Teaching Casey to Pray

When I told my wife, Carole, and our three children that I'd been accepted by one of the teams in the local adult hockey league, the reaction of our 9-year-old daughter, Casey, caught me completely off guard. "I knew you'd make the team," she said. "I prayed you would."

It wasn't her confidence that surprised me; kids her age still routinely believe that their parents are capable of almost anything. What surprised me was her admission that she had prayed.

Bringing prayer into our children's lives has been a long-term project for Carole and me, and one that has at times met with about as much success as the Donner party. Our objective was simple: We just wanted our kids to have a feeling of connectedness to God and access to the comfort that only faith can provide at times of anxiety, pain, and loss. But the format we had decided on--group prayers at bedtime--was, in retrospect, a mistake, perfectly designed to bring any simmering sibling rivalries boiling to the surface.

We first tried group prayers when the kids were 8, 7, and 4 years old. Peter, the 7-year-old, took to it with his usual enthusiasm for performing. A miniature televangelist with an audience of four, he concocted elaborate requests for divine intervention on behalf of the rain forest, starving children, and, at play-off time, the New York Rangers.

Four-year-old Sara's take on prayer was that it presented a unique opportunity to settle old scores. She blabbed her siblings' transgressions, ostensibly to the Father but in actuality to the father: "Dear God, thank you for Mama, Baba, Peter, even if he threw my teddy bear down the stairs, and Casey, even if she's mean and won't let me play with her dumb game."

Casey, on the other hand, wouldn't--or couldn't--get into the spirit. She had never been one to pour out her feelings to her parents, let alone to God.

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