I/Thou-I/Spirit: Martin Buber and the spiritual life of the infant.(Report)

Abstract

Martin Buber's philosophical anthropology is presented as a framework for understanding the spiritual life of the infant. To Buber's I/Thou and I/It attitudes toward the world a third attitude is proposed, I/Spirit. I/Spirit is the manifestation of spirit in the mirroring of the infant as Thou ill the mother's eyes. Not yet knowing there is a world outside of him/herself, the infant takes from the mother what s/he perceives is part of him/herself. The infant becomes I as the mother mirrors Thou. Once the infant distances the mother s/he can enter into a dialogical relationship with her in limited mutuality. Handling, holding and presenting the world to the infant through dialogical relations, the mother nurtures the infant's spiritual growth.

I/Thou--I/Spirit: Martin Buber and the Spiritual Life of the Infant

Into this world a child is born. This new life approaching us is a primal force, desiring to enter into relationship with "others" in the world to build, to tear down and to know him/herself and the world. As pastors, counselors, and religious educators we accept a shared responsibility with the infant's parents to nurture this real and actual child; body, mind, and spirit.

Recently authors have given us cultural, social and religious perspectives on the spiritual life of children (Ota & Erricker, Eds., 2005) as well as literary, empirical and pedagogical approaches to spiritual education (Erricker & Ota, Eds., 2001; Wright, 2000). Research has been done on the spiritual lives of children and developmental stages of faith have been proposed (Coles, 1990; Estep, 2002 Fowler, 1981 Oser & Gmunder, 1991); but these works primarily deal with the spiritual lives of children older than three. Literature on infant spirituality has come from the psychoanalytic community from regressed adults in psychotherapy (Rizzuto, 1979) and the overlay of object relations theory on the spiritual formation of infants (Ulanov, 2001). In this article I am presenting the spiritual life of the pre-verbal infant through a Buberian lens.

Martin Buber, a 20th Century Jewish philosopher, contends the manifestation of human spirit happens "between" a very special relationship, an I-Thou relationship. "Spirit in its human manifestation is man's response to his Thou ... It is solely by virtue of his power to relate that man is able to live in the spirit" (Buber, 1970, p. 89). A contemporary of Buber, object relations theorist D.W. Winnicott (1896-1971) "... in his discovery of transitional space ... witnesses to the location of the numinous in the space between self and other in the human realm, and between the human and divine, in the religious realm" (Ulanov, 2001, p.5). Transitional space, like the space created by distancing, is the space of moving out of being into becoming. Viewing Winnicott through a Buberian lens it could be said that spirit does not reside in the immanent or the transcendent but manifests itself through the narrative of self of the child created in the transitional space between I and Thou. But what can be said about the time before I am I?

An Ontological Point of View