Education: Teach your children ‘how to pray

Sydney
4 November 2001

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Education: Teach your children ‘how to pray – not what to say’

By Marilyn Kerjean

Adults can underestimate children’s natural propensity to pray, and should be teaching them ‘how’ to pray, not merely ‘what’ to say, says author and lecturer, Sr Margaret Smith SGS (pictured).

“I grew up in an era when at school we just ‘said’ prayers. Every morning we rattled them off. It didn’t bear any relationship to our lives, or the Church year or what was going on in the world around us. I’m not criticising where we came from, but I don’t think it works today.

“Children have an imagination, a creativity and playfulness (such that) they see … interpret and understand things that might just pass us as adults.”

This is what religious education must tap into in forming children’s prayer life, Sr Margaret says.

“Religious education should form in children attitudes to life and living. There is a need for content, but I don’t think that content can stop at just facts,” she says. “Somehow those facts have to have an impact on how they live.”

Sr Margaret, a Good Samaritan sister, has just published Daily Prayer Under the Southern Cross, a prayer book adapted from the American Children’s Daily Prayer 2000–2001.

It is the third edition of her annual resource for schools, parishes and families.

It is modelled on the official daily prayer of the Church, which is structured by prayers and psalms and follows the liturgical year.

The premise of the book is that “prayer is not something that is in one box and life in another box, they are related to each other,” says Sr Margaret.

And so prayers for National Sorry Day and ANZAC Day are included along with prayers before school holidays, and a special blessing for pets.

The saints are highlighted on their feast days, as are ‘Prophets and Peacemakers’ such as Mother Teresa, Caroline Chisholm, Fred Hollows, ‘Weary’ Dunlop and Mum Shirl.

Some important days in the Muslim, Jewish and Eastern Orthodox calendar are also briefly mentioned to “broaden children’s religious world”, says Sr Margaret.

“If schools have exposed them to a great breadth of scripture and helped them to reflect on those stories in relation to their everyday life, then we’ve done them a huge service that I don’t think can be achieved just by reciting formulas,” she says.

Daily Prayer under the Southern Cross can be purchased from all religious booksellers for $49.95.