It was a windy day as my three-year-old granddaughter and I played outside. I asked her, “Ophelia, what do you think the wind is saying to us?” She thought for only a moment before replying, “It’s saying it loves us.” This was a child who knew her place in the company of the Divine.

Three years later, she sat at my Christmas table, appearing dejected. I asked her what was wrong. She said, “I don’t belong here.” She explained she had made poor choices and did not deserve the presents under the tree. This older Ophelia now recognized the conditional love of humans through the story of Santa, who rewarded “nice.”

In her book, The Spiritual Child, Lisa Miller suggests the most important thing we can do to assist children develop spirituality is to create what she calls a “field of love,” a relational space in which children are loved unconditionally and learn to love unconditionally. At that Christmas table, I got to tell Ophelia that none of the presents were from Santa. They were all from her family. I ended by saying. “We get to give you those presents simply necause we love you, no matter what choices you make.”

The dejection we sometimes experience as adults may seem much more complex than what Ophelia felt. But our own despair often includes questions about belonging and worth, about what we deserve and what we do not. Experiencing the dark night of the soul does not often end easily with comforting words from a loved one. I cannot help but wonder, though, how we might meet our own sorrow and that of others in the relational space Miller describes. In that space, “we are fully accepted for who we are, and learn to hold others with the same compassion…It is a super-sized we.”

Looking forward to seeing you in the field of love.