TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012191/0121510.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.6 KB | 188 lines

                                                                                INTERVIEW, Page 16

Youngsters Have Lots To Say About God


America's most renowned child psychiatrist, ROBERT COLES of
Harvard, finds surprising existential insight among the young

By RICHARD N. OSTLING/CONCORD and Robert Coles


    Q. You talked with hundreds of children all over the world
for your book The Spiritual Life of Children. Are you now more
inclined to see all religions as one, or are the lines sharply
drawn?

    A. The lines are drawn. Jewish children had a strong
interest in righteousness; I could hear some of those Hebrew
prophets in their words. Christian children were true to an
interest in the Incarnation, which at times strained their
faith, and in the redemptive tradition that somehow Jesus
arrived here to save us and that this salvation, when earned,
would be theirs. And I found among children brought up in Islam
a distinct emphasis on obedience and submission.


    Q. Did you run into surprises?

    A. I was surprised by the energetic interest that children
in secular America could bring to spiritual reflection. I
didn't have to prompt these children or work as hard as I
thought I would.


    Q. A footnote says you "hesitated long and hard" before
doing Spiritual Life. Why?

    A. First I had to come to terms with the way psychoanalysis
treats religion in a cavalierly condescending, and at times
outrageously intolerant, manner, plus some plain old ignorance.


    Q. Are children merely echoing what their parents or clergy
teach them?

    A. There's a big part of that, of course, not only in
religion but in politics and, I might add, in psychology.
Having said that, I've heard children in a wonderful fashion
echo that Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn-Holden Caulfield tradition of
American literature, bringing feisty skepticism and originality
to spiritual matters. They have pointed out to me that the
churches and synagogues and mosques can betray the original
spirit of the faiths those children have been brought up in.
Lots of children have commented on how Jesus lived, his
association with outcasts and unpopular people, his poverty,
the fact that he was a carpenter and his friends were peasants,
that he didn't go to college and get fancy degrees, didn't have
a lot of money, didn't associate with big-shot people.


    Q. Are most children really interested in spiritual
questions?

    A. They're interested, out of their humanity, because they
know to ask what [Paul] Gauguin asked in his 1897 Tahitian
painting: Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we
going? Those are the great existential questions of artists,
philosophers, novelists, historians, psychologists, and the
questions of children and of all human beings.


    Q. So we adults can learn, religiously, from children?

    A. Look, psychoanalysis says we have a lot to learn from
children. The spiritual interests of children have a lot to
teach us as well. I have listened to children of eight or nine
or 10 getting to the heart of the Bible. I have found in
elementary schools a good deal of spiritual curiosity that does
not reflect mere indoctrination. This is an interesting
capacity children have, and I think we ought to pay attention
to it.


    Q. How should schools deal with it?

    A. This is one of the great problems in American public
schooling. Many teachers are afraid to bring up moral, let
alone spiritual, questions for fear that they are going to
violate the Constitution. It's a tragedy, intellectually as
well as morally and spiritually. This might relate to the
educational problems among some children. A large number of the
schools' assumptions are basically materialist and agnostic.
There's a kind of culture conflict between the families and the
schools. That conflict may have some bearing on what children
learn and what they don't learn, and on how children behave
in school.


    Q. Might it have a bearing on parents' support and
enthusiasm for schools?

    A. Definitely. And not only in so-called Fundamentalist
areas but in the suburbs and certainly in the ghettos as well,
where the black spiritual tradition is not welcome in schools.


    Q. What could be done?

    A. Children could be taught history that connects with their
actual history, namely the history of the great religions, what
those religions have been about, culturally, aesthetically,
intellectually, morally and spiritually. That learning could
inform the moral lives of those children, and classroom life.
There is also an intellectual vacuum. Children aren't being
taught what religious life stands for and what these various
traditions have to offer us, even as they are being taught what
Freud or Darwin stands for.


    Q. I understand you teach a course on religion that has the
largest enrollment at Harvard.

    A. That's my course on the literature of social reflection,
which has in it a good hunk of religion. Last year it was the
largest course, but this year it's No. 3 because I cut down the
enrollment. I also taught a course for a number of years on the
literature of Christian reflection. I hope to go back to it.
That course was not an indoctrination into Christianity. It
simply reminded us that religion has given us a great narrative
and lyrical tradition that the secular world has a lot to learn
from. By the way, there's a great spiritual and moral hunger
among a lot of these secular college students.


    Q. Tell me more.

    A. The hunger is often displaced into secular
preoccupations, namely politics, psychology, health, support
groups, child-rearing preoccupations, sometimes literary and
artistic interests, what have you. These interests are part of
the search all of us undertake for some kind of meaning in
life. I just think those fundamental existential concerns are
never going to go away.


    Q. Isn't religion often used negatively?

    A. So is everything else. So is intellectual life. Look at
the sectarianism in the name of psychoanalysis, the way we've
learned to hate one another. Look at the Ivy League colleges.
The meanness you find there rivals Belfast. Religion becomes
a scapegoat. We see clearly the hatred in the name of religion,
but we don't see so clearly the hatred generated in the
different departments within these fancy universities or
different political worlds. There's no sphere of human activity
that lacks smugness, arrogance, self-importance, divisiveness
and all the other sins we're capable of. And I say sins. If you
look at what the religious tradition tells us, it warns about
this sin of pride. No amount of secular progress, social or
economic or educational, has so far enabled us to get beyond
that darker side of ourselves.


    Q. Are you officially a member of a religious denomination?

    A. No. My children have been baptized in the Episcopal
church, and my wife and I used to go with them fairly often.
I have trouble finding a home in religion. My father was a
scientist, Jewish with some Catholic background. My mother used
to take us to the Episcopal church, and my father would never
go in. He'd sit outside and read the Sunday papers. He was very
skeptical of religions. He thought they all basically betrayed
their ideals, and I think he was right. That's a part of me,
along with some yearning for faith. For all my political
liberalism, I'm fairly conservative on religious matters.


    Q. Do you believe in a supernatural God?

    A. Sometimes I do, and at other times I have my moments of
doubt. I regard those moments of doubt as part of the struggle
that we all have for faith.