Teaching Us the Source of Joy

SOFIA CAVALLETTI IS A pioneer in the area of understanding children's spirituality. She works at the Centro d. Catechesi in Rome, Italy, with children ages 2 to 12, and is the author of the The Religious Potential of the Child (Paulist Press, 1983). She was interviewed for Sojourners by Carol Dittberner of St. Paul, Minnesota, and Cathy Maresca of Washington, D.C., during a conference in Minneapolis. The following is a portion of that interview. --The Editors

Sojourners: How did you begin working with children?

Sofia Cavalletti: I was at the University of Rome, studying Hebrew. A friend was looking for someone to do religious education with children. There was one child, Paolo, the 7-year-old son of a friend, and she asked me to begin with him. I had never worked with children, but it was hard to say no. And then two other children came. We just began like that, with no materials, with these three children.

I had just my Bible. And I opened my Bible, and that was all. The first response was such deep joy, such deep enthusiasm. What encouraged me to continue were the tears that I saw in Paolo's eyes when, after two hours, his mother came to pick him up, and he didn't want to go. Then, about 1954, we decided to do something more structured.

The first group was made up of 7- and 8-year-olds. Then younger brothers and sisters came. I remember a younger brother who came with his brother--he was not supposed to stay. But he wanted to stay. And we watched him working with such seriousness. So little by little we worked with the younger ones.

In many methods of educating children, the adult first formulates a theory, then develops a curriculum based on what he or she thinks the child needs. You have not sat behind a desk developing your work with children. How have you learned about their spiritual life?

The children showed me. I never thought to establish a theory or to start from something that was in my mind. The work came out of observation of the children. And it was the joy of the children, their eagerness to go on listening, that showed me the way. They show quite clearly through their eyes what engages them.

What we offer the young child focuses on what is essential throughout the life of the church. It is relaxing, really, to know that we have not invented anything, that we are just giving the children what has already been lived by the community, by believing people. If we had to create, to imagine, to invent, we would always have the doubt: But is it good for the children? But when you see things alive for centuries and centuries in the community of believing people, you see that there must be something there.

Everything has been invented before us. So we just have to be very faithful to scripture and to liturgy. Liturgy is after all the life of the church, and we have to be able to transmit this in the simplest way and then leave to the child all the necessary time to relish these things.

Would you talk about the young child's capacity to love and how that corresponds to God?

I think there is a very deep correspondence between the child and God, because both are very rich in love. The child is very capable of receiving love, but also of giving love. And most of the time, I think children are disappointed with adults because we have our limits.

I think the best mother and best father have their limits, after all. With God the children really have found the right partner for them.

One of your most important contributions to children is the way in which you introduce them to scripture through the parable method. Would you explain this method and its use with children?

What is really fascinating in the method of parables is that they are never, never exhausted. We can spend our whole life, I think, meditating on the mustard seed or the Good Shepherd parables. There are always new aspects of the mystery that come out.

This method of speaking about God is a method that is aware of being incapable of speaking about God. When we have learned the definition of God, it's finished. A definition is pretentious, because it pretends to tell us who God is, how God is. We really don't know. We can just approach the subject. For this we have many parables.

But we are careful not to reduce the Bible to a book of many good stories. The Bible is above all a book which tells us the great history. It is important to give the children the idea that this history is the largest history we have heard. It begins the world, it reaches the most important moment with redemption, which is not yet finished. To open in front of the child the vision of eschatology is so important--to give them the hope of a new world, a world renewed, and to give them the feeling that everybody is involved in preparing this new world.

Children see the links among all these different events of history. They are not just beautiful events, one separated from the other. They are one project that God is developing and which is still waiting its accomplishment.

How do children teach us? What are they giving to the church?

They are teaching us what a source of joy it can be to have God in our life. This is the greatest gift they can give to the church.