We look back on the patterns in our life and see the way God has played with us, always taking us to a larger place of faith.

We see the winters that turned into spring growth, loss that made way for a new kind of, gain, steep hills that gave us a better view, crucifixions that turned into resurrections.

These patterns were all about spiritual growth.

We realise with wonder and gratitude, that the soul comes into incarnation to grow, and the Sacred Presence is our teacher.

Sometimes, though, we can feel the loss so severe, we wonder if we will survive.

I reflect on times of loss when I've wanted to blame someone or something, and being unable to do that, have wished I could believe in a spirit of evil.

However, belief in a spirit of evil made God too small for me.

I felt helpless.

Looking back, I see the pain of loss as divine play at work.

It was God's way of emptying me in order to make room for something new. I now call it the giving of the left hand of God.

To put it another way, I believe we're continuously guided in faith, to a larger place. And some of that guidance we would rather not have.

What else does age teach me?

The importance of forgiveness.

Every negative judgement is a burden I have to carry, and that slows me down.

We also learn not to worship words. Words are created by humans to contain order.

The word God is no more God than the word sea is the ocean. As St Augustine of Hippo points out it is the effect of that simple three-letter word that conveys vast meaning going beyond words

Sr Augustine wrote: "What happened in your heart when you heard "God"? What happened in my heart when I was saying "God."

"Something great and supreme occurred in our mind. It soars utterly above and beyond every changeable, carnal and merely natural creature…"

"So what is that thing in your heart when you are fixing your mind on some substance that is living, everlasting, infinite, almighty, everywhere, whole and entire, nowhere confined?

When you fix your mind on all this, there is a word about God in your heart.

Try St Augustine's method of prayer. It works. The word "God" can be a gateway to something so great it cannot be described.

I like to do the same with words from the Mass that can become blunt with repetition or get made into idols.

Free these words with prayer!

As St Augustine suggests, we let responses freely fill our mind, and then take those words to feeling in the heart.

That's when we experience divine play and the presence of the Mystery we call "God."

Perhaps the greatest spiritual gift of age is the sense of Oneness. We lose judgemental thinking and divisions disappear. We know that the Creator is everywhere and in everything and will never be separate from us.

We are at home in those beautiful words from Psalm 139.

Where can I escape from your spirit?

Where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, You are there.

If I descent into Sheol, You are there.

If I take wing at dawn and come to rest

on the Western horizon,

even there Your hand will guide me,

Your right hand will hold me close.

• Joy Cowley is a wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and retreat facilitator.

For more than 50 years now, we in the United States have been gradually reducing children's opportunities to play, and the same is true in many other countries. In his book Children at Play: An American History (2007), Howard Chudacoff refers to the first half of the 20th century as the ‘golden age' of children's free play. By about 1900, the need for child labour had declined, so children had a good deal of free time. But then, beginning around 1960 or a little before, adults began chipping away at that freedom by increasing the time that children had to spend at schoolwork and, even more significantly, by reducing children's freedom to play on their own, even when they were out of school and not doing homework. Adult-directed sports for children began to replace ‘pickup' games; adult-directed classes out of school began to replace hobbies; and parents' fears led them, ever more, to forbid children from going out to play with other kids, away from home, unsupervised. There are lots of reasons for these changes but the effect, over the decades, has been a continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children's opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways.

Over the same decades that children's play has been declining, childhood mental disorders have been increasing. It's not just that we're seeing disorders that we overlooked before. Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled.

The decline in opportunity to play has also been accompanied by a decline in empathy and a rise in narcissism, both of which have been assessed since the late 1970s with standard questionnaires given to normative samples of college students. Empathy refers to the ability and tendency to see from another person's point of view and experience what that person experiences. Narcissism refers to inflated self-regard, coupled with a lack of concern for others and an inability to connect emotionally with others. A decline of empathy and a rise in narcissism are exactly what we would expect to see in children who have little opportunity to play socially. Children can't learn these social skills and values in school, because school is an authoritarian, not a democratic setting. School fosters competition, not co-operation; and children there are not free to quit when others fail to respect their needs and wishes.

In my book, Free to Learn (2013), I document these changes, and argue that the rise in mental disorders among children is largely the result of the decline in children's freedom. If we love our children and want them to thrive, we must allow them more time and opportunity to play, not less. Yet policymakers and powerful philanthropists are continuing to push us in the opposite direction — toward more schooling, more testing, more adult direction of children, and less opportunity for free play. Continue reading

Sources

• Aeon
• Image: Mother&Child

People have suspected that play helps children learn, but until recently there was little research that showed this or explained why it might be true. In my lab at the University of California at Berkeley, we've been trying to explain how very young children can learn so much so quickly, and we've developed a new scientific approach to children's learning.

Where does pretending come in? It relates to what philosophers call "counterfactual" thinking, like Einstein wondering what would happen if a train went at the speed of light. Read more

Sources

• Smithsonian.com
• Image: eHow