Ron Csillag

Children being raised in a religious environment is a volatile issue, at least to anti-theists. Are we cranking out soldiers in God’s army, to the horror of Dawkins, Hitchens, et al, or are we ensuring that our children are equipped for life in the modern world, which is overwhelmingly religious and/or spiritual? Are we warping them, giving them touchstones to live by, or tools they can ultimately reject, if they wish?   

Turns out there’s a lot more to the question.   

Not much has appeared in the media about a groundbreaking study from the University of British Columbia, the first I know of that examined the link between spirituality and children.   

While the connection between spirituality and happiness in adults has been well established, the UBC experts found relatively little is known about the connection between spirituality and happiness in children.   

They found - unsurprisingly to those of us who have read or been exposed to hundreds of studies linking higher levels of religiosity to longer life and overall well-being - that spirituality is a major contributor to a child’s overall happiness.   

Mark Holder, associate professor of psychology at UBC Okanagan, and graduate student Judi Wallace recently tested 315 children aged nine to 12, measuring spirituality and other factors such as temperament and social relations that can affect an individual’s sense of happiness.   

The goal, said Holder, “was to see whether there’s a relation between spirituality and happiness.” He knew going in that there was such a relation in adults, so he took multiple measures of spirituality and happiness in children.    The results were surprising: 6.5 to 16.5 per cent of children’s happiness can be accounted for by spirituality. Compare that to the four or five percent of adults for whom spirituality accounts for happiness.   

“From our perspective, it’s a whopping big effect,” said Holder. “I expected it to be much less – I thought [children’s] spirituality would be too immature to account for their well-being.”   

We do tend to shortchange our kids.   

 The study is sure to contribute to the age-old debate over exposing children to religion. If you must, advise the atheists, do it in the home. When you do, look at the results.   

It will also revivify the differences between spirituality and religion. They are not the same. In the UBC study, spirituality was defined as an inner belief system that has four parts: personal meaning in one’s life; relationships and love for others; transcendental belief in a higher power; and a sense of beauty and awe with nature.   

The children in the study ranked so high on the happiness scale that the researchers will take their quest to India to test whether they will have similar results with children in a country that is not dominated by Christianity.   

It’s easy to lose track of studies like this. At last count, more than 1,200 studies and 400 reviews from Canada, Europe and the United States show direct links between higher levels of religious behaviour and physical as well as mental well-being.   

I agree with Christian commentator Lorna Dueck, who wrote in the Globe and Mail that it’s “only right to give children everything they need in this quest – even if it’s source material from church, school, or Scriptures.”    Dueck conceded that she was unaware such young children could verbalize what these amorphous concept meant to them, let alone with such confidence.   

Looks like all we needed to do is ask them.   

The UBC study’s results are at:

http://www.publicaffairs.ubc.ca/ubcreports/2008/08feb07/happykids.html

In Ontario’s it’s often the little things that kick up the biggest fuss. This time, it’s Premier Dalton McGuinty’s pledge to do away with the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer at the start of legislative sessions because it no longer reflects the province’s diversity.

The announcement a few weeks ago caught a lot of people by surprise, with some media pundits suspecting that it was a sop to certain religious groups who felt slighted by the premier’s refusal to fund faith-based schools - a hot issue in the recent election.

As with anything that combined politics with religion, the debate swirled around three main positions: Those who advocated that the prayer should be kept not necessarily as a nod to Christianity, but in recognition of Ontario’s heritage; those who would outlaw religious expression in the public square altogether; and those who believe Canada is a Christian country that must retain its Christian principles.

Some proposed alternating the Lord’s Prayer with invocations from other faiths. But isn’t the Lord’s Prayer ecumenical in spirit? How can anyone object to its universal teachings and ideals?

Some investigation and a little Scripture reading reveal two main findings: Like Christianity itself, the Lord’s Prayer is deeply rooted in Jewish tradition, while at the same time, it is the best-known Christian prayer, primarily because it is the only one authorized by Jesus himself.

It appears in two places in the New Testament. In the book of Matthew, it is part of Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, while in Luke’s gospel, a disciple comes to Jesus and asks to be taught to pray the way John the Baptist had taught his followers. Jesus obliges with a succinct few lines.

But where did he get it?

Hamilton’s Rabbi Bernard Baskin, who has studied the prayer’s roots, offers an explanation. “Jesus wasn’t a pagan or a Greek. It came from the Jewish tradition almost phrase by phrase.”

The Interpreter’s Bible, a well-known Christian source, agrees. The Lord’s Prayer “is thoroughly Jewish,” and nearly every phrase is paralleled in the Jewish liturgy. “Thus it is Jesus’s inspired and original summary of his own people’s piety at its best.”

Many scholars have noted the distinct similarities between the Lord’s Prayer and the Jewish mourner’s prayer, the Kaddish (”May (God) establish His kingdom during our lifetime and during the lifetime of Israel”), the Eighteen Benedictions of Jewish liturgy (”Forgive us our Father, for we have sinned” is the sixth blessing), Talmudic prayer (”Lead me not into sin or iniquity or temptation or contempt,” goes one - though it came after Jesus) and many Hebrew scriptures in which we find “Give us this day our daily bread,” or some variation of it.

Jesus merely “brilliantly” condensed and concentrated important Jewish ethical teachings in a unique manner, and at the same time, the Lord’s Prayer sums up the essence of the Christian faith, says Darrell Johnson, a teacher at Vancouver’s evangelical Regent College and author of Fifty-Seven Words That Change the World: A Journey Through the Lord’s Prayer.

Worth noting too are different word usages. Though Matthew uses the term “debts” and “debtors,” older English versions of the Lord’s Prayer use the term “trespasses,” while others, such as Luke, use “sins.”

And Catholics and Protestants pray it differently, with the latter adding the concluding line in some texts, known as a doxology. Scholars agree it was appended later and was in any case probably lifted from the Book of Chronicles, in which King David is quoted: “Yours, Lord, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendour.”

A final irony, so far as the situation in Ontario goes, is that Jesus preferred private prayer.

In the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:6) he chides “hypocrites” who pray in public in order to be seen and heard, and “pagans” who “babble.” Rather, he counsels the faithful: “When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen.”

It’s possible, Baskin points out, that the very public Lord’s Prayer was meant as a protest against fixed, statutory, public prayer.