I have been searching in vain for decent spiritual reading for children about 8-10 years old. There seems to be a huge void in this area. There are great books out there, but most have vocabulary and syntax and grammar that are geared towards adults and which render them unintelligible for younger children. That's even true of the Douay-Rheims translation of the Bible. Sometimes the language is so archaic that it's inaccessible to children. Same thing with most lives of the saints. Ironically, if you look at the Greek New Testament, it's written in the simplest Greek and has very little complex grammar or syntax.
On the other hand you have a lot of the saint picture books, but they seem to be geared towards the 5- or 6-year old and are lacking in substance and have a lot of fluff.
So something in between these.
I've had a thought to come up with a children's translation of the Bible, based on the Douay Rheims (plus Greek and Latin) but simplified for children. Same thing with lives of the saints. But I just don't have the time at this point in my life.
Another thing I've also thought would be beneficial for children but I don't have the time to put together is little audios with guided meditations for children, to help teach them mental prayer. Yes, the SSPX offers Ignatian retreats, but these target adults and late teens. And chlldren need guided meditations. These new-agers create guided meditations, but there's nothing like that out there for younger Catholic children. Children need to learn mental prayer, and they need to be walked through it and guided through it, helping them to use their imagination, the imagination of their various senses, according to the method of St. Ignatius. You can't just give them a "topic" for meditation, as one does for adults and send them off.
To me, this 8-10 year-old range is the most critical in spiritual formation, and yet it appears to be the most neglected.
Does anyone know of materials out there that target this range? If not, I'm going to have to start creating such materials myself.
Two things here.
First, I recommend that YOU read from Frank Sheed's
Theology and Sanity (Ignatius Press) in the first 3 chapters. Do not expect the 8-10 year olds to understand this. It is for you, so you can help them. You say they need guidance using their "imaginations" but I suspect you don't literally mean that.
WARNING: Pay no attention to the 8-page "Preface to the Revised Edition," which goes on for 8 pages of infection with the unclean spirit of Vatican II that had swept the world at that time. When the book was first written it had no such corrupted Preface in it. The one-page Forward to the First Edition is okay.
Read Chapter 1 of Sheed's book, and you will have a better grasp of what I'm talking about. The first section is "Religion and the Mind," which goes directly to the problem of us replacing our intellect with our "imagination," as you have done here, in your post above. It is an innocent mistake, because of our culture, but you would no doubt be most appreciative of the expansion Sheed offers in this fine book of his.
Second, I do hope you haven't been looking at "centering prayer" or "meditations in the manner of Merton" or things like that. Steer clear of anything written after about 1947. That is, until you know what you're looking for. We have a tremendous wealth of information that was available prior to then.
I recommend for the children to try using a 150 step meditation for the Mysteries of the Rosary. They're in a book called "Let's Pray, Not Just Say, the Rosary," by Fr. Richard L. Rooney, SJ.
I made a thread about them in November, found
here.
The Rosary is Our Lady's gift to us to train us how to meditate in a Catholic manner. Actually that is the only way to really meditate at all. Any "eastern mysticism" or "NewAge" method is only a DISTRACTION from the true one.
It is the OBJECTIVE of meditation to FILL our mind with God's grace, beauty and goodness, not to EMPTY it of everything, including God's grace, beauty and goodness!! Children can never be too young to learn this lesson.
Go and see - go to any public place and find the children that are worst behaved, and find out if they're Catholic or pray the Rosary. They will not be. Then find the children who are well-behaved, and find out the same. Many of them will be so. This is very interesting to do.
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