After an interview on a local TV station on the topic "Talking to Children About God," Rev. Bruce Marshall and Gregory Stewart, Minister of Education wrote the following essays to their parishoners at the First Unitarian Church of Cleveland in Shaker Heights, Ohio.

Rev. Marshall:
First of all, we need not get hung up on terminology. What we're concerned about is the experience of being connected to other people and to life itself, the experience of value, the sense that the world is trustworthy. We may call such experiences as of God or we may use other names.
Children are natural theologians. They wonder about everything. Albert Einstein said, "Never lose a holy curiosity." We help a child find what is holy by nourishing his or her curiosity and wonder.
I think it important too that children realize God can take many forms. There are many stories of God, many images. A child's God should not be too small.
The single most significant way that a child experiences God is through love, through knowing one's worth as a person. If we can help a child experience his or her own worth and dignity, then we have helped that child find God.
When I was a child, my first experience of this deeper dimension of existence was through music. In listening to music and in playing music, something awakened inside-something that connected me to all of life.
I had no idea then that what I experienced was also what some people were talking about when the invoked "God." If people talked to me about God when I was a child I did not know what they meant. But if we talked about that feeling I got sometimes with music, then I understood.
So to talk to children about God, first of all listen. Listen to the child and what he or she wonders about and what moves the child. In that way you are beginning to talk about what is holy in life or, if you prefer, "God."

God, Where?
by, Greg Stewart
Mommy, what is God? Daddy, where is God? Tough questions for all of us, parents and on-parents, orthodox and unorthodox, believers and unbelievers alike. But we can expect such queries from the young and the restless, and we can bet our dusty Bibles they'll her answers that are fundamentally fallible. How do religious liberals respond to the inevitable "god questions?"
Where is God? This is another "how-to" question: how to find God or, if you prefer, the good. Where does the G-ster hang out? In Coventry? On a cloud? Up in the steeple? Over my head? And how do we get from "here" to "there?"
First, do not look for God at church, or temple, or any other house of worship. People don't find God at church; they bring God to church. No space is sacred by virtue of the name above its threshold or the icons that lie within.
Instead, it is the good that people bring through the doors with them that consecrates the sanctuary. And those doors swing both ways! When the organ strikes the first chord of the postlude, as the crowd goes, so goes God.
Second, don't look for God within. Many mainline Sunday School curricula are simply anatomically incorrect. God doesn't dwell in our hearts; the good isn't buried somewhere amidst the tangles of our intestines. Soul searching and navel gazing may be great ways to find lint balls, but only rarely do they conjure up any divinity.
Instead of heart and soul, try finding God with hands and feet. The Koran declares that "one act of social justice is worth seventy years of prayer." In other words, it's deeds, not beads! In doing good works we experience the good in ways that are transformational, both for us and others.
Third, look for God in others. Hey, wait a minute! If the good is not within me, why is it in others? What am I choppped divinity?
Not others, individually but others, together-in community. In community, the good is infinitely multiplied and becomes a force to be reckoned with. Indeeed, it is a force that can change the world-and our worlds, too!
God is in the world, not in the church. The good is experienced with hands and feet, not just through heart and soul. The journey of life is more meaningful when it is traveled with others. Young or young at heart: the good in the world awaits our discovery.

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Last updated May 24, 2002 by clf@uua.org