Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder Louv, Richard (e book reader pc TXT) 📖

know what it is any more than he.

—WALT WHITMAN

21. The Spiritual Necessity of Nature for the Young

To trace the history of a river or a raindrop, as John Muir would have done, is also to trace the history of the soul, the history of the mind descending and arising in the body. In both, we constantly seek and stumble on divinity . . .

—GRETEL EHRLICH

WHEN MY SON Matthew was four, he asked me, “Are God and Mother Nature married, or just good friends?”

Good question.

During the course of researching this book, I heard many adults describe with eloquence and awe the role of nature in their early spiritual development, and how that connection continued to deepen as they aged. Many were committed to sharing that connection with their children, but faced challenges: how to explain the spirituality of nature—or, rather, our spirituality in nature—without tripping on the tangled vines of biblical interpretation, semantics, and politics. These can be real barriers to communicating the simple awe we felt as children as we lay on our backs seeing mountains and faces in clouds. It also inhibits progress toward a nature-child reunion.

There is a path out of this bramble.

Several years ago, a group of religious leaders that included a Protestant minister, a Catholic priest, a rabbi, and an imam met in my living room to discuss parenting. At that meeting, Rabbi Martin Levin, of Congregation Beth-El, offered a wonderful description of spirituality: to be spiritual is to be constantly amazed. “To quote the words of Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great teacher of our age,” he said, “our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. Heschel would encourage his students to get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”

In the old texts, a child’s spiritual life was assumed. Abraham began his search for God as a child. The Bible tells us that “God’s glory above the heavens is changed by the mouths of babes and infants.” Isaiah fore-saw a future time when “the wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and a little child shall lead them.” Jewish mysticism describes the fetus as privy to the secrets of the universe—forgotten at the moment of birth. And in the Gospels, Jesus said, “Unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.” The visionary poets William Blake and William Wordsworth, among others, connected the child’s spirituality to nature. As a child, Blake announced that he had seen the prophet Ezekiel sitting in a tree (and he received a beating for it). He also reported a tree filled with angels who sang from the branches. Words-worth’s poetry describes the transcendent experiences of children in nature. In “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” he wrote:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream

The earth, and every common sight,

    To me did seem

    Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

Of course, there were those who considered such thinking sentimental claptrap. Sigmund Freud, an atheist, considered such mysticism a regression into what he called the “oceanic experience” of the womb. As Edward Hoffman wrote in Visions of Innocence: Spiritual and Inspirational Experiences of Children, “Freud regarded childhood as a time in which our lowest, most animalistic impulses are strongest.” Children were, in Freud’s view, instinct-driven vehicles for incestuous longings for self-gratification. So much for winged angels in the trees.

Carl Jung, Freud’s closest intellectual ally, broke with him in 1913, and offered a view of the human psyche influenced by Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and fairy tales, among other factors. Jung believed that human beings become attuned to visionary experience in the second half of their life. “Late in Jung’s career, though, he seemed to shift his position somewhat,” according to Hoffman. In his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung even recalls how, at the age of seven or nine, he would sit alone on a boulder near his country home, asking himself: “Am I the one who is sitting on top of the stone, or am I the stone on which he is sitting?” However, other than such recollections about his own childhood, Jung had little to say about childhood spirituality. “In this respect,” according to Hoffman, “he was unfortunately typical of the whole current of mainstream psychology and its therapeutic offshoots.”

Even William James, who, as the founder of American psychology at the turn of the twentieth century, possessed a keen interest in religious experience, never really turned his attention toward the early years. Not until the 1960s and 1970s did the topic gain much interest, notably in Robert Coles’s book, The Spiritual Life of Children. The narrower topic of nature’s influence on childhood spirituality has been given shorter shrift. Ironically, much of the current work on the influence of nature on childhood cognition and attention is rooted in James’s work.

Hoffman is one of the few psychologists to attend this area. A licensed clinical psychologist in the New York area, he specializes in child development. While writing a biography of Abraham Maslow (who created the famous Hierarchy of Needs in the late 1960s), he discovered that the preeminent psychologist shared Hoffman’s view that even small children grappled with questions of a spiritual nature. Maslow died before he could elaborate on his findings. Hoffman pursued them, interviewing children and several hundred adults who described their spontaneous childhood experiences “of great meaning, beauty, or inspiration . . . apart from institutional religion.” He writes, “Most fundamentally, it now appears undeniable that some of us (perhaps far more than we suspect) have undergone tremendous peak—even mystical—experiences during our early years. In this respect, conventional psychology and its allied disciplines have painted a badly incomplete portrait of childhood and, by extrapolation, of adulthood as well.”

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