The
Soul of the Child Nurturing the
Divine Identity of Our Children by Michael Gurian
ISBN 0743417046
256
pages, US$ 17.50
With
The
Wonder of Girlsand The
Wonder of Boys, bestselling author Michael Gurian
presented his groundbreaking views of parenting. Now, with the
same breadth of vision and depth of commitment, he combines
accessible analysis of cutting-edge science with the study of
spiritual texts to explore the divine side of childhood and to put
forth a practical design for the care of our children's souls.
A
revolutionary vision for parents and educators alike -- indeed,
for all who love children -- The Soul of the Childis
a deft blend of inspiring stories, common sense, and scientific
observations that demonstrates what the soul is and how it works.
This insightful and groundbreaking book urges its readers to
become aware of our children's divine inheritance, and learn how
to nurture that divinity. Sensible and informed, it shows how to
protect childhood from the complexities of our age, and provides,
as no book ever has, the means for bestowing upon our children the
gifts of compassion, security, discipline, humility, and
enlightenment.
The
Soul of the Child is a passionate and practical book that puts
forth a finely wrought argument for greater attention to the
spiritual side of childhood, to the very life of the human soul.
And it couldn't have come at a better time.
The greatest
tragedy in human life is to live unaware of one's divine identity.
--REVEREND WILLIAM HARPER HOUFF
Blair is a small
town about an hour from Omaha, set into the green fields, low
hills, and open plains of eastern Nebraska. Most of the people who
live in Blair also work there, as farmers, schoolteachers, or
shopkeepers. A few commute to a larger city or neighboring town
for employment or travel to visit family.
My children's
great-grandmother, Laura, a woman of ninety- five, lives in Blair
at a nursing home. She has accomplished much in her long life,
including raising three children with her husband and then without
him, helping to run a chicken farm, and teaching elementary
school. She is my children's oldest living relative.
She is also very
frail, thinks of herself not only as living but also as dying.
"It is time for my soul to leave my body," she said
once. Neither her vision nor her balance is good. She can no
longer live independently and now exists in that time of life
between life and death, and has the wisdom to know it. Once while
visiting her, my daughters and I took a walk on the parklike
grounds of the nursing home, which sat near the edge of town. We
had just come downstairs -- the children and I needed a little
time walking outdoors after spending an hour in Laura's small
room. The three of us were saddened, as we walked, by how quickly
Great-grandma's soul did seem to be leaving her body -- almost
like air gradually leaking out of a balloon. Her body's skin was
shriveling and pale, her presence in the teaming, vital world
contracting before our eyes -- and yet we also simultaneously
experienced a different emotion that was difficult to describe,
almost a mysterious sense of anticipation. We knew something
incredible awaited Great-grandma, though we didn't know what it
was.
Davita, who was
eight, asked me, "Where will Great-grandma's body go when she
dies?"
"Probably into
the ground," I replied.
"What about
her soul?"
Though tempted, as
most parents are, to say "heaven" when a small child
inquires about death, I said instead, "We don't know for
sure. We could say she's going to heaven. We could say she's
returning to nature itself, to the trees and the wheat fields out
there." I pointed to the green plain at the horizon that
surrounds Blair, Nebraska.
"Her soul will
be out there, all around?" Davita asked.
"Maybe."
I smiled. "We don't exactly know what happens to the
soul after death."
Gabrielle, almost
twelve, had been chewing on the moist end of a long blade of
grass. Now she entered the conversation.
"Dad,"
she said, "what is the soul made of?" She had been to
Christian and Jewish Sunday schools over the years. My wife, Gail,
is of Nebraskan Protestant stock; I am of New York Jewish origin;
our daughters have thus heard both Christian and Jewish answers to
questions about the soul. Because we have lived overseas and are
interested in world religions, they've heard Hindu, Buddhist,
Muslim, and other responses as well. Yet I don't think she had
ever heard an answer to this specific question. It was a somewhat
unusual one: what material is the human soul composed of?
My instantaneous
answer was to stall. "What do you mean?" I asked.
She thought for a
moment. "What's a soul made of?" She did her best to ask
again a question that I had no answer to at that moment.
I responded
honestly, "I don't really know. I'm not sure anybody
does."
"Well, but I
know," she said.
I raised my
eyebrows, amused. "Really?" "Yes. It's made
of God."
"The soul is
made of God," I repeated back to her. "Okay. And what is
God made of?"
She frowned. Behind
her eyes her mind whirred, trying to figure out the logical
quandary she'd walked right into.
"I guess I
can't say 'God is made of the soul,' can I?" she thought
aloud, applying simple logic.
"You could
actually," I said, "and you're most certainly right. But
it wouldn't answer your question the way you want it answered,
would it?"
"No," she
agreed.
"When
Great-grandma dies," Davita said, interrupting our
intellectual discourse, "will all the lights go out in her
soul?"
"I don't know
for sure," I responded. "But every wise teacher from all
over the world seems to agree that her body will become dark when
her soul leaves."
"That's what
her soul is made of, then," Gabrielle said triumphantly.
"It's made of light."
"Light?"
"Yes.
Light." Gabrielle, still a little girl at eleven, yet
beginning to develop the mind of an adult, looked at me with
certainty. And now, I must admit, behind my own eyes, my mind
began to whirr at a fast rate. Thoughts from the Bhagavad Gita,
the Sutras, the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran, flew
into my mind. "Be ye lamps upon the world." "You
are light for all the world." "Light particles are
energy -- they cannot be destroyed." "The brain on a PET
scan shows life because it lights up." Pieces of Newtonian
and quantum physics, like children's rhymes, replayed themselves
in my mind. Einstein's physics and principles of neuroscience
tugged at me. Was this an epiphany? What if Gabrielle had stumbled
onto a linking point between the human and the divine
conversation, there in Blair, Nebraska, on an afternoon filled
with feelings both of life and of death?
"You
know," I said, grinning at the children, "there's
actually something pretty profound in what you're saying, if we
follow it all the way through. Though that follow-through might
take some time, and a lot more research. But there's something
very complex in the simplicity of what you've said."
They looked at me quizzically, which they often do when my words
meander. Then we stood silently for a moment, taking in the view
from the edge of the nursing home grounds in Blair, the sun
beaming down on the green fields of Nebraska.
I thought, Okay,
it's a given that we still can't really know what the soul becomes
after death, but hadn't things changed since the times religious
sacred texts were written, even in the past hundred years? Wasn't
there a way to know what the soul is composed of and how it works
while the body is alive? Because both science and religion have
changed in the last decades, could it be that we are at a moment
of truth as a civilization that we hadn't yet quite seized?
What was I
thinking? I backtracked. Wait a minute. Was 1, in an instant,
conceiving of a way to provide a philosophical, religious, and
scientific proof of the soul? Had I arrived at this idea by having
a conversation with my children? If I had, how might this proof
apply to children? It had grown, after all, from the wisdom of
children.
It was very hot and
very humid. Davita had had enough and asked to go back inside so
we could return to their mother, Gail; Grandma Peggy; and the
other family members still chatting with one another and
Great-grandma Laura.
I led the girls
back into the nursing home and up to room 214.
"Where did you
go?" Grandma Peggy asked. She sat on the edge of her mother's
bed, holding the aging matriarch's tiny hand.
"Just walking
and talking outside," Gabrielle reported.
"We talked
about you," Davita said, coming up to Great- grandma
and giving her a kiss.
Instinctively wary
that Davita might say something awkward like "we were talking
about your dying," I said aloud, "We were actually being
kind of philosophical -- we were talking about the human soul and
children."
Grandma Peggy
ruffled Davita's hair. "You're a good soul, aren't you?"
Davita nodded,
giving her grandma a hug.
Great-grandma
Laura, looking first at my two daughters with her light blue,
watery eyes, then looking to Gail and me, commanded, "You
take good care of these two sweet souls, okay?"
"They are
beautiful young lights, aren't they?" I said, my mind still
on my thoughts of moments ago.
"Yes,"
she murmured. "They are. God lives in your children."
"We'll take
good care of them," Gail assured her grandmother. I nodded my
agreement, looking from my position at the foot of the bed into my
two daughters' eyes, so beautifully lit from within -- lit by the
light of their own natures, by their sympathy for their elderly
and dying progenitor, and by the light of God.
Everywhere around
me hovered not only the souls of the dying but also those of young
children. In my mind came a kind of verbal replay of the words
"you're a good soul," "these two sweet souls,"
"God lives in your children." In these later moments of
their long lives, Grandma and Great-grandma saw so clearly that
near them stood not just "kids" but living, breathing
souls -- discernible aspects of God. Did this really mean
anything? Or was all this just about words?
No, I didn't think
so. There was something more here. In response to the comments
from the girls' grandma and great- grandma, my epiphany increased
to include a sense of the obvious light in my children's eyes-the
same light in every child's eyes, and even beyond that light, the
very essence of God.
The afternoon in
Blair was a private epiphany, one I didn't share for quite some
time even with my wife. But in it, this book began.
End
of Excerpt
About
the Author Michael Gurian, author of The
Wonder of Girlsand The
Wonder of Boys,
Boys
and Girls Learn Differently!, and The
Good Son, is a social philosopher, therapist, and educator
whose work has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today,
Time, and on Today, CNN, and National Public Radio. The cofounder
of the Michael Gurian Institute at the University of Missouri --
Kansas City, he lives with his wife and two daughters in Spokane,
Washington.
