How do you talk to your kid about God? Or prayer? Or death? We’re beginning to have some of these conversations around our house and I feel totally out of my depth.

Luckily, I met with my mother’s renewal group today and the chapter for this month was on Spirituality and Motherhood. When you don’t have a church or other spiritual community to help your child be a part of, how does one introduce issues of faith?

A couple of people in our group suggested Sunday school at a Unitarian Universalist church as they introduce members to all faiths. I mentioned that they have a kid’s room at the Shambala meditation center in town.

Considering I don’t even have my son in daycare or preschool, the Sunday school notion feels a little far-fetched. Let’s introduce him to group social settings and God at the same. Nope.

I remember saying “Now I lay me down to sleep” prayer before bed when I was a kid and liking the ritual of kneeling by my bed before crawling into it. I’ve even found a version without the “if I die before I wake” part, but it doesn’t seem the right prayer.

Cavanaugh learned the Serenity Prayer this summer on our walk back from a playground. He was crying because his sand clod had disintegrated, so I talked about accepting “the things we cannot change” (sand returned to its grainy state), “the courage to change the things we can” (our attitude about the sand clod–being grateful that we’d gotten to play with it), and “the wisdom to know the difference.” Then he asked what serenity meant. Can I tell you, I was not feeling at all serene.

Other practices the group talked about were lighting a candle for people having a hard time–to send them some light, turning over Angel Cards, taking deep breaths, being in nature/taking care of the natural world, going to a gem and mineral shop to find a stone for child to hold when needing comfort or grounding.

All of our kids are in the 2 – 4 age range and explaining God or prayer challenging. One woman related fairies to angels to help her daughter understand the concept.

We all talked about the holdovers from our childhoods: what churches or belief systems we were raised with, if we thought those had served us, what we hoped to pass down to our kids (or not).

When my parents were in meditation group on Sundays during my childhood, there was sometimes a kid’s meeting where we chanted mantras. I loved the feeling of that sound traveling through all of us. Cavanaugh and I like to sing. I bet he’d like chanting.

How about you? Do you talk to your child about God or other issues of faith and spirituality? What do you say?

Image by vai-aerielle