A child has a natural capacity to experience God as boundless and unconditional love. But as it moves into adult life, exposure and experience may teach it otherwise; then the experience of love is lost to fear and scepticism. It is therefore, Fr Laurence stresses, the responsibility and the contemporary challenge for religious education to train our children to be true believers with the gift of an interiorly deep faith. This will help them to deal with the challenges of life as they grow into adulthood.

So we need to introduce them to a way of prayer that will enable them to stay in touch with their early experience of God, which is a direct experience unmediated by language or thought. Meditation, he says, offers this as a way from the earliest stages of our development and accompanies us through all our stages of growth as it keeps the connection between the head and that heart-centre where wisdom and love have their source.