Spiritual Influences in Childhood and Youth

Some people find childhood a time of life when they’re especially responsive to nature. This was the case for me. To look up at the stars was to experience awe and wonder. The sound of wind surging through trees or of surf surging up a shoreline stirred and mesmerized me. The fragrance of the air after rain seemed to fill my whole being. But as I entered my pre-teen and teenage years, the feelings faded and were largely forgotten – but not quite – under the influence of a depression that lasted and deepened until age twenty three.

My connection with nature wasn’t completely broken, however; in college I discovered the poetry of William Wordsworth. For the first time, I became aware that others had responded to nature as I had and had found these responses especially powerful in childhood. Perhaps most significantly for me, I saw that Wordsworth and other writers had returned to nature as a source of inspiration in adulthood.

It would not be until I’d been out of college for a couple years that I would find out for myself how my responsiveness to nature could come alive again as an adult - with less sheer wonder than in childhood and yet with greater depth and appreciation. Meanwhile, Wordsworth’s poetry was a real consciousness-raiser and a hopeful sign for me in a dark time - so much so that I count his work and that of other nineteenth century British poets and essayists as the major spiritual influence on me in youth.

I’ve known people who don’t seem to have ever had much of a response to nature – also, folks who remember childhood as a time of enormous misery from which they were happy to escape.

What were the major influences on your spirituality from childhood and youth? These might include people, places, or events whose influence you didn’t recognize and appreciate until you looked back years later.

From Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood

What though the radiance which was once so bright
Be now for ever taken from my sight,
Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower;
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind;
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be;
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering;
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.

- William Wordsworth