Of Relevance and Whole Cloth
April 29, 2007
Anne Bancroft


Readings

The Great End in Religious Instruction William Ellery Channing
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 form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs; not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions, but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision; not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought; not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules, but to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment. In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul, to excite and cherish spiritual life.

From The Prophet – Kahlil Gibran
And a woman who held a babe against her bosom said, Speak to us of Children.

And he said:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit not even in your dreams.

You may strive to be like them, but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

Good morning. This morning, in a service sandwiched in between our annual Youth Service and our Coming of Age Celebration, I want to speak with you Of Relevance and Whole Cloth – an enigmatic title perhaps. But let me give you a hint. What I want you to know when you leave this sanctuary is this: if this congregation is your village, then the baby who was dedicated here this morning is your child. If this is your village, then the Youth who spoke last week and the adolescent who will share with us next week are both yours as well. In a healthy community – whether that means FUSN or the world at large - our cloth is woven of and by each one of us. If this is your village, Myles is your child. Just keep that in mind.

“It’s irrelevant,” he insisted in a thinly veiled attempt at adolescent attitude. His words sounded much more like an expression of self-conscious frustration. The precocious ten year old had been brought to my office after all of a brief ten minutes with his fifth grade group which was meeting for the first time of the fall semester of Sunday School. “Why do we always have to read the Bible? Bible, bible, bible,” he mumbled. “I don’t even believe in God. And I hate Sunday school.”

I bring you this story because this morning the Prophet encourages us to speak of children, the ones among us and the ones within us. They are a part of our weaving, but every now and then we find ourselves asking, who are they? And sometimes we even wonder of the ones among us - what are they doing in all those classrooms as we sit here in worship together?

I want to talk about children as people, as pieces of each of our whole life’s pie – whether you are a parent or not - such that we might recognize their value in a new light; such that we might engage or re-engage with them as participants on a common journey to a better world, a journey to whole cloth; and even such that we might better understand ourselves. Because in childhood is possibility, the chance to do better than we have done before. In children is hope. And right now, we need hope, as ever or more than ever before. And we need to be raising children who can continue to have hope.

The Prophet tells us that our children are not our children, but the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. All of us are the beings through which life endures, projected carnally and romantically in a continuum of human existence. We are of our parents, as our children are of us, re-creations of ourselves, and yet how easily we forget, in the pride of procreation, that children are their own persons. “They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you yet they belong not to you.”
Now, honestly, how many of you out there thought to yourselves, while listening to the story of the petulant child earlier, “Wow. I’m glad that child belongs not to me!”

But the story I began with has given me pause to articulate what I have always intuited about children, that they – and we - come into the world as whole beings, not as tabula rasas, but as complicated mixtures of genetic predispositions and idiosyncratic personality. Too often we adults relegate children to a specific place in our minds - for some a place oozing with sweetness and innocence, for others a place of fear and trepidation. Either way, we risk missing the beauty that is the whole: the adventure, the challenge, the complex potential that is implicit and evident in all of us, and no less so in them. They flourish with love and wither for lack of it. They want and need as we do. Can you remember your childhood?

It is not my inclination to argue with a child who is so emphatic. “It’s irrelevant! I don’t even believe in God. And I hate Sunday School.” Arguing will rarely change young minds any more than will our occasionally self-righteous proclamations of authority. Nor will it help them to trust that adults might actually be willing to listen, let alone hear what they have to say, not to mention take their opinions into account when making choices about how their time will be used. So I asked, instead, of my ten-year old friend, “What is relevant in your life? What matters to you? What would you like to be doing instead of Sunday School?”

In religious education, we struggle to identify paths to relevance for our varied and various children and youth. We are challenged to find ways to help children understand how spiritual questions are implicit in living, and how these questions, more than their answers, are universal and natural and good. But when we are too tired or frustrated to locate relevance, we fail them. A child needs to grasp the “so what?” of a Sunday morning message every bit as much as an adult. Otherwise, while they may maintain associations with faith organizations over time, the true and strong spiritual connection that might provide direction or sustenance in their living will be that much harder to find, if they manage to find it at all.

“I like to read,” he told me, “more than anything. I read all the time. And this morning my parents made me leave my book at home because they said it’s rude to read during class.”

I had to agree. It is rude to read in class. And I’m delighted that his parents care enough about his connection to a faith community to require that he come with them, along with his younger sister and brother.

“What do you read?” I asked.

“Mostly adventure stories. I just finished a really good one called Across the Nightingale’s Floor,” he shared.

We talked some more, about books and politics. I learned that he is not a fan of our current President. I was delighted to have the opportunity to point out the possible benefit of being familiar with the Bible if one is inclined to take exception with Mr. Bush, as so many of our President’s perspectives are grounded in his religious beliefs. A ten year old as precocious as this one can certainly appreciate the problem of debating a topic with which one is entirely unfamiliar!

We left our morning chat with an agreement. I would read the first book of his trilogy, and he would read a book I chose for him, called Who’s Who in the Bible, a light collection of resumes on characters from the scriptures. And when we were each done, we would have a chat about what we had learned.

A week later we went for a walk around his neighborhood, and compared notes. I had so enjoyed his recommendation. I was delighted to report my feelings, and then asked which of the characters from the book he read most resembled a character from the book I read.

“Well, if I tell you,” he said, “it will spoil the third book for you.”

“I’ll manage.” I replied.

“Paul,” he told me, “is like the character Makoto, because Makoto – who was both a warrior and a monk - has an epiphany and gives up violence to live the life of a religious person, in peace.” For those of you unfamiliar, Paul is one of the most influential personalities from the Newt Testament, who encounters the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, and becomes a convert to peace.

I could have fallen over. I was so moved by this child’s insight, by his attention to what he had read and heard, and by his willingness to engage in thinking about it.

“You’re right,” I said. “You ruined it for me. What else?”

He must have figured he was on a roll.

“We shouldn’t have to make up covenants every time we start a new Sunday school class! Everything we write boils down to the same thing: respect each other. Why can’t we just say that, and move on?”

Give ‘em an inch, as they say! But he had a very good point. It reminded me of a Jewish tale about a rabbi who is challenged, under penalty of death, to articulate the whole of the Torah while standing on one foot. “Treat others as you would be treated,” he said. “All the rest is commentary.” The words of my young friend may hold wisdom akin to that of the rabbi standing on one foot. Respect each other, he said.

As good fortune would have it, I was inspired by a class I was taking, called “Children’s Literature and Religious Education,” to continue our book reading together. I suggested our class text, which was Philip Pullman’s trilogy, referred to as His Dark Materials. Book One is The Golden Compass, then The Subtle Knife, and finally The Amber Spyglass. Not surprisingly, my friend had already read them, but was happy to re-read the first one for our next meeting. We invited two additional fifth-graders to join us, and thus began our official Book Group.

Remember that a part of our question for today was about relevance, and the challenge of identifying opportunities for educating about spiritual issues that children can connect with. I am hard-pressed to imagine anything better than what these books provided us. In an essay from the New Yorker, Laura Miller suggests that in Pullman’s books, “fantasy is a springboard for exploring cosmic questions about the purpose of human life and the nature of the universe.” Pullman uses storytelling the way traditional religious environments use the Bible. In fact, he sees the art of storytelling as superior to scriptural education. He is quoted in the same New Yorker article as having said, “ ‘Thou shalt not’ might reach the head, but it takes ‘Once upon a time’ to reach the heart.”

Pullman describes himself as an atheist. In His Dark Materials, he challenges the idea of the Fall of Man, a weighty topic for any of us, let alone fifth graders! His perspective provided a wonderful opportunity to revisit the story of Adam and Eve from the, ahem, “Bible, bible, bible.” It gave us rich conversation about how an author’s perspective impacts the way a story is told; and it gave us an opportunity to talk about concepts like atheism.

But Pullman’s challenge to traditional interpretations of the Fall also draws our attention, here, to the ways in which western cultures have inclined perceptions of children – perhaps OUR perceptions - to be influenced by interpretations of the powerful Genesis story. He suggests that when we equate childhood with the innocence of the Eden existence – with goodness, simplicity, love - we project Adam and Eve’s act of disobedience onto puberty. Remember that the “bad” choice, the disobedient choice to eat the apple caused Adam and Eve to recognize their nudity and become self-conscious. This mythology severs childhood (i.e., safety) from adulthood (danger, self-consciousness) and characterizes the transition as a loss of innocence that results from misbehavior. Our friend Mr. Pullman is encouraging us not to lament this loss, by making it clear that childhood is not a parallel to life in Eden, and that whatever loss of innocence might be experienced is “a gain in self-knowledge.”

It’s an interesting thesis, I think – and worth a moment’s consideration. By imbuing children with only innocence in their young lives, they have nowhere to go but down. How else are we to think of the age of puberty, or the moving towards it, as anything but bad? Robert Orsi, in a paper entitled “A Crisis about the Theology of Children,” goes so far as to say that we equate innocence with being holy in a way that can only undermine our perception of adolescence, of growth. “The discourse of the holy child generates as its necessary counterpart the fantasy of the dark teen-ager that so haunts contemporary imaginations; the dark teen is the holy child come to adolescence.” Even for those of us less theologically disposed, the concept is sadly familiar, and the result is that we live in a “culture that denies them (children) the full complexity of their experience . . .” And it predisposes us to oversimplify our ideas of childhood. When the complex reality bumps up against our good v. bad assumptions, we either get annoyed or we back off. What a loss for us, who might have been able to see through the tumult and recognize the questioning and the challenging for the beauty and mystery of an individual becoming him or herself.

At our best, we are made of whole cloth. We are woven fabrics of young and old and in-between. But we struggle to appreciate the company we might be for each other, the many colors and textures we represent, particularly across ages. What are they doing in all those classrooms as we sit here in worship together? If we’re lucky, they are doing what Channing recommended so many years ago. They are seeing with their own eyes, and thinking their own thoughts, and hoping that someone is paying attention. And if we’re even luckier, their teachers are being mutually inspired, and are being opened to touch their own inward springs. The gift of teaching in a religious context is not so much about passing along content as it is about nurturing an awareness of the connection that flows between body and soul in our daily living. Emerson reminds us that we are not spectators in this life, and that the soul is not preached, but discovered.

Finding relevance, making a connection, is not so difficult when we acknowledge the child as a whole being, autonomous and intact. When we recognize that we are all the same, each of us an “attempt to order chaos, to create beauty, to become an individual who matters,” (Friediani) that each of us is somewhere along the spectrum of growth, we will all be stronger for it.

Let us weave together, freeing ourselves of expectations and open to mystery – it’s magical, what happens! Remember: if this is your village, Myles is your child, as is every child among us. We must recognize this as a responsibility, but even moreso as an opportunity. They need you, every one of you. And the truth may be that you need them. Ultimately, for the future, as Life longs for itself again and again, our cloth, and our world will be more whole as you act on that understanding.

Amen.