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I honestly don't get the distinction you're trying to make here. I mean, on the one hand, you have all the adults and children in your community and their attitudes influencing you, and on the other you have some words you repeat once a school day, and you think the words were a really important factor in shaping your character? That chimes with nothing in my experience with myself, with other children, or with children I have known as an adult.
WRT prayer, hopefully this won't turn into yet another religion bash-a-thon, but if it will it's probably already too late so why not. Stand-up-and-witness events such as you describe definitely do not happen for us; the description you give sounds very protestant (i.e., alien) to me. I can't think of any analogous experience, either. The Divine Liturgy is indeed repetitive, but it's quite easy to drift off during it or during personal prayers, which are of the same general type--of course, the liturgy takes about an hour and a half, minimum, while daily prayers are around five minutes. But even the short little pledge is vulnerable to the same distraction: since the words are well-known, the lips rattle them off on autopilot while the mind thinks about anything and everything else. It's something one has to make a conscious effort not to do--even then, the effort is rarely effective, which is why we're told to make our distraction during prayer a subject for prayer itself--and I never saw any reason to make the effort with the pledge. I don't think the words I don't even pay attention to as I say them are having some hidden effect on my psyche.
Indeed, the prayers that do have the most effect on me are the ones I don't hear constantly--the seasonal songs, the parts the priest says quietly so you only hear them when you stand near the altar, and especially the midnight Paschal service. The Liturgy is made beautiful to draw people in, and it is marvelous if it's done with a good choir, but I don't have any kind of communal Zen experience such as you describe (we Orthodox, as a general rule, have a deep distrust of strong feelings). I'm pretty sure other people/children don't either, except in a temporary, evanescent way for new converts or for exceptional moments of grace. We're often reminded that "liturgy" means something like "work of the people." We're there to work at paying tribute to God. They made it nice for Him, and also to lighten the load for us a bit, but it's a job for us to work at. Also, nearly everything about the worship was specifically made to be instructive in a pre-literate society, so it's hard to say we're supposed to simply mouth and absorb passively.
Now, there is the Jesus Prayer...but that is specifically meant to be said with many, many repetitions, in solitude, stillness and silence, or the closest we can get to it, with the eyes closed. It's also not really meant for children. Kind of a complicated subject to get into, and I think dinner is imminent, so I'll leave it at that for now.
WRT prayer, hopefully this won't turn into yet another religion bash-a-thon, but if it will it's probably already too late so why not. Stand-up-and-witness events such as you describe definitely do not happen for us; the description you give sounds very protestant (i.e., alien) to me. I can't think of any analogous experience, either. The Divine Liturgy is indeed repetitive, but it's quite easy to drift off during it or during personal prayers, which are of the same general type--of course, the liturgy takes about an hour and a half, minimum, while daily prayers are around five minutes. But even the short little pledge is vulnerable to the same distraction: since the words are well-known, the lips rattle them off on autopilot while the mind thinks about anything and everything else. It's something one has to make a conscious effort not to do--even then, the effort is rarely effective, which is why we're told to make our distraction during prayer a subject for prayer itself--and I never saw any reason to make the effort with the pledge. I don't think the words I don't even pay attention to as I say them are having some hidden effect on my psyche.
Indeed, the prayers that do have the most effect on me are the ones I don't hear constantly--the seasonal songs, the parts the priest says quietly so you only hear them when you stand near the altar, and especially the midnight Paschal service. The Liturgy is made beautiful to draw people in, and it is marvelous if it's done with a good choir, but I don't have any kind of communal Zen experience such as you describe (we Orthodox, as a general rule, have a deep distrust of strong feelings). I'm pretty sure other people/children don't either, except in a temporary, evanescent way for new converts or for exceptional moments of grace. We're often reminded that "liturgy" means something like "work of the people." We're there to work at paying tribute to God. They made it nice for Him, and also to lighten the load for us a bit, but it's a job for us to work at. Also, nearly everything about the worship was specifically made to be instructive in a pre-literate society, so it's hard to say we're supposed to simply mouth and absorb passively.
Now, there is the Jesus Prayer...but that is specifically meant to be said with many, many repetitions, in solitude, stillness and silence, or the closest we can get to it, with the eyes closed. It's also not really meant for children. Kind of a complicated subject to get into, and I think dinner is imminent, so I'll leave it at that for now.
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