Children are the “beloved” of God. Jesus puts them as “models” for adults. To recover and always maintain in us the child that we have been and still are. Faced with the rejection of the elders-children bother-Jesus brings them with him, blesses them, hugs them, protects them.
But protecting children is not just overcoming poverty, lack of protection or super-protection. It is necessary to provide a comprehensive education that includes, in addition to other values and skills, education to the mystery, transcendence, meaning of life and religion.
Mere teaching only produces “knowledge” and the only “knowledge” of religion can only lead to mere cultural socialization or indoctrination, but not to faith. Faith is not inherited, it is not taught, it is not “transmitted”: faith is contagious, proposed, offered, shared…
Hence, the essential role in the discovery of child like faith corresponds to the family, through contagion, participation, and speech. It is about educating the “religious awakening” which is a right of the child as a possibility, the right to be open to all the dimensions of the person, of the human being, of his deepest “I”.
This is not the work of teaching, but of experience:
The childlike faith has affective characteristics in the symbolic relationship with the parents. The radical trust that the sleeping child places in his parents carry out in him the experience of trust in the world, in existence, the confidence of being in the hands of someone.
Later on, that radical confidence will be named and perhaps the time will come to call it “God”.
But before that, experiences are necessary that “fertilize” the field where the seed can grow and be inserted in faith. God is ahead of our educational activities.
Before talking about God, an education in certain values is necessary without which the experience of God is not possible. The cultivation of interiority is necessary, although this, at least from a Christian perspective, is not enough.
A child like faith, at all times, is a free offer needed day by day of a “first announcement” that repeats itself constantly and circularly throughout life, as Pope Francis also insists.
The person is not an “empty”, “hollow” being. The person is a mystery to himself, and it is necessary to educate that sense of mystery to meet a man.
Children, as people who are, are not oblivious to it. In all of them, there is a predisposition for transcendence and mystery. Therefore, it is not a matter of “indoctrinating” the child, but of making it sprout in it and developed what it already has inside.