From: Ralf Muhlberger < ralf@muhlberger.com >
If you want to teach kids stuff that they haven't asked about, story telling is the best method. The trick here is that new knowledge needs to be attached to existing knowledge and that's hard when you teach something cold. Answering questions is a lot easier there -- there's already something that that sparked the interest :-) Story telling helps because of the association we make as audience with the characters.
I think that to teach about spirituality you could do worse than reading to them from different myths: Celtic myths, selections from the old and new testaments, etc.
To me spirituality is about three things:
1) control
2) power
3) faith
The first is achieved through calm. When everything gets too much you feel out
of control. Calming yourself (breathing, meditation, thinking of something nice,
whistling, etc...) helps you regain the feeling that you are in control of
yourself. It's like a power struggle between the external thing that is taking
away your control and your inner self.
By power I mean the inner feeling of strength, energy, etc. The high when you're doing something you enjoy. The feeling of really getting involved in something passionately. That which we draw on when we perform magic. (As an aside: let them play with toy guns. It's better to understand that a gun is a tool and the power is in the person, than to not understand the tool and think it is a solution in itself.)
Faith is about recognising that no matter how calm and powerful we feel, there will always be forces greater than us -- and that some of those forces are available to help us. When you can't get through it with calm and power, you ask for help from the higher forces.
The Celtic heroic tales tend to address all of these: the hero goes on a solitary quest (calm), gains magical tools and learns how to use them (power) but often interacts with the gods who help (faith). Finn McCool, the Mabinogian, Arthur and his knights, etc etc...
The judaic/christian mythos is useful too, but needs to be told in context: Jesus' love has to be understood without God's wrath... Maybe pick some from the old and then the new testaments. This is also useful when they have to interact with non-pagan kids later on...
Finally the disclaimers: I don't have kids yet. :-) This essay is partly reflection (I've been on the magical path all my life), partly teaching experience (teaching at University and in industry in various areas including knowledge management), partly magical group experience (I've been involved in a couple of groups so have seen a bit of how different things can be taught or understood) and partly observation of my nieces, their cousin (on my brother in laws side) and other kids of my sister's friends watched from birth to age 4 (currently). My sister's family isn't pagan, but it's been quite useful to see how they learn compared to Uni students and IT Professionals :-)
Ralf
Every child comes with the message that God is not yet tired of the man.
-Rabindranath Tagore [1861-1941]
for the spiritual stories section, go [here]