San Franciscan Daniel Handler, also known as Lemony Snicket, reviewed several children’s books in a New York Times piece not too long ago, including Zen Ties, writer-illustrator Jon J. Muth’s sequel to his Caldecott winner, Zen Shorts. Handler is allergic to preachy moralisms of the sort often smuggled into children’s so-called spiritual books (and dissed in this blog on a few occasions), and while overall he finds Muth’s new book undercompelling, his thoughts on how it goes wrong are compelling. (Muth comes to writing from his background in graphics, however, and Handler heartily approves his visuals.)
Both Muth books have been widely and appreciatively reviewed by bloggers. A quick perusal of the blogosphere indicates one obvious reason why: spiritual books for children provide busy parent readers with spiritual sustenance as well.
Many children have deep spiritual experiences that adults may not know how to validate (or even, sometimes, acknowledge in themselves). Books can give children a sense that their liminal, fragile, and ignored-by-most-grownups experiences are worthy and precious. I asked Whitney Stewart, author of the picture book biography Becoming Buddha: The Story of Siddhartha, to comment on this topic:
“I have a great deal to say on the subject of adults ignoring the ’spiritual’ experiences of children. When I was fourteen, I took a rafting trip with my best friend and her older siblings. We hit a rough patch of white water and the raft flipped. I was on the bow and I got trapped under the raft and in some tangled branches. I started running out of air and panicked for a period. Then suddenly my internal voice said, ‘Oh this is just death,’ and I relaxed completely. I ‘saw’ scenes from my whole life as if in one frame of a movie, and I felt bright light and deep peace. I stopped struggling. And I felt joy.“Then someone pulled me out of the water. I was choking, and I tried to talk about what had happened but no one was interested in listening. We had to portage the raft over rough riverbank.“This was one of several childhood experiences of something beyond myself that I have tried to understand. These ’sensed’ experiences led me to Tibet in 1986 and into Tibetan Buddhism. I chose to meet and write about the Dalai Lama because I wanted to understand his view of universal consciousness.“I now have a strong urge to teach children how to listen to their inner wisdom and connect to universal wisdom as they understand it. To me this connection can happen at any time in any place if the child is ‘listening’ in a full body-mind-heart way. My newest book on meditation shows kids simple ways to make this connection.“I could talk forever on this subject. But this is a start.”
Thank you, Whitney, for your thoughtful perspective. For a preview of Whitney’s book on meditation, including instructions and illustrations to get you (kids and grownups) started, click here. PaperTigers welcomes readers’ book recommendations and comments on the topic of spiritual books for children–and other topics as well, as always. See Whitney’s blog here.
Great and fascinating post. Robert Coles wrote “The Spiritual Lives of Children” which adresses this subject in depth. But, intuitively speaking, I think adults don’t give kids enough credit for or know how to address this area of life with kids these days. Maybe due to its taboo nature in American society (along with sex, drugs, and and and…) while we also lack this exposure through our secular education system where it can become intellectualized or a point of friction (mainly between adults who already divided or see the educational system infringing their First Amendment rights. My question might be: how can we open kids to these experiences so they can become more comfortable with religions and practices? How can we give them a vocabulary of experiences to scaffold their own onto to help them make sense of the choices and visions of religious experiences in the world? And how can adults come together with their own practices enough to do this with kids?
Thanks for your thoughtful response, Chad, and for the book recommendation. Talk about something we could use a “national conversation” about in the U.S…! It’s a sensitive topic that could so much more productively be a topic for sensitive, nuanced exploration. I’m looking forward to reading Coles’ book.
Thanks for your post Chad and your excellent questions, which I have posed to myself. I wrote my meditation book in nondenominational prose so that readers can develop their own vocabulary for the experiences they have when they slow down their breath. I have left blank pages for readers to fill as they experience beyond their everyday mind.
At age four, my own son used to announce to me that he saw beings who sent out rainbows from their heart, which went into people. Once we walked in the park, and he shouted that the beings were right in front of me. (I had never given this idea or image to him or read anything to him with similar imagery.) I could not see the beings he saw. But I explained that each of us has a different and unique way of experiencing the Beyond. This was his special way. And I was pleased to know about what he saw.
I have always encouraged parents to open up to these kinds of conversations with their children without imposing a specific vocabulary on the conversation. Children can gain confidence in their experiences if they are allowed to express themselves freely.
Thanks, Whitney, for your very important addition to this topic. You have really encouraged me to think more broadly about how we are conditioning our kids by our silence at such a critical time in their lives, and our own…
I think adults are very uncomfortable with the child in themselves, particularly when they become parents. Many adults believe that parenting is about ‘controlling’ their child, making them behave in away they deem appropriate to societal ‘norms’ and so, to be a parent, they need to control the child within themselves. Disowning this child in themselves is, in a way, disowning their own spiritual selves for I believe young children have no boundaries between themselves and the spiritual world. Watch a young child at play and they will talk to all manner of beings around them. Their faith and belief in the world is endless. As we grow older and try to understand the world around us we try to control our surroundings and act in the way we think is expected of us: adult, sensible, controlled. Spirituality cannot be explained or controlled and so it is dismissed, or fashioned into rules and regulations or worse still, religious dogmatism. I believe if we listened more to children, really listened, instead of trying to control and dominate them all the time, we would see how much we have to learn from them and we may even find ourselves revisiting the child within ourselves.
Sally, what a wonderful addition to this conversation your comments are! “Becoming Buddha: the Story of Siddhartha,” which Whitney wrote and you illustrated, is a great example of a spiritual book for children in both a traditional informational sense and in the sense you and Whitney and Chad are talking about–a book that confirms children’s own experiences of the liminal and spiritual without didacticism. Likewise, Whitney’s new book on meditation for children.
I’m also thinking of books like Woolvs in the Sitee, by Margaret Wild, illustrated by Anne Spudvilas, which I had the pleasure of reviewing for PaperTigers recently. It’s about fear, one could say, but also about love and the courage it takes to overcome fear. With its dramatic and unusual artwork it might not “look” like a “spiritual book” at first glance but the feel of the experience of it is certainly deeply moving in a spiritual way. I’m interested in other books that fit this (rough) category. Another librarian at a private school in San Francisco (other than Chad) recommends Jerry Spinelli’s “Crash,” for example, a YA book about bullying–she’s looking at how to encourage the discussion of values in a non-bullying way!
There is so much to ponder here and it makes me think hard about the amount of time we spend doing things with our children as opposed to just being; the importance of giving them the space to engage their own imaginations in their play as opposed to presecribing their activities. It also reiterates for me the need for the provision of some kind of spiritual space in the teaching of religious studies, not just the bare facts on the one hand or, as Sally points out, religious dogma on the other. That is a challenge!