discover that there is such thing as sin, and that they commit it. They learn to discern the state of their consciences, and how to go about rectifying matters with God.
But this is always done in the context of God's unconditional love.
How many of us struggle with knowing we have done wrong, thinking that no one could love someone who has done such things (whatever they are)? How many of us find it hard to accept that we have done wrong, because we don't know how to love ourselves as God loves us? Without a conviction of God's unconditional love so deep that we are barely consciously aware of it, it can be so easy to fall into legalism - having things on a tick-the-box level; or denial - refusing to acknowledge our need for mercy - unable to live our spiritual lives on more than a surface level.
Cavalletti and Gobbi realised that so much of this could be avoided if children learnt they were unconditionally loved, and loved God deeply in return, long before they learnt they could mess things up. In the atrium (the CGS equivalent of a Montessori classroom), therefore, we focus on presenting this unconditional love of God to the children, allowing them to internalise it, and to return it as far as a human can. If done before 6, this will endure with them forever. (Yes, it is possible to do it after 6 too, but it's SO much harder because they're already figuring out that morality exists (or already have) and it's a bit like retrofitting a computer with new technology - much easier to do when you first make it, and very hard to get it just the same.)
And that is why the focus on Jesus the Good Shepherd, and why start as young as you can.
Before I became involved with CGS I knew my children were capable of a religious life, but I had neither the foggiest idea of how to facilitate it, nor an understanding of just how important it was to start before 6. As I said, CGS training is invaluable, but it's also not accessible for everyone, so I hope to be able to give parents both the knowledge of how important their role is, and the tools to carry it out. For those who are blessed with access to an atrium, the two streams of formation will work perfectly together. For those who are not, you can still do so very much!
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