Come, Children
Rev. Paul Sprecher
Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org
June 13, 2010
On occasions like this, when we celebrate our children’s learning and the wonderful gifts that our teachers, volunteers and Minister of Religious Education give them each Sunday, we often quote from William Ellery Channing, one of the great founders of our Unitarian tradition. Our hymnal has turned this into a responsive reading that we use often; here’s a shorter version:
“The great end in religious instruction, is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own; not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth; … not to burden memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought.”[i]
Sometimes we misunderstand Channing’s meaning as implying that we should not teach our children what we ourselves have found as faith that can ground us, as religious traditions that we ourselves revere. This is done for the supposedly liberal purpose of “allowing our children to decide what religion they want to pursue for themselves.” Religious education in our Unitarian Universalist practice in the past sometimes put more emphasis on learning about other people’s faith traditions than in passing on our own. Our children emerged from religious education a generation ago superbly versed in world religions but without a real sense of why we are Unitarian Universalists rather than, say, Taoists.
We were talking in our class a Linden Ponds this past week about how to raise children in mixed religious marriages, and one of the participants told the story of how her Jewish daughter and Catholic son-in-law had decided not to raise their children in either of their traditions so that their kids would be able to choose for themselves when they grew up. As it happened, she took her grandson to High Holy Days at her synagogue when he was about nine, and from that point on he decided that he wanted to be a Jew. He studied Hebrew, had a Bar Mitzvah, and went on to be observant in his mother’s religious tradition. Still, I think that the practice of leaving the decision about religion to children is a grievous error. It puts far too much burden on the children at an age when they are not ready to carry it, and it deprives them of a firm tradition – a sense of rootedness – from which to make such a decision.
Our children will inevitably make up their own minds about the faith tradition they will follow during their adulthood if indeed they do follow any tradition. They require, though, some tradition from which to start. Carl Jung recalled that a Hindu guru in India found himself teaching many seekers raised in Christian and Jewish traditions of one sort or another, and he discouraged them from becoming adepts in his tradition. He said that one can only come to wisdom and understanding by examining and digging deeply into ones own tradition. We as Unitarian Universalists owe it to our children to provide them with the teachings of our own faith, even as we remind them of our long traditions of religious tolerance and our willingness to learn from other faith traditions.
The Hebrew Bible instructs the Children of Israel to pass down their particular traditions to their children.
Just as they are about to enter the Promised Land, Moses instructs them to
[NRS Deuteronomy 4:9] 9 ... take care and watch yourselves closely, so as neither to forget the things that your eyes have seen nor to let them slip from your mind all the days of your life; make them known to your children and your children's children--
We, too, must say, “Come, children. Listen to what we have learned and believe, and let’s learn together what wisdom we can.” We must teach our children and our grandchildren what we have learned of faith and of the life of the spirit.
And so here at Second Parish we teach the fundamentals of our traditions and our rich heritage to our children. We teach the stories of the Bible, the parables of Jesus, and our own rich Unitarian and Universalist history and our heroes or superheroes, as a recent course put it. Of course, children don’t always get all the facts straight. Here are some examples of Biblical bloopers from John Nichols, formerly minister of our congregation in Wellesley Hills. He says:
The sense [children] make out of what we teach is [sometimes] far from what we intended to impart. What follows are some answers which British school children gave to questions they were asked on a religious school examination:
Noah’s wife was called Joan of Ark.
The Fifth Commandment: Humor thy father and mother.
Another name for marriage is Holy Acrimony.
Lot’s wife was a pillar of salt by day but a ball of fire by night.
The pope lives in the vacuum.
The First Commandment was when Eve told Adam to eat the apple.
Christians can have only one wife. This is called monotony.[ii]
They don’t always get the facts down, but they learn the rudiments of these old stories and have their eyes opened to the treasures in scripture and sources of wisdom from which we draw.
We teach them our seven principles, starting with our “respect for the inherent worth and dignity of every person” – or, as we translate for them, “We believe that each and every person is important.” Another of the seven principles we especially emphasize is our seventh – this time not about human beings but about all of creation – “We affirm and promote respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part;” or in simpler language, “We believe that we should care for our planet earth.” Of course, we teach them the other principles as well: Justice, equity and compassion; acceptance of one another; the search for truth and meaning; the use of the democratic process; and the vision of a world with peace, liberty, and justice for all – the vision we speak of as the Beloved Community, which Jesus referred to as the Kingdom of Heaven.
We know that children differ in the way they learn, so we use art to give other forms of expression. We have been acting out the parables of Jesus; our kids love dramatic presentations. We took our primary class outdoors to explore the web of life all around us; and we gave them the opportunity to plant their own vegetables and to decorate our Community Garden. Some kids love school, some hate it; our job is to make sure to give all of them a love of learning in whatever modality works best for them.
Of course, religious education – even the very best we can offer – is not something that happens only on Sundays. Our children and grandchildren are constantly turning to us as role models and as ones who can answer the big questions of life. Forrest Church recalls the story of such a question, starting with a meeting with a mother who was new member of the All Souls congregation. A little while before, her three-year-old daughter had asked her mother where she had been before she started growing in her mommy’s tummy. The mother did the sensible thing and punted, hoping she could find the answer in a book. She pulled down a book she was reading about children, The Magic Years, and started searching for clues. She explained to her daughter the the question was a very good, very hard question. That evening, her father found her looking through the book and asked what she was doing. She said, "Mommy told me that I can find out where I was before I was born by looking in this book. But, Daddy," she said, "there aren't any pictures."
Two days later, I was visiting one of our longtime members, a gentle, lovely woman, who had been a member of All Souls for almost fifty years and was in the hospital. We had a wonderful conversation. She was in good spirits and, given how much trouble she had been having lately, looked hale and beautiful to me. After our conversation had gone along for a while, she asked me, "Forrest, what do you think happens to us after we die?"
At that very moment it struck me. Not the answer, exactly. I really don't know the answer to that question. What struck me was that the two questions, hers and that of the little girl, were very much the same. "Where were we before we were born?" and "What happens to us after we die?" One is an important, existential question for the very young; the other an important, existential question for those of us who are nearing the end of our lives. I thought about my own age at the time, almost exactly halfway between that of this bright little girl and this strong and wise older woman. Weighing the questions one against the other, I felt deep within a balance point between them. Where am I? Am I halfway between nothing and nothing? Or something and something? Or everything and everything?[iii]
We learned a hymn recently from the teal hymnal which asked the same questions in the words of Paul Gaugin: “Where do we come from, what are we, where are we going? Mystery, mystery, life is a riddle and a mystery.” Out job as parents, grandparents and teachers – all of us are teachers – is to help children see the mystery and then see how we ourselves have learned to go about finding the answers that anchor our own lives.
The model we set for our children and grandchildren is the most important way that they learn. I remember sitting in my grandfather’s lap when I was very young reading comics about Tullus, a Christian believer at the time of the Apostle Paul, and his adventures in the mighty Roman Empire; I wanted to love what my grandfather loved. When I was about fifteen, we went together to his cousin Elmer’s house to debate with some Jehovah’s Witness who were trying to convert him. I did my valiant best as a high school debater to counter their strange interpretations of the Bible, but I was no match for them. To me, it was another challenge to become better versed; to my grandfather, it was a great trial of his beliefs. He called me to him the next day and said that we couldn’t go back again; his faith was never so shaken as it had been the night before. This time I determined that I needed a stronger faith than he showed me then, and I soon stopped going to church. What we model isn’t always what our children will do; our job is to show them our own lives of faith and purpose, and hope that we will be able, as Channing put it, to stir up their own minds and spirits.
Our job as teachers, religious educators, parents, grandparents, mentors within the congregation, minister – is to teach our children well; to teach them what we know and show them how we go about finding out about questions whose answers we don’t know; and above all to model for them the kind of faith and ethics we want them to learn.
Come, children, learn what we have to give you, and learn with us as we, too, grow in wisdom and understanding; come, children, come.
Amen. www.secondparish.org