Coles course focuses on ways to manage inner-city trauma - child psychiatrist Robert Coles class for school teachers and ministers

National Catholic Reporter, July 30, 1993 by William Cole

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- How do you keep the spirit alive in children who live in fear of drive-by shootings, homelessness and other traumas of the inner city?

Adela Acosta, who teaches at a Catholic elementary school in Washington, D.C., thinks about this all the time. And with 23 other chosen Catholic school teachers and youth ministers from around the country, she had a chance to sit down and talk things over with eminent child psychiatrist and spiritual writer Robert Coles.

Most of the participants teach and minister to children in the inner city. A few do the same in depressed rural areas. All have achieved recognition for their daily work with poor and troubled kids. They were invited here to the Weston School of Theology to spend two weeks at a workshop with Coles, a Harvard University professor and author of the 1990 book, The Spiritual Life of Children.

The program, which began July 18, was the first of three to be held with Coles during this and the next two summers. The idea is to help teachers and ministers nurture the spiritual lives of children, especially poor kids "who often lack spiritual support and moral guidance in their communities," said Francis J. Butler, who represents a consortium of lay Catholic foundations funding the program.

Coles used the first couple of days to tell about his own spiritual journey. An Episcopilian, he fell in the path of Dorothy Day and her Catholic Worker movement while a student at Columbia University in New York. He has drawn further spiritual lessons from literary masters, Dickens, Orwell and Tolstoy among them.

Coles told the gathering that children, too, have stories to share about themselves, their families, friends and their world, and the children need to hear the stories of great spiritual figures like Dorothy Day.

As the teachers tell them, the stories of children often mirror the burdens of their lives.

Acosta, principal of St. Augustine School in Washington, D.C., told about a seventh-grade boy who has lived for the past two years in a neighborhood shelter for the homeless. "He tells me his shoes have been stolen twice and that he's afraid to sleep at night," said Acosta, who has three children of her own in the school. "He says that he wishes he lived in the school, where it is safe."

She said teachers at St. Augustine's, a predominantly African-American school, stay late to give the boy extra help, to keep him company and -- most of all -- to keep him away from shelter life as long as possible. Acosta said another student, a fifth-grade girl, was walking on a street with her mother last year when a beggar came up to ask for money. Then he pulled out a gun and murdered her mother.

Jeanna Forhan, a teacher at Christ the King School in Cleveland and a youth minister in the parish next door, said the children have low self-esteem and a feeling of powerlessness in chaotic and often violent surroundings.

"Some of them find it hard to believe in God and the institutional church when basic needs are lacking in their lives," she said. "They think of religion as a luxury, something for the rich and comfortable."

The first step in raising spirits and giving hope is to build a relationship of trust with children, said teacher Christopher M. Evans, who teaches children of recent Mexican immigrants at Dolores Mission Elementary School in East Los Angeles. Evans also said he tries to help his students give spiritual expression "through ritual, song, theater, stage and art."

Even with disorders in their lives, children have an irrepressible urge toward the sacred and a vivid imagination of what God is like, said workshop participants.

During the workshop they heard from experts in moral theology and educational methodology, in addition to Coles, who has spent years listening to and writing about children in crisis, from the poor of Appalachia to victims of terror in Northern Ireland.

The program, called "Teaching for Spiritual Growth," is sponsored by the Washington-based Foundations and Donors Interested in Catholic Activities with the National Catholic Educational Association and the Jesuit-affiliated West. on School.