Book discussion, The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller - Cultivating the field of Love

 Topic Thirty Five

Cultivating the field of Love

Once we become parents, we are forever changed. No matter how your child comes into your life—by birth, by adoption, through parenthood, or grandparenthood, or the synchronicity of friends or strangers—your love for a child opens the field of love. To the degree that you cultivate the field in the ways we’ve discussed—unconditional love, actively engaging the child in spiritual reflection and contemplation, conversation and right action in everyday life—the field becomes your child’s spiritual reality, your family’s spiritual reality, and your own.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (pp. 317-318). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The “field of Love” is the manifestation of God’s love in the world displayed by the communication, verbal and nonverbal, from the parent, and other people, with whom the child interacts. Because the bonds of attachment are usually the strongest with parents and sometimes grandparents, the experience of God’s love in these relationships are the most significant and intense.

This manifestation of unconditional love is what we refer to in “The Lord’s Prayer” when we say “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

When have you felt most loved? Most safe? Most comforted, reassured, peaceful?

Was there a “field of Love” in which you lived, experienced, and were nurtured?

The experience of the “field of love” contributes to what psychologists call “attachment styles.” There are four attachment styles; secure, anxious, avoidant, and dysregulated. A person's attachment style based on the type of field of love they experience in their lives has a significant influence on the development of that person's spiritual life. Can you give an example of how the field of love you have experienced in your life has contributed to your attachment style?

Book Discussion: The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller. The spiritual journey called "parenthood."

 

The spiritual journey called “parenthood.”

We can see how our spiritual growth as parents can progress in tandem with our children’s spiritual development. 

The arrival of a child in our lives awakens us spiritually, whether we call it that or not. Haven’t we all, upon becoming a parent, felt the “something more,” experienced something difficult to describe but very real stirred by this new being in our lives? Many parents, particularly fathers, have told me that they “did not believe in anything” until their child was born.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 317). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Parenthood is an opportunity for spiritual growth. It is an opportunity to create a better version of ourselves which moves us from an egocentric level of consciousness to an ethnocentric and worldcentric view. 

Our sense of purpose is enhanced beyond our individual sense of self to a concern for the next generation and the world they will be living in. Our narcissistic motivations and incentives are enlarged and move beyond just the egocentric self.

Parenthood raises existential questions, if we allow a recognition of them, about why a person is born, what the purpose of life is, what really matters to be created before physical death occurs. Why has this soul become incarnated into this physical body and how can I recognize, acknowledge, and nurture this soul’s development and how does this desire to nurture and facilitate encourage and enhance one’s own spiritual development?

If you are or have been a parent how has raising children influenced for better or worse your own spiritual development?

In Unitarian Universalism we covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. How does being a parent shape that search?

The Spiritual Child - The Two Developmental Tasks Of Adolescence

The two developmental tasks of adolescence

We’ve talked about the principle work of adolescence as spiritual awakening, individuation, and integration into all realms of living. This involves two major developmental tasks. One, the teen must connect head and heart knowing in order for their spiritual and analytical faculties to inform one another. Two, they must integrate all parts of their being—their varied selves as social, emotional, intellectual, and sexual beings—into a whole self, with spirituality at the developmental hub of command central.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 298). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Oh wow! Teens must learn how to connect their head and heart, and they must get their shit together. That’s a tall order.

What are the factors that facilitate, nurture, and acknowledge these processes?

Parents/family.

Peers

Media

School

Church

How good a job do any of them do in our current society?

Rate each of them on a scale of 0 - 10 with 10 = being spot on 100% of the time, 5 = do the job 50% of the time, and 0 = missing in action. Not at all. Once you have rated the five factors add them up. 25 would be a perfect score. Anything 10 or below the teen is in serious trouble. Unfortunately, I encounter, as a mental health professional, many young people with scores of 10 or below. The most glaring absences are church, school, and parents/family, with peers and media often being very problematic.

If people of good will were interested in bolstering the positive presence of these factors in a teens life where would you start? Often it is in the mental health and the criminal justice system because these are the default positions in our society. The primary targets of these systems are to address the needs of adolescents through parents/family, and school.

What about church? 

Church is often an afterthought in our post religious society. Is that something that could be remedied? It would be helpful if there was the vision and the will. The most significant intervention would be a 1-2 year volunteer service corps for 16 - 20 year olds. Could/would a church institution fund it and run it? If so, that institution would have dedicated members for life.

The Spiritual Child - Depression as a system's failure.

 Depression as a system’s failure.

Spiritual community gives struggling teens the benefits of the expanded field of love or social engagement system, shared spiritual values, unconditional acceptance, and communal prayer and spiritual activity. As we learned in chapter 5, the tendency for mirror neurons to prompt synchronization between brains among participants during religious ritual in turn makes all participants more primed to experience transcendence. This means that teens’ potential for transcendent experience is enhanced by the group’s heightened neurodyanmic, a benefit for the developmentally depressed teen. 

The field of love also emerges as a rich resource for the depressed teen and for adults in the tough position of wanting to help but feeling helpless to do so. Depression affects an entire family, after all—siblings included—with what I call “family bystander stress,” until the depression is acknowledged and named: “Ah, George is actually depressed; he doesn’t hate me.” “Telling Carla to ‘just look on the bright side’ may have no traction—maybe I could ask, ‘Is that the depression talking?’” “I wonder if you are depressed—is something troubling you, knocking at the door right now for you? There may be something valuable on the other side of that door.” Extended family, teachers, coaches, and clergy can often connect with a teen with deep empathy that helps the teen feel accepted, loved, and part of the “something larger” that has spiritual meaning.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (pp. 295-296). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

We know that one of the six components of mental health are social connections. People who are depressed often withdraw and isolate and become cut off from social connections. People with depression often don’t have the energy for social connection. Sometimes the best thing is for people to hibernate and cocoon for a while. But then there comes a point where having a place to turn to or someone to turn to becomes paramount for turning the corner from depression to peace of mind once again.

What role does spirituality have in this recovery? It often is critical and very empowering. How is it accessed and utilized? Sometimes from parents and sometimes from friends and other times from authority figures representing various social institutions like school, sports, clubs, community groups, a clique, a gang. Rarely these days from church.

Young people in the 2020s have been turned off by formal religion and are as likely to say that they are spiritual and not religious as adults. Where has religion lost its credibility with young people? 

Young people don’t see religious institutions as being relevant to the problems they face such as climate change, the job market, the digital economy, the hypocrisy which floods the media outlets hourly.

How are young people to spiritually cope with the insanity of society? Will any adults be honest with them or are they, also, a part of the big lie?

As kids are subjected to safe shooter drills in schools with metal detectors at the entrances and police in the hallways with every student now a suspect, how is religion relevant to the lives they live?

With the Travon Martin killer acquitted and Tamir Rice’s killer acquitted, can children and teens trust adults to be protective of their welfare?

Is it any wonder that the God of institutional religion no longer speaks to the lives of young people?The adults in positions of authority no longer see themselves as spiritual ambassadors, but as agents of state control.

And so it goes with children and adolescents looking for God other than in the institutional church which has let them down and failed to protect them and nurture them. For evidence of this failure to nurture all one has to do is turn on the news, go to Twitter, log onto Facebook where the evidence of abuse, degradation, demeaning subjugation is prolifically evident.

The connection that children and adolescents need is with adults of integrity who are honest, genuine, sincere, authentic, and loving. They seem to be in short supply and religion has not only failed the children but also the adults who should be caring for them. If adults are to help children and adolescents with their depression, perhaps adults should focus on their own.

The Spiritual Child - The parent as spiritual ambassador.

 The parent as a spiritual ambassador

A parent’s role as spiritual ambassador—the embodied guide on the ground introducing a child to the spiritually attuned life—is especially important for the teen who struggles with developmental depression. As we saw earlier, research has found that from early childhood, a child’s relationship with God or a universal spirit is imbued with the attributes of their parents. Through adolescence, as well, to the degree that parents are unconditionally loving and accepting, teens perceive God or their higher power to be so. Studies show that parents’ unconditional love supports their teen’s sense of a higher power that “I can turn to in times of difficulty,” one who gives direction and offers guidance.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 290). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The idea that the parent is a spiritual ambassador for a child is a powerful one. The parent is the conduit of God’s unconditional love. This does not mean that the parent does not correct, discipline, and guide but that this correction and discipline is done in a loving way, what can be called “tough love” which gets translated into the words, “I care enough about you to help you behave yourself.”

Sin and guilt are not helpful concepts but mistakes and learning are.

In Unitarian Universalism, people covenant together to affirm and promote the free and responsible search for truth and meaning. The parent becomes the model for this search for the child and gently asks the child to reflect on their own functioning by saying in so many words, “How is that working for you?” God wants what is best for us and gives us free will, but sometimes our willfulness causes problems for us and the ability to reflect on the consequences of our choices leads to greater self awareness and is a path to an increased sense of what is holy.

Who should know the child better than the parent? Who should better have the child’s best interests at heart? Who best to be the ambassador and conduit of God’s love for the child?

Spiritual book discussion, The Spiritual Child, Creation and nurturance of an interior spiritual life is a positive factor for resilience.

Now that we have looked at adolescence as a gateway to either resilience or to recurrent suffering, let’s return to the idea of “kindling” or the way that a pattern of emotional experience sensitizes us and predisposes us to experience more of the same. We know that kindling occurs in the context of depression. Kendler’s data showed that the more depression recurs, the easier depression is triggered from one time to the next. 

Science also shows us that the reverse is true, too. A resilient response to negative or unwanted moments builds greater resilience for the next time. In the face of stress or challenge or loss, a resilient view says: Go into life, not out. Go deeper, find meaning, view the unforeseen opportunities here, step farther along the path, open a new or different door. This is the reverse kindling for spiritual resilience, which is associated with thriving. The voice in the moment is: I would never have chosen this, but I’ll move through it and be open to what there is for me to learn. And in retrospect, deriving the meaning in the experience: I would never have chosen this, but if this hadn’t happened, then I would have never found this person or found my way to do this unimaginable new work or find this leg to my journey.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 283). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

How developmental depression gets managed has consequences for later life experience. If the developmental depression is not resolved with learning effective emotional management skills, future episodes of depression will occur. If effective emotional management skills are learned they create what is called “resilience” and future bouts of depression are managed much more effectively with less negative impact.

What is being suggested by Dr. Miller is that the development and nurturance of a spiritual interior life is a major positive factor for resilience.

Spiritual Book Discussion, The Spiritual Child, Is mild depression normal in adolescents?

 

Given that subthreshold depression is so widely common among teens, it makes great sense to seriously question whether the illness model really applies well here. Is a 45 to 70 percent rate of some level of depression really an epidemic of medical illness? Or, might subthreshold depression, based upon its rates and the related science, more accurately be seen as a normal developmental process, that only if ignored, untreated, and unsupported tends to slip into a more severe and debilitating major depression? 

My own clinical perspective, based upon the data and listening to teens, is that many, perhaps even the majority of adolescent depressions, are the hard work of quest, holding potential for spiritual individuation that makes the teen stronger and more resilient for the rest of adult life. Nearly every adolescent suffers from developmental depression at some point; it’s the general rule of growth, not the exception. The opportunity for spiritual individuation usually comes with hard work, doubts, dangling questions of ultimate significance, emptiness, and dark emotions. In a severe depression, medication may help, as long as the individuation work continues. For some it may be moderate to mild in that they are challenged but not overwhelmed by the developmental demands. Perhaps they have spiritual resources already well developed or at least emerging enough to help them manage as they go. Whatever the degree of challenge and depressive experience, research shows that the lifetime course of depression can be strongly affected by the spiritual developmental work of adolescence.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 280). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The two major developmental tasks of adolescence are to find answers to the questions, “Who am I ? and “Where, in society, do I belong?” The struggle with these questions can generate anxiety, confusion, depression, the so-called adolescent “angst.”

What help is available in our society for these normal adolescent challenges? There is family, school, peer group, media, but increasingly, rarely church. Nurturance of an interior spiritual life is notably missing and yet this is what adolescents crave, what John Bradshaw called, “the hole in the soul.” And what does the adolescent try to fill this hole in their soul with? Romantic love, chemicals, risky behavior, rebellion, a cause.

In traditional cultures there was a coming of age vision quest which marked the transition from childhood and dependence on parents to adulthood and self sufficiency. In our modern culture such rituals are absent in a socially consensual way other than going off to college, entering the Armed Services, finding a job and moving in with roommates, and increasingly staying at home, playing video games, and withdrawing into a cocooned existence where things are safe, secure, and predictable.

Lisa Miller suggests that nurturing an interior spiritual life is a positive factor in building resilience not only for adolescent development  but for a life time. 

1.  What was your experience growing up through adolescence?
2.  What kind of an interior spiritual life did you have and how was it nurtured if it was?

Spiritual book discussion, The Spiritual Child, What is the good life?

What is the good life?

Recent science offers a fresh view of depression as a developmental process, especially in light of what we know about natural spirituality, its development, and its relationship with mental health in adolescence. As we know from the science of the spiritual brain and the adolescent surge: 

• Natural spirituality burgeons by 50 percent in adolescence. The transcendent faculty is kicking in during this window of genetic expression. 

• Once spirituality surges, harnessing it into a transcendent relationship is more protective against depression than anything known to medical or social sciences. 

• Spiritual individuation helps build relationships based on commitment and love and work based upon calling. This is a blueprint for a life of thriving, meaning, and purpose.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 277). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

A few years ago I had a 17 year old male client who was in twelfth grade, failing all his courses even though he had been on high honor roll, experimenting with drugs and alcohol, defiant of his parents rules, staying out all night, etc.

I had met with him three times at his parent’s insistence although he had no use for counseling and even further had a disrespectful, scoffing, and ridiculing attitude toward me and therapy. In our third session, not knowing what else to do, and maybe inspired by the Holy Spirit I asked him an impertinent question I had never asked a client before. Out of the blue I said, “So Jake, what is your interior spiritual life like?”

Jake looked at me stunned and like I had three heads. His whole demeanor changed. He became pensive, the cocky, know-it-all attitude immediately changed and after a few moments of silence and stuttering he finally said, “I don’t know. That’s a really good question.”

We were at the end of our meeting time, and for the first time he said he wanted to make another appointment and come back. When we got together the next time, he had given the question a great deal of thought, and he told me he wanted to finish up high school even though it was “bull shit” and go to a college in the midwest. I saw him a couple of times and his parents told me they were amazed at his change, positively, in his attitude and behavior.

I told this story to my adult daughter and she said, “Dad, nobody talks with teenagers about what is really important to them in life. The whole question of ‘what is the good life?’ never gets discussed. You’d think it would be #1 on the curriculum wouldn’t you?”

Yes, you would. It is interesting how adults have abdicated this role of discussing what is the good life to advertisers, marketers, and drug dealers.

Spiritual book discussion, The Spiritual Child, The Developmental depression

 

Topic Twenty Seven

The Developmental depression

Adolescent depression is set up to answer the question: Will the hard times be met with resilience or with deepening hopelessness, and perhaps recurrent depression? This is all based upon the outcome of individuation: Who am I? Who am I going to be, given this challenge or loss? What am I really here for? How am I going to understand and engage the bumps in life? The more resources a teen has for resilience—and spirituality is a significant one—the better equipped she is to understand and engage those bumps.

The research data and our evolving understanding of spiritual development and adolescence call for a new, more flexible, variable, and nuanced model of adolescent depression. We need a more discerning understanding of depression that enables us to conceptualize a developmental depression in which transcendent opportunity has been blocked or foreclosed upon. The fact that spiritual awakening co-occurs with such a robust protective effect during a biologically timed window of onset for depression suggests that we are looking at a shared underlying process, essentially two sides of the same coin. We will see in the data in a moment that depression can be viewed as foundationally spiritual in nature, with a potential spiritual resolution. We know from Alcoholics Anonymous and research into spiritually engaged treatment approaches for substance abuse and eating disorders that the transcendent faculty can support healing and recovery.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 276). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The developmental task of adolescence is the forging of one’s identity and figuring out where one belongs and will fit in the society one is a member of. 

What are the major socializing influences in our modern society? Prior to the 1960s they were, in this order: family, church, school, peers, media. Now in 2020 it is family, media, peers, school, church. Some might say it is peers, media, family, school, church.

Church, and spiritual formation, has slipped to last place . Research has found that this is a problem. The inner compass has been supplanted by an external compass that is fickle and impermanent. The orientation to external compasses does not provide the proper guidance for mentally healthy individuation. Being other directed leads to increased symptoms of anxiety, depression, substance misuse, and other dysfunctional behaviors.

Research has found that spiritual formation is a basis for resilience which helps the teen weather the stresses and struggles not only of adolescence but of later life.

The primary question rarely discussed with adolescents today is “What is the good life? How should one live? What really matters? Parents and adults need not have the answers, but they are catalysts, facilitators to help the developing teen find meaningful answers for oneself.

Teens need to be challenged to go on their vision quest. The vision quest is a challenging situation where one finds out what one is made of. The vision quest is the transition from childhood to adulthood. Can religious institutions provide appropriate opportunities for the vision quest or will it be left to the teens peer group to provide this experience which often involves risky and destructive behaviors?

Was there a milestone event or activity which facilitated your growth from childhood to adulthood? What was it? How did it play out in your life? Did it make you more resilient or more vulnerable and fragile? What role might you play in creating a vision quest experience for your children and grandchildren?

Spiritual book discussion, The Spiritual Child, Interior spiritual life and the development of resilience.

 Topic Twenty six

Interior Spiritual life nurtures resilience based on purpose and meaning.

Confused, unprepared, and unmet in his spiritual burgeoning, a teen’s struggle is often misunderstood. Research suggests that a significant portion of teens who are depressed do not have a biologically based medical depression, but have developmental depression originating in the struggle for spiritual individuation and responsive to spiritual support.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 268). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

In our modern society we do not have clear cut and widely shared rights of passage. Some might point to the age 16 and getting one’s learner’s permit for driving a car, or age 18 and the right to vote, or a confirmation in a church or a Bar Mitzvah or Bat Mitzvah in a synagogue as examples of a right of passage of sorts. For others it might be going off to college or the one of the Armed Services or having a child and/or getting married..

For many, the end of high school is a time of a sense of loss, structure, purpose and social support. What is one to do with oneself next in life? Without a spiritual compass and a sense of transcendent purpose in life, adolescents are cast adrift and are vulnerable to substance abuse, psychiatric, criminal justice, and other forms of social dysfunction. An interior spiritual life is a protective factor contributing to resiliency and constructive positive functioning.

Does Unitarian Universalism provide the much needed guidance for finding a sense of purpose and meaning in life? In what is this sense of meaning and purpose grounded? Is it substantial enough to base a life on?

All too often do UUs miss the mark when they try to anchor teens and young adults in social justice issues rather than the development of an interior spiritual life?

The Spiritual Child, How Adolescent deveopment is influenced by an interior spiritual life.

 A SPIRITUAL CORE SHAPES DEVELOPMENT: MEANING, PURPOSE, CALLING, AND CONNECTION

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 246). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

The chart below fleshes out the adolescent's developmental task and how an interior spiritual life influences the task achievement. Each task should be considered deliberately and can be used for discussion and reflection and action.

Spiritual Book Discussion, The Spiritual Child, Phoniness, hypocrisy, and disillusionment

 

Phoniness, hypocrisy, and disillusionment

What the teen cannot bear, as Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye declares, is “phoniness”—hypocrisy and inconsistency—in their hunt for a harmonious truth, a felt wholeness of personal values and reality. In my work with parents and teachers, I sometimes share that “me, me, I think…” or “not me at all…” can sound irritating, self-centered, and self-obsessed. It isn’t. It is the cultivation of the only instrument that teens—or any of us—have for knowing: our inner instrument. At a surface level, in our everyday lives with teens the questions and debates of individuation may sound overdramatic. But given the deep stakes of the developmental work under way, the emotion is appropriate.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 236). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

What most teens, who developmentally are challenged to form their identity and find the reference groups to which they belong, find most troublesome is phoniness and hypocrisy. Disillusionment is a big experience in adolescence as parents and other authority figures are de-idealized and a more accurate awareness of the authority figures functioning sets in.

This de-idealization occurs in religious training and adherence as well. The phenomenon of teen rebellion and opposition and resistance to external controls is well known. At the same time as the de-idealization is going on, an interior compass is being developed which guides the person in decision making. This often is an unconscious process and gaining the approval of one’s reference group and avoiding their disapproval becomes paramount.

The covenantal nature of Unitarian Universalism becomes important for teen development and yet commitment to the covenant is very weak in most cases if it exists at all. Perhaps this lack of commitment to the covenant is because the seven principles calling for affirmation and promotion are so weakly explicated and rarely recognized as indicators for the interior moral compass. Parents have a huge role to play in explicating these principles and talking with their teens about how to apply these principles in their daily lives and decisions making. Examples by the parents and other adults is the best teaching pedagogy.

Questions:

1. How often do you talk with teens about the principles and their application?
2. When  opportunities to demonstrate good decision-making are available, are the principles used as reference points?
3. Have you ever talked with a teen about the interior compass which is based on genuineness and authenticity and not on hypocrisy and dissembling?

Spiritual Book Discussion, The Spiritual Child, Spiritual individuation is a protective factor

 Spiritual individuation is a protective factor mitigating problematic behaviors.

More than any skill or asset, spiritual individuation will set up the teen for a much healthier, more meaningful, purposeful, and thriving adult life. Lacking spiritual resources, teens search for the transcendent experience wherever they can find it: risky behaviors, including reckless driving or casual or unprotected sex, and substance use.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 226). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Having the vocabulary to describe one’s interior spiritual life, and values about what really matters for the good life, and principles to guide decision making, and a teacher or other people to turn to with existential questions and dilemmas are keys to spiritual individuation.

It is an extremely intimate question which teens are rarely asked, “What is your interior spiritual life like?” Try it and see what kind of response you get. You might start with the adults in your life before you move on to the adolescents.

Spiritual book discussion - The Spiritual Child, What to call your Higher Power?

 

Do you have a vocabulary to name aspects of your interior spiritual life?

As we have discussed, adolescence is a precious window for locking in a fluid front-and-back brain capacity for spiritual awareness, the transcendent relationship, and integration of transcendence into relationship, calling, meaning, and purpose. Together these create your teen’s spiritual identity. Identity formation, as we know, is another hallmark task of adolescence. Spiritual identity is a deeply felt sense of Who I am spiritually, how I set course and navigate, see my guideposts and calling in the world spiritually. As spiritual identity can become such a deep and lasting aspect of the self, this central developmental task needs to be a top priority. This doesn’t mean a forced march to religious services. It means engaging the spiritual dimension in everyday life, cultivating your teen’s capacity for engaging the Big Questions, as well as the seemingly smallest or subtle wonders or complexities of life. The fully integrated command-control process and spiritual identity may include religious involvement or it may not.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (pp. 222-223). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Whether a teen goes to church and engages in religious instruction is up to the parent, the teen, and the church. The point is that spiritual development is what is important with or without religious training.

Spiritual development is facilitated by having a vocabulary to name spiritual concepts, values, and practices. Some people refer to this as an interior spiritual life which includes a spiritual compass with which to make life decisions about what to think, to value, and to do.

Some basic spiritual questions are: What do you name your Higher Power? How do you access your awareness of this Higher Power? How does your discernment of your Higher Power guide and influence the decisions about you conduct your life?

Editor's note: The discussion of the Spiritual Child will continue into November and we will also begin discussing Scripture Unbound. We will be discussing both books over the next couple of months.

Spiritual Book Discussion - Spirituality is a protective factor in adolescent development.

 Topic Twenty One

Spirituality as a protective factor in adolescent development.

In fact, my lab’s research and a growing body of scientific literature about adolescent development shows that spirituality is the most robust protective factor against the big three dangers of adolescence: depression, substance abuse, and risk taking. In short, adolescents who have a personal sense of spirituality are 80 percent less likely to suffer from ongoing and recurrent depressions and 60 percent less likely to become heavy substance users or abusers. Girls with a sense of personal spirituality are 70 percent less likely to have unprotected sex. In the entire realm of human experience, there is no single factor that will protect your adolescent like a personal sense of spirituality. The totality of recent, cutting-edge research paints a definitive and unambiguous picture: the adolescent brain is a spiritual brain, primed for development and responsive to the protective benefits of personal spirituality. 

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (pp. 208-209). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Spiritual health is just as important as physical health, social health, intellectual health for positive adolescent development. All people want to be happy especially teen agers, and if you ask them what will make them happy they often mention idols in the world of the ego such as money, friends, romance, academic and athletic achievement, or getting to the next level in the current video game enthrallment.

What do we do as parents and adults to foster spiritual development? Remember spiritual development is more important than training in a religious tradition. Spirituality has been defined as a relationship with the Transcendent Source of one’s existence.

Questions

1. What words and names do you use to talk about spiritual ideas with your child?
2. Are there spiritual practices which you engage in with your children on a regular basis?
3. To what extent do you think your children, grandchildren, students, turn inward to their Higher Power as a means of handling stress and turmoil in their life?

Spiritual Book Discussion - The Spiritual Child, The six core spiritual strengths

The six core spiritual strengths

Your child is born with a capacity for spiritual knowing. Rather than leave it to be winnowed away by neglect, we can support their natural spirituality, hold open the space for expression, provide a language for it, and help their spiritual assets grow into these six core spiritual strengths: 

1. A spiritual compass for trustworthy inner guidance 

2. Family as a spiritual “home base” and sustaining source of connection, unconditional love, and acceptance 

3. Spiritual community as an extension of the family’s field of love, a shared experience and a lifelong “road home” to spiritual connection 

4. Spiritual “multilingualism” that broadens their access to a world of sacred experience and inspiration 

5. Spiritual agency that empowers them to right action that expands the field of love into a culture of love 

6. Transcendent knowing: dreams, mystical experiences, and other special knowing 

These core strengths build out, like nesting dolls or concentric circles, from the most singular, intimate inner compass, extending and resonating through a child’s spiritual experience of family, community, the multicultural world, and ultimately into their own sense of spiritual agency and transcendent experience.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 177). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

As you can see these six core spiritual strengths don’t have much to do with what we normally think of as “Sunday school” or religious training. These core spiritual strengths refer to the “perennial philosophy”; what all religious traditions have in common.

As Dr. Miller has made clear in her book, “spirituality” is the relationship the individual has with the Transcendent Reality whatever form that takes for the child. This experience of the Transcendent Reality is first based on attachment to primary caretakers and later to the broader community and then to interreligious experiences and awareness which gets manifested in the individual’s participation in society. Lastly there is an awareness and a vocabulary for the interior spiritual like which is composed of dreams, special knowing, and even what might be called mystical experiences described as “awe” and a feeling of oneness with everything.

Miller’s last chapter in Part One of her book describes the six spiritual strengths in more depth. It is well worth reading and discussing. However, we will not do it here but encourage readers to study this material.

Questions

1. What thoughts do you have about Miller’s description of the six spiritual strengths?
2. To what extent have these spiritual strengths been intentionally and unintentionally nurtured in your life?
3. Having reviewed this model, do you have any ideas about how you can nurture the development of these strengths in your children and/or great grandchildren?

Spiritual Book Discussion, The Spiritual Child, "Mommy, it's not fair!"

“But it’s not fair! It’s not right! Things shouldn’t be that way!”

This means that a child’s heart knowing might lead him to ask an inspired question or assert something he “just knows” from the same inner source, but these insights don’t fit the parameters of the typical class discussion. If we’re not supposed to hit, then why do some people spank kids? Why do we help some people and not others? If you tell a lie and it doesn’t hurt anyone, why is that wrong? Children aren’t usually encouraged to think that way in school. They may even have been socialized out of the kind of heart knowing that leads to these questions. Nor have they been given language to talk about spiritual values. But if an adult encourages or validates the inspired inquiry, children rise to it quickly—they have the capacity and only need to be encouraged to use it. 

It’s not hard to raise the questions of right and wrong, good and evil, and create a safe and welcoming space for kids to share from their deep inner wisdom. We can ask, “What does your higher self say?” “Does your heart feel an answer?” Our interest and the words make heart knowing real and important. Children love the questions and will respond in whatever way they’re developmentally prepared to do. We have only to invite the conversation.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 173). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Like the mother in Hans Christian Andersen’s folk tale, The Emperor’s New Clothes, the child’s good sense gets “shushed.” The child’s protest is threatening to the adult powers that be. The child’s spiritual sensibility is perceived as a threat to the secular order.

A child continually complained to his mother “Mommy, it’s not fair! It’s not right!” The mother said, “Son, you have no right to complain unless you can do it better.” And so the son was determined for the rest of his life to make things better. He is rare but not alone. 

1. Have you ever felt in the face of injustice and incompetence the desire to make things better?
2. Have you ever validated another person’s concern about injustice and helped them in their attempts to rectify things?
3. To what extent do you think these concerns about injustice and incompetence to be spiritual concerns? 
4. How has your faith helped you manage these frustrations and anxieties?

Spiritual Book Discussion - The Spiritual Child - Chapter Five: The Field Of Love

 

Dr. Lisa Miller writes “Parents often ask me, ‘So, how do you make your child spiritual?’” p.135 No parent makes their child spiritual. A good parent nurtures the child’s innate spirituality. Dr. Miller writes that parents do that by cultivating what she calls the “field of love” which is the relational space which we often think of as family and includes other people as well. This field of love has a transcendent quality and in some religious traditions has been called “ancestor worship” and the “faith of our fathers and mothers.”

Miller gives five suggestions about how to create and nurture this sacred relational space.

1. Create family traditions and rituals.

2. Highlight the importance of quality time rather than material things.

3. Model acceptance of diversity.

4. Teach forgiveness and unconditional love rather than judgment.

5. Mark entrances and exits from the field of love as important times for the system.

Miller ends the chapter with these sentences:

I opened this chapter with the question I am asked so often by parents, “So, how do you make your child spiritual?” The answer emerging from all corners of science and spiritual study is, we don’t “make” our child spiritual at all. We cultivate their spirituality when we recognize the field of love as ground and guide for spiritual parenting. We set our intention to make our home environment and communities, our actions and expectations, and our ways of interacting with one another to be consistent with spiritual values. Family and the expansive field of love are our most important tools for building a spiritual life, for giving our children a spiritual grounding.

Miller, Dr. Lisa. The Spiritual Child (p. 159). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. 

Questions

1. As a child growing up who were the family members you felt most loved by?

2. As a parent who do you think your children have felt most loved by?

3. How are entrances and exits from your child’s field of love acknowledged?

Spiritual Book Discussion, The Spiritual Child by Lisa Miller, Chapter Four: The Soul Arrives

 Chapter four: The Soul Arrives

The existential question all human beings must answer is “Are we a soul in a body or a body with a soul?”

Based on psychological and human development research the evidence is accumulating that we are a soul in a body. The concept for this is “incarnation.” Viewed from this perspective, the birth of a child is a sacred event. The day a child is born, parents are born as well.

Lisa Miller describes in her book, The Spiritual Child, on p.104, a series of studies done by psychologists Annette Mahoney and Kenneth Pargament at Bowling Green University which found that 80% of people said that becoming a parent is inherently sacred,

Miller describes three distinct features of spiritual cognition in young children. First, when a child is an infant and growing into toddlerhood, it is apparent that the child perceives an intentional universe which is intelligent and of which they are a part. The innocent child has a love for the interdependent web of all existence which is destroyed by society with increasing objectification and conditioning. Second, the child sees the parent as all knowing with a God-like omniscience and is the child’s first conscious experience of what a transcendent being might be like. Third, the young child is aware of non egoistic existence with reverence for an intergenerational and transcendent reality beyond the tangible here and now. The young child feels a connection with the immortal souls of people and animals which often gets remarked on in passing to the alarm of adults.

In other words, the young child’s awareness of its existence is non dualistic, perceives the primary caretaker as all knowing and all powerful, and is still in tune with the non egoistic reality. 

Given these three characteristics of spiritual cognitive functioning, Miller outlines five natural capacities that will expand if not neglected or destroyed. They are a natural love for spiritual ritual and prayer; a heart knowing unitive empathy of oneness with others; a proclivity for generosity, compassion, and caring for others; a love for family and other attachment figures; and affinity for nature and the life cycle.

Given these three characteristics of spiritual cognition and five capacities what should parents and caring others do to enhance them?

First., we should create and protect special time for reflection (prayer) with the child.

Second, the adult should demonstrate though their own lives reverence, gratitude, and respect for the interdependent web in which they navigate. In other words the “sermon” which parents provide is their example.

Third, we need to name things and experiences. As parents sometimes say to an upset child, “Use your words! Tell me what’s upsetting you.” The same naming is important for spiritual thoughts, feelings and behavior. Over time a vocabulary, a glossary develops which contributes to satisfying communication and self awareness.

Fourth, welcome and play in nature. Let your child get dirty. God may well be hidden in a mud pie.

Fifth, be sensitive to what Miller calls “sympathetic harmonic resonance.” The psychologists call it “mirroring.” Do you hear what I hear? Do you see what I see? Do you feel what I feel? Can you do as I do? This works two ways and works best if the parent mirrors the child having initiated engagement.

Questions

1. To what extent do you believe that parenting is sacred?
2. When have you felt most spiritual with your child?
3. When have you been surprised by a spiritual awareness that your interaction with your child has evoked?

Spiritual Book Discussion - The Spiritual Child - Chapter Three - The nod: The intergenerational transmission of spiritual attunement.

 

Chapter three - The nod: The intergenerational transmission of spiritual attunement

“Statistically, a spiritually oriented mother alone or a spiritually oriented child alone showed only marginal protection against depression, but if the two shared being spiritually oriented, and the spirituality was something that had been shared during the child’s formative years, then there was a protective effect that dramatically lowered the incidence of depression by  80 percent.” p.87

“After considering all the research, literature, and my own experience as a therapist and mother, I have come to think of the parent as an ambassador. The parent is an ambassador of transcendence, the guide on who introduces the child to the spiritually attuned life.” p.90

“The child looks among available parent figures for the nod, the spiritual guidance through a loving relationship.” p.97

“In predicting the degree of persona spirituality in the young adult, two factors contribute equally: (1) the parent’s own spirituality and (2) unconditional parental love and affection.” p .100

Lisa Miller’s concept of the “nod” is very important to the development of spirituality in children, adolescents, and young adults. The “nod” is defined as the intergenerational transmission of spiritual attunement. 

Questions:

1. What is the parent, the grandparent, the aunt, the uncle’s level of attunement with one’s Higher Power? 
2. How is this attunement manifested? 
3. What are the opportunities of looks of recognition intentional and unintentional?
4. Is there a shared vocabulary to refer to these thoughts, feelings, and actions?