‘Suddenly, I Saw God Smiling’ : Faith: What do children believe in? Dr. Robert Coles, who has spent 30 years talking to kids all over the world, has found a pervasive sense of spirituality.

CONCORD, Mass. — In nearby Lawrence, Robert Coles asked a fourth-grader if God ever gets tired.

Quickly, and with animation, the child responded, “Maybe He does and maybe He doesn’t,” then added, “He’s God, so He can’t get tired.”

In Stockholm, Sweden, a 10-year-old boy told Coles he couldn’t draw Jesus with the crayons offered to him. “The Lord is everyone’s, so He’s not white and He’s not brown or black. He’s all the skin colors and the eye colors. It’s hard to imagine Him; that’s why I’ll just use a pencil.”

And nearly 30 years ago, an 8-year-old black girl in North Carolina explained to Coles how she stayed calm in the face of hostility from segregationists. “I was all alone, and those people were screaming, and suddenly I saw God smiling, and I smiled,” she said.

Though he had heard many such remarks over the years, Coles only recently pondered their significance. A Harvard-trained pediatrician and child psychoanalyst, Coles spent more than 30 years working with children and writing about them. “The Spiritual Life of Children” (Houghton Mifflin, $22.95) is the eighth and last of Coles’ Pulitzer Prize-winning “Children of Crisis” series.

His more than 50 books have looked at children caught in the racial struggle; children of migrant workers; children and drugs, and children of poverty and privilege.

More recently, traveling around the United States and around the world, Coles has examined the moral and political lives of children. But the spiritual lives of young people came last, the culmination of these three decades of writings.

The medical profession “tends to regard religion with a great deal of scrutiny,” Coles, 61, explains. “I had to come to terms with that.”

On the other hand, because Coles tends to scrutinize his own profession, his willingness to part with medicine’s resistance to spirituality is easy to understand.

Coles boasts that he does not work in a hospital, has never been in private practice and has never sent a bill for his medical services. Trained in pediatrics and child psychiatry, he describes himself as a maverick physician, a rebel who shuns white coat and tie--one who, for that matter, shuns any coat and tie.

Instead, he spends most of his time interviewing children and writing about them. During his travels, Coles says, he sometimes encounters children who need medical attention. He often diagnoses them, and sometimes has seen them to a hospital.

Coles took a literary route to medicine. As an undergraduate at Harvard, an adviser suggested he take a look at the writings of William Carlos Williams, the physician-turned-poet. Coles became so enamored of Williams that he wrote his senior thesis about him and sent it to him, and as a result met Williams.

It was 1950, Coles remembered, and “William Carlos Williams was not what he is now. He was rebellious. He wasn’t tolerated by the literary establishment.”

Williams became Coles’ model and mentor. The older man took Coles to meet his patients in Paterson, N.J. Coles went with Williams from house to house, treating children who otherwise could not have afforded medical attention.

Without the influence of Williams, “I probably would have been a high school English teacher,” Coles said. Instead, he went to Harvard Medical School.

As he began the practice of medicine, Coles continued to turn to Williams for guidance. His first book, “Children of Crisis I: A Study of Courage and Fear,” stemmed from his observations as an Air Force physician in the deep South in 1960, when the rocky process of school desegregation was under way. Coles conducted long conversations with black and white children, and with their parents, who were involved in desegregating the schools.

When he began to write up his research, Coles said William Carlos Williams was “the one who told me to listen to the children, and to write for the ordinary reader.” Coles said he still follows Williams’ counsel to try “to find the poetry in everyday expression.”

But this advice flew in the face of “what a traditional psychiatric researcher is trained to do,” Coles said. “Extract, abstract.”

Instead of setting himself up as a traditional child psychiatrist, Coles set himself up as a “field worker.” He thought he would learn from children by learning to talk to them.

“I sit in the kitchen and drink Coca-Colas and draw pictures with them,” Coles said.

In recent years, Coles has tried new approaches. He has taught art history to fourth-grade students in working-class Lawrence, Mass., and in a public school in Cambridge, Mass.

With a laugh he confirms that he also teaches morals and ethics at Harvard--in the medical school, the law school and the business school. “I teach at Harvard,” Coles said, smiling. “But I also teach elementary school.”

Officially, Coles began doing the “Spiritual Life” research in the mid-1980s. But when he went back through years of transcripts of interviews with children around the world, he found a consistent theme of spirituality.

“I’ve learned so much from these children about the way they integrate their spiritual lives with their everyday lives--their academic lives, even their athletic lives,” he said.

A young Islamic Pakistani boy living in England applied his faith in Allah to his desire to become an airline pilot. Asif, nearly 12, said that if he was piloting a plane, “I’d know that I’m nearer to Him than I’d be if I wasn’t up there flying. I’d look at the sky; at night, I’d look at the stars. I’d think of Him. He must walk from star to star.”

Thirteen-year-old Avram of Brookline, Mass., was preparing for his bar mitzvah when Coles talked to him about God. Avram was also studying for two big tests, one in math and one in history. The Jewish child told Coles that God “really takes an interest in us, and He really hopes for the best--that our lives will work out well. He’s not a magician. He gave us our freedom. It’s up to us. But He didn’t walk away after he let us be on our own.”

An 8-year-old girl, Connie, whom Coles treated in Boston, stunned him with her comfortable spirituality. “I see Jesus smiling when everyone else is looking real mean, even me,” Connie told Coles.

Coles also learned from the children that, “You don’t have to believe in God to have a spiritual life. A lot of kids who have been avowedly atheist are quite spiritual.

“There is a gray area between moral refraction and spiritual reflection as people look for life’s purpose,” Coles said. “Religion has no monopoly on spirituality.”

After so many years of studying children, Coles said he can still marvel at the way “certain religious and spiritual values work their way into kitchen table talk, or advice and punishment.” He can still be impressed by “the pervasiveness of this in the lives of kids, and the yearnings that families have for some kind of spiritual mooring.”

This kind of spiritual anchor helps children through crisis, Coles said. There was 10-year-old Leah, who saw herself as “a part of Israel” as she lay dying of acute leukemia. Natalie, an 8-year-old Hopi girl, was calm about her grandmother’s impending death because she knew the old woman would travel to the mesa, where Natalie believed spirits reside.

“She will leave us for there, and then she’ll prepare for us to come there,” Natalie explained. “I woke up yesterday and realized that I’d been there myself (in a dream) to visit her.” Natalie said she was pleased that her grandmother would be reunited with her own forebears. “They’ll be together there, and we’ll go visit.” Natalie said.

Long before their parents may give them credit for it, children seek explanations, Coles said.

“I think we are the creature of language and awareness. We are the creature who wants to understand,” Coles said. “Children 8 or 9 years old have said to me that they know they are a dot in an infinite space.”

“That kind of awareness prompts us to try to figure it out, and long before they go to high school and take philosophy classes, children ask and wonder and reflect about the meaning of life.”

They wonder about “the sources of their moral life, the reason for their behavior, and what they should do, and why--and everything else that categorizes a human being,” Coles said. “Namely, hoping that there is a meaning, because I think there is a dark side of us that wonders about meaninglessness, too.”

Coles said this is the last of his books about the inner lives of children.

“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m 61 years old. I just feel that it would take me another eight or 10 years to do another project like this.”

And besides, “I just feel that this is a nice way to end 30 years of work.”

Coles may be tired of writing about children, but he stressed that he is in no way way tired of working with them.

“I’m not tired of children,” he said. “I’ll never be tired of working with children.” And then a big smile. “I’ll never stop working with children.”