Experiencing God in childhood

Most of us can probably remember an experience of God in our early childhood, a direct and complete experience. It may be an experience of overwhelming love, an experience of uncontainable joy or an experience, very often for children, of profound oneness with everything around them; perhaps in nature, just looking at a tree; a feeling of being swept up into the unity of creation. A child can have that experience very profoundly and totally, but a child has no concept to be able to label that experience, to describe it. And
what happens of course is that the images, the concepts of God with which the child is shaped and formed in its religious development often bear no relationship to the experience that it has had; and very often, even if he talks about that experience or shares it, it isn’t related to God, to the real presence of God.

( Aspects of Love 3, by Laurence Freeman )