Editorial March 22, 1993 Issue

Spiritual education

Richard C. Bergenheim

"As long as you eat our food and sleep in our beds, you go to Sunday School." That was the rule that got me in the car on Sunday mornings, and as a teenager I made my parents remind me of this more than once. As a result, I brought a certain air of unresponsiveness to the class that probably caused more than one Sunday School teacher to say an extra prayer before or during those sessions.

Thank goodness for those prayers—and for those of my parents. That spiritual education established a frame of reference that I could turn to when I found that "going it alone"—that is, trying life without a spiritual framework—wasn't working. Actually, it was more than a frame of reference. Because of the spiritual education I received at home and at church, I had an inherent sense that God was, in the words of the Bible, "a very present help in trouble." It just took a while to have enough troubles to get me to the point of finding out if that was really true. But when that time came, I found that the groundwork which had been put in place while I was growing up was sufficient to cause me to seek God's help.

It's never too early to share with children what we have learned to be more significant than all else: an understanding of God, a knowledge of His law, a love for Christ Jesus, a sense of our true being as God's image and likeness, a recognition of the omnipotence of good. Such sharing may be as simple as singing hymns to an infant during the 2 a.m. feeding, or helping a young child learn how to pray and to live by the Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes. It may be as challenging as making our own lives a testimony to the value of spirituality, or trusting a teenager to God's care when he or she isn't home by 2 a.m.

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