HELL ON EARTH: A Sunday Paper Editorial

One of my favorite books on children and religion is Do Children Need Religion? by Martha Fay (Pantheon Books, 1993; paperback edition re-titled Children and Religion: Making Choices in a Secular Age). The book includes a chapter on holidays, ritual, and tradition.

Approaching the six or seven weeks between Thanksgiving and
New Year’s that has come to be called “the holiday season,” …
a friend invited me to attend a session of a support group of
corporate women who meet periodically to discuss the difficulties
of combining motherhood with full-time work outside the home.
The subject for this meeting, which took place in mid-autumn,
was “How Important Is a Spiritual Life?” but … as one woman
after another spoke, it became obvious that what they really
wanted to talk about was Halloween, which had just passed a few
days before.

Far from being a minor event, the children’s holiday appeared
to have taken on enormous significance in the lives of these
mothers, and their descriptions of the preparations and the
actual event were delivered with the sort of animation and
detail women traditionally reserve for tales of love or child-
birth. One after another, they told how their children had
decided what they were going to “be” for Halloween, how they,
the mothers, had then assembled or sewn the appropriate
costumes, how they had left work early or made special
arrangements with the baby-sitter to take the child trick-
or-treating. It was clear that this holiday satisfied these
women in a way no other celebration did and eventually the
conversation shifted toward why that should be. One
woman suggested that it was because Halloween was what
she called a “true children’s day”; second, that the element
of make-believe made it especially fun; and a third, that,
unlike Thanksgiving, for example, it did not entail messy
involvement with one’s troublesome extended family. …
And finally, one woman said that what she liked about it was
that it was a purely secular holiday—that, unlike Easter or
Christmas or Passover, it did not make you feel uncomfortable
about choices not made.

Everyone around the table nodded in agreement. Then I
noticed a few faces registering confusion as their owners
struggled to recall just where this wonderful holiday did
come from. Feeling something of a pedant, … I volunteered
that while it was technically not a religious feast itself,
Halloween did derive from one, being the even of All Saints’
(or All Hallows’) Day in the Christian calendar … . The
goblins and ghosts, devils and broom-riding witches, now
rapidly being displaced by fairy princesses, astronauts, and
Ninja Turtles, refer to a long tradition of caricature of the
unholy dead, as well as to Celtic pagan traditions that
antedate Christianity and have to do with the onset of winter’s
darkness and the unleashing of emotions customarily
repressed. This bit of information was politely received, but
generated no further discussion. Not only were these women
not much interested in Halloween’s religious antecedents;
there could be little doubt but that their sense of the holiday
as a thoroughly secular one was both an active preference
and a proper gauge of general sentiment. (pp. 137-139)

Fay adds in a footnote, “Ironically, while the majority of Christians celebrate Halloween without a thought to its once considerable religious significance, the Jewish day school one of my friends’ children attends sends a note home every October to remind parents that it is a Christian holiday and that their children should not be participating in it.”

There are, of course, other groups besides Jews who object to Halloween. Many conservative Christians who may never have heard of All Saints’ Day see in Halloween an orgiastic celebration of death, evil, perversion, witchcraft and Satanism, and take a firm stand with their children: no Halloween.

In my book Offering the Gospel to Children (Cowley Publications, 1992), I mentioned this attitude:

There are Christian bodies and Christian families that will not
allow their children to participate in Halloween at all, because
of its ancient connections with paganism and its continuing
association with devils, witches, and monsters. These Christians
are frightened of letting their children participate in such
traditions, in the same way some other parents are afraid of
letting the children play with toy guns. They fear that permitting
children to play with a symbol of evil—the gun or the devil
mask—signals to them that we approve of the evil itself, and
removes all restraints on its seductive powers.

But by censoring children’s imaginative lives, by modeling fear
and denial instead of an imaginative approach to our own
destructive impulses, we fail to help our children. We are
warning them that we ourselves are so frightened of our own
aggression that we cannot face it or offer hope that it can be
tamed. This realization may be more frightening to children
than the fear they certainly feel as they themselves play with
and test these symbols of evil, and find their own response.
Censorship may also, of course, have the opposite effect of
endowing these ideas and figures with the fascination of
forbidden fruit.

I know several evangelical churches in New Haven that bypass Halloween in this way, substituting a harvest festival (or in one case a “Hallelujah party!”) with entirely wholesome and happy themes.

In my book, I suggest we can do something much more nuanced, and invite children into a dramatized confrontation with evil, via a “Bible Halloween funhouse” in which we dramatically retell our story, including the very real Biblical element of the Evil One, who dogs us on our journey, meddles with God’s plan, and attempts to seduce us with lies and false promises. Some parts of the story are scary (pitch darkness in a church stairwell at the beginning of the journey, for the telling of the creation story); some are exciting (crossing the Red Sea and slamming the door (draped with plastic sheeting to resemble the “walls of water”) on Satan as he attempts to follow; some are inspiring (standing at the font to renounce Satan, and watching him fall helpless to the floor); some are solemn and serious (anticipating our own death, by adding a cross to a graveyard scene and passing behind a curtain). At the end, we bind Satan and cast him away,[1] each child adds a “saint” figure to a feltboard scene of the New Jerusalem, and we march away singing.

Well, I’m not alone. The Bible Halloween funhouse is an idea whose time has come.

“Shake your city with the most ‘in-your-face, high-flyin’, no denyin’, death-defyin’, Satan-be-cryin’, keep-ya-from-fryin’, theatrical stylin’, no holds barred, cutting-edge’ evangelism tool of the new millennium!” shouts the web site of Colorado’s New Destiny Christian Center, whose pastor, the Rev. Keenan Roberts, invented the Hell House around ten years ago and now markets it online for $299.00. “Piece by piece, prop by prop, costume by costume—the master plan is organized in a comprehensive manual. A video of what Hell House in action looks like and a special-effects compact disc audio master are also included. This sizzling evangelism event is designed to capture the attention of our sight and sound culture!”

Costumed demons guide visitors through five scenes: “the funeral of a young homosexual male who believed the born gay lie and died of AIDS;” “a riveting reenactment of a clinical abortion;” “a satanic ritual involving a human sacrifice;” “a drunk-driving accident where a father realizes he has just killed his own family;” and a teen suicide. Then, in scene six, “the tour experiences the agony of the sights, sounds and smells of hell as well as Satan himself declaring that all of what the tour has seen in Hell House is his handiwork. They are rescued out of hell by heaven’s angels who escort them to scene seven which is heaven.” There, “the tour meets Jesus, sees the glory and splendor of heaven and is given the opportunity to pray the prayer of salvation.”

Additional scenes, available separately, include “Date Rape,” “Gay Wedding,” “Rave” (“underground world of rave clubs and drug usage”) another drunk driving scene—this time the guilty parties are teens, “buzzed after the prom”—domestic abuse, and a school shooting.

Even allowing for the predictable obsession of the right-wing churches with sexuality and abortion, the scenes seem to be picked as much for their capacity to shock as for their moral seriousness. I doubt, for example, that Satanism and human sacrifice are a real temptation for American teens; meanwhile there is no mention of such real-life issues as competitiveness, jealousy, cheating, lying, and character assassination, that can be truly poisonous in the worlds of school, sports, and social relationships. I would be interested to find out if the “school shooting” scene raises the issues of bullying as a common, and serious, occasion of sin, or whether the shooters are merely depicted as devils incarnate and the innocent victims as Christian martyrs, as in the (apparently inaccurate) story of one of the victims of the Columbine tragedy.

Hell House is a high-tech version of the hellfire-and-damnation preaching that has long characterized certain branches of Christianity. True to that tradition, it reduces the Good News of Jesus Christ to the message that the meaning of salvation is to avoid, or be rescued from, horrifying, disgusting, and frightening experiences, and from the bad and evil spirits (and their human minions) who would try to harm us outright, or entice us into harm under the guise of fun or thrills or self-fulfillment or whatever. It does not appear as if any moral distinction is even made between those horrifying experiences that just happen to us (domestic violence of which we are the victims); those which we choose, knowing they are wrong (drunk driving); those into which we fall in desperation (suicide); and those into which we (supposedly) might be tempted through our own ignorance and the evil designs of others (homosexuality, in their view). All of it is just bad: horrifying, frightening, disgusting.

The most horrifying, frightening and disgusting prospect of all is eternal damnation, and that is the one thing we can surely avoid, by accepting Jesus.

And this, it seems, is Jesus’ only purpose, and his only achievement. Apparently he did not preach, or teach, or heal; he did not call disciples, rebuke the religious establishment, or feed the five thousand; he did not wash his disciples’ feet, touch lepers, or eat with the outcast; he may as well not have risen from the dead: all he did was reveal to us the magic words that will infallibly rescue us from horrors beyond our imagining. Some day he will, with triumphant glee, send all the bad guys to suffer the revolting and terrifying punishments that they had tried to visit on us, the saved.

How much of scripture—how much of the riches of the faith given to the saints—these people seem to be missing: how narrow (and ultimately uninteresting!) their Good News, so that the way to make it appealing is to contrast it so vividly to the Bad News, to scare people into church, and then to package church as entertainment, hardly distinguishable (with its amplified music and electronic special effects and its microphone-clutching worship leaders) from the malls and rock concerts and raves that are portrayed as the source of so much evil.

Make no mistake: this is now what many intelligent secular people imagine when they hear the words “Christian,” “salvation,” “faith,” “Bible,” and “evangelism.”

When does a distorted and debased version of the Gospel, and of church, become so problematic that we must flat-out denounce it, even though it claims the name of Jesus Christ? Do we just loftily ignore it, and hope it somehow goes away; or do we confront it—and if so, how? My daughter (a candidate for ordination) recently said to me, “If I couldn’t be in an Episcopal church, I would be much more comfortable in an egalitarian conservative Jewish synagogue than in a fundamentalist Christian church, in spite of the fact that the most important article of my faith is one that I supposedly share with the fundamentalist Christians and not with the Jews.” I heartily agreed with her. Some of this is a matter of culture, class and education. But not all. I really believe they are preaching a different Jesus than the one I find in the Bible. When does the time come to say so—publicly, loudly, and often?

(c) 2007 by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard. All rights reserved.

[1] This is not in the book; we added it some years after the book was published. For more information about the Bible Halloween funhouse, feel free to give me a call.

THE LOST TOOLS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION: A Sunday Paper Editorial

My daughter Grace was a toddler when The Sunday Paper began life. She’s now a seminary graduate and in line for ordination in the Diocese of Connecticut when her class of ordinands catches up with her (she did things in the wrong order, attending seminary first and then entering the ordination process). This year she is working as a youth minister in a suburban parish. She asked if I would let her write this season’s Editorial Page, and of course I was delighted. The apple doesn’t fall very far from the tree. For a parent (or teacher, or other form of mentor) this is a wonderful affirmation, and also a reminder of how much responsibility we bear: we do have an impact; we do, in actual fact, engage in “formation” of those we rear and those we teach.

THE LOST TOOLS OF RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

by Grace Pritchard Burson

As parent volunteers tossed salad and cut up bread in the church kitchen, the rector and I went over last-minute details of the evening’s Youth Program Dinner.

“I’ve got five or ten minutes of announcements and thanks to give before we serve,” I said. “Then I’ll hand it to you to say grace.”

“We should sing the Doxology,” he replied. “Except these kids probably don’t know the Doxology. We learned it growing up. They didn’t.”

“You know,” I said, “I frequently think that until at least fourth or fifth grade, church school should involve nothing but learning hymns. OK, stories too, and artwork in response to both. But no discussion, at least none that isn’t initiated by the kids. No moral lessons. No abstract teaching. Just learning the songs and stories that are the building blocks of our faith.”

The rector was intrigued by the idea, though he knew (and I readily admitted) that it was essentially nothing more than the philosophy of Christian education my mother has been promoting since I was born, and which is encapsulated in the Beulah Land curriculum. We discussed it energetically—though briefly, since people were beginning to arrive. I was intrigued to notice that what I was advocating bore a remarkable similarity to the philosophy of secular education outlined in 1947 by the great Anglican writer Dorothy L. Sayers (better known as the author of the Lord Peter Wimsey mystery novels), in her essay “The Lost Tools of Learning.” [The essay is out of print, and I have used a copy available online at http://www.brccs.org/sayers_tools.html.]

Sayers proposes a return to the Trivium—the curriculum of grammar, dialectic and rhetoric that was the method of the medieval Schools. She identifies three stages of development that she names, with her usual élan, the “Poll-Parrot”, the “Pert” and the “Poetic”.

The Poll-Parrot stage is the one in which learning by heart is easy and, on the whole, pleasurable; whereas reasoning is difficult and, on the whole, little relished. At this age, one readily memorizes the shapes and appearances of things; one likes to recite the number-plates of cars; one rejoices in the chanting of rhymes and the rumble and thunder of unintelligible polysyllables; one enjoys the mere accumulation of things. The Pert age, which follows upon this (and, naturally, overlaps it to some extent), is characterized by contradicting, answering back, liking to “catch people out” (especially one’s elders); and by the propounding of conundrums. Its nuisance-value is extremely high. ... The Poetic age is popularly known as the “difficult” age. It is self-centered; it yearns to express itself; it rather specializes in being misunderstood; it is restless and tries to achieve independence; and, with good luck and good guidance, it should show the beginnings of creativeness; a reaching out towards a synthesis of what it already knows, and a deliberate eagerness to know and do some one thing in preference to all others. Now it seems to me that the layout of the Trivium adapts itself with a singular appropriateness to these three ages: Grammar to the Poll-Parrot, Dialectic to the Pert, and Rhetoric to the Poetic age.

Sayers goes on to lay out her ideas about how the business of education should proceed—first accumulating facts, dates, multiplication tables, and so on, to provide material for the mind to work on; then learning to debate, to apply logic and reason, and to spot flaws in arguments; and finally going on to interpretation and creative work.

So when I said to the rector that the earlier years of Christian education (certainly in Episcopal churches, and arguably in all churches) should consist of nothing but stocking the children’s minds with the concrete building blocks of the Christian (and, in Episcopal churches, Anglican) traditions—what I was saying was, in essence, that we should use Sayers’ method in Sunday school. For the first eight or ten years of their lives, children memorize easily, and are happy to parrot back what they have memorized ad infinitum—as any parent subjected to endless repetitions of the latest Disney song or cookie commercial is well aware. We should take advantage of this facility, and simply give them the lore—songs, stories, and images—without demanding that they analyze it or answer questions about it. It is enough that the stories of the Bible, and translations of texts by Hilary of Poitiers, Adam of St. Victor, Martin Luther, Isaac Watts, Charles Wesley, and John Keble, are competing for disk space in their heads with the effluvia of consumer culture. It wouldn’t matter whether they understood the hymns or not; they would know them, and they could come to understanding as they got older. (It would, of course, be a huge help in learning the hymns to have at least one teacher who was a confident a cappella singer, so that the tunes could be well learned alongside the words before the children become cripplingly shy about singing in public.)

Of course, many fine curricula—among them Godly Play and, of course, Beulah Land—already do this, in essence; though I think the potential for hymn learning is greater than currently realized. What is particularly interesting to me—since I’m the youth minister, and responsible for sixth grade and up—is how Sayers’ method would map onto our approach to the older grades.

If the “Grammar” stage of our Christian education system was firmly in place—if children emerged from fourth or fifth grade with a thorough knowledge of the whole sweep of Bible story and with their memories stocked with the classic hymns of our tradition—the possibilities for youth ministry would be astonishing.

I sat in on a Rite-13 class on All Saints’ Sunday that involved an energetic discussion of what does and does not constitute a saint. Photocopies of “I Sing A Song of the Saints of God” and “For All the Saints” were passed around and commented on. But we ran out of time before we even got through “For All the Saints”; in the slim time we have for church school, the discussion could have been even more fruitful if all the kids had simply known those hymns already and been able to call upon them out of a common stock of lore, learned as small children and retained as they grew older. And when we did get into church, the singing of the hymn would have been that much more meaningful.

I know a DRE whose church implemented Godly Play a few years ago, and also does Journey to Adulthood. The first crop of Godly Play graduates recently passed into the J2A Rite-13 group, and my colleague says the difference is striking. They are calmer, more open to wonder and questioning, and they really know their stuff.

With the basics well in hand as the children emerge from the elementary grades, the youth minister would be able to draw on the tools of Dialectic and Rhetoric to encourage the young people to make the tradition their own.

Sayers’ “Pert” stage, corresponding roughly to middle school, would be a natural time to inquire, debate and pull apart the whole structure of Christian theology, encouraging questioning about God, humanity, free will, sin, salvation, ethics, and theodicy. And with a vast common store of raw theological data to draw on, in the form of stories, images and hymns, the teacher would feel less nervous about the choppier waters into which these discussions frequently steer. Instead of relying solely on his or her own experience and imagination to respond to—for example—a young person who is arguing stoutly that the Cross is disgusting and horrible and something no God worthy of worship would perpetrate on his Son, the teacher could point the inquirer to any number of texts to wrestle with, from the Sacrifice of Isaac to the Vexilla Regis and the Passion Chorale. No laborious reading of texts in class would be required; the stories and hymns would be well-known to all.

Then, as the young people progressed into high school and the “Poetic” stage, and began striving for originality and differentiation from their parents, the emphasis would shift to Rhetoric—approaching the tradition creatively rather than dialectically, and making it one’s own through interpretation. Some of the teenage energy frequently directed into wearing black, starting rock bands, and writing poetry, could be aimed instead at coming to one’s own theological insights and expressing them in verse, music, drama, or whatever other form came to hand. Sayers’ idea of bringing back the “thesis”—the independent presentation of work that provides the capstone to the Trivium—might manifest itself in an individual presentation before Confirmation (at a fairly late age--16 or 17).

In fact, the Journey to Adulthood curriculum, as it currently stands, is fairly well suited to this approach; it encourages questioning and debate at every stage, it acknowledges the teenager’s search for a sense of self and for separation from the family, and it lays an emphasis in the last (“YAC”) segment on coming up with one’s own statement of purpose and vocation. What it cannot provide, and strives valiantly to make up for, is the assumption that the young people come into the program with any kind of basic literacy in the stories and songs of our faith. And that assumption is legitimate—in most churches, it would be audacious to assume that sixth-graders have a working knowledge of the Bible and hymnal, and so one goal of the Rite-13 years is to provide basic Biblical and Prayer Book literacy. But by sixth and seventh grade, young people don’t want to be learning Bible stories; they want to be figuring out the adult world they are gradually awakening to.

Thus, shifting our early Sunday School instruction to a model which focused exclusively on the transmission of stories, songs and other lore, would take burdens off both the Sunday School teachers and the youth leaders. In the primary classrooms, it would remove the burden of “lesson plans” and didactic instruction; the teacher would only be responsible for knowing and passing on the content and for being willing to follow the children’s occasional inquiries wherever they might go, with no expectation that anyone will emerge with “answers” or moral lessons. The children would happily soak up the stories, characters, songs and images, take them into their artwork and imaginative play, and be enriched.

The youth leaders, in turn, would be freed of the burden of trying to impart the content at a late date and in a haphazard manner, at an age when young people want activities, discussion, and fellowship, not Bible lessons. Building on that firm foundation, they would be able to have a much richer, more nuanced and theologically informed conversation with the young people as they grappled with their faith, the world, and their place in it.

Again, the equipment to do all of this already exists, or at least is implicit, in the curricula I have mentioned, which are widely used--Godly Play, Beulah Land and Journey to Adulthood. It is merely a matter of adjusting one’s focus, away from the didactic educational model of both Sunday school and youth programs, and toward the idea that we are imparting the tradition to those whose heritage it is. With that insight, and with the unorthodox but developmentally sound ideas of a great Anglican thinker, everything else falls into place.

I spent much of my childhood sitting in Sunday school, and then in church, memorizing hymns. More than fifteen years later, those hymns are the center of my spirituality. Granted, I was an odd and cerebral child, and I’m Gretchen’s daughter. But if few of my fellow Episcopalians of my generation and younger share my experience, I think that is chiefly because it was not offered to them. I wanted the lore, and I sought it out. But our children should not have to seek it out. It is their heritage, and we should make sure they make it their own.

© 2006 by Grace Pritchard Burson. All rights reserved.

NOTES: This article refers to several curriculums which may not be familiar to all of you. Of course you could just google them, but for the record:

Godly Play developed out of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, the work of Sofia Cavalletti, an Italian educator who applied Montessori techniques to religious education. Her approach is described in The Religious Potential of the Child (2nd edition, Liturgy Training Publications, 1992) and emphasizes parables, liturgy and sacraments. She pioneered the use of manipulables (wooden, clay, or laminated-paper figures) in presenting sacred stories to children, and emphasized “helping them discover God for themselves.” Godly Play is the work of Jerome Berryman, an American who began as a Presbyterian layperson doing clinical psychological work with young children and later studied with Cavalletti. On returning to the US, he was ordained as an Episcopal priest and began adapting Cavalletti’s methods to a fuller Biblical canon. Along the way, he partnered with Sonja Stewart, a Christian Reformed religious educator who (independently, I believe) had had some of the same insights as Cavalletti, and they published Young Children and Worship (Westminster John Knox) in 1989. It is a curriculum, with story scripts, an order of worship, and patterns to make the story figures, and it allowed church educators, for the first time, to adapt Montessori techniques in the parish without attending a formal training institute. Later, Stewart and Berryman went their separate ways. Berryman brought out his own complete set of curricular materials under the name Godly Play. Young Children and Worship now has a sequel, Following Jesus, by Stewart alone. Her materials are used in many reformed churches under names such as “Children Worship and Wonder,” or “The Worship Center.” All these methodologies now operate training institutes, etc. Godly Play seems to be the one best known in Episcopal churches. See Catechesis of the Good Shepherd and Godly Play. Beulah Land grew out of The Sunday Paper, cross-fertilized by Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, Young Children and Worship, and Godly Play. It uses a feltboard rather than three-dimensional manipulables.

Journey to Adulthood (“Rite 13,” “J2A” and “YAC” [“Young Adults in the Church”]) is a comprehensive model of youth ministry originally developed in an Episcopal parish setting. Grace’s article gives a general sense of its developmental and theological underpinnings.

LETTING THE CHILDREN COME: A Sunday Paper Editorial

The stream of books issuing from the impetus of Dorothy Bass’ Practicing Our Faith (Jossey-Bass, 1997) has continued unabated, and includes a good many focusing on children. Here’s a look at two of them.

Let the Children Come: Reimaging Childhood from a Christian Perspective by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003. Hardbound, 219 pp. including a study guide for parish use.

Welcoming Children: A Practical Theology of Childhood by Joyce Ann Mercer (foreword by Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore). St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1995. Paperback, 291 pp. including bibliography and notes.

The first of these books is designed for parish study and use; the second is academic in orientation—for use in seminary classes and to advance the dialogue among professional theologians. The very fact that professional theologians are writing about children—that they can frame such a thing as a “practical theology of childhood”—is a sign of progress in the academy that is greatly to be welcomed. I can remember when a search for “children” in the catalog of the Yale Divinity School library came up virtually blank.

Neither book is an easy read. To begin with, neither book is about children; they are both about childhood. As Bonnie Miller-McLemore explains in her introduction to Let the Children Come:

It is important to clarify that this is not a book about how children think in general or about how children think about God. Nor is it a book on how to raise children in Christian faith. When I first received a grant for this research and news reached the general public, this was the general assumption of newspersons, my neighbors, and my kids’ teachers. … These are indeed important subjects, and the book’s reflections certainly have implications for those other three tasks. It even took me a while to become clear, however, that this is a book about how adults think about children (a descriptive task) and about how adults should think about children (a prescriptive or normative task). (p. xxv)

Miller-McLemore goes on to comment that before she could begin to write about “raising children from a Christian perspective” she had to address, and critique, “dominant cultural views of children.”

Both books are cultural studies first and foremost, and both place themselves firmly in a liberal, Reformed, feminist context. Both authors are painfully aware that one aspect of feminism—and of feminist theology, especially in the popular mind—has appeared to be the denigration of family life and children, the pitting of the interests, freedom and self-realization of women against the needs of their own children and of children in general. The addressing of this apparent paradox takes up a large part of both books.

Reasonably enough, the bulk of the authors’ critique is addressed to the all-pervasive commercial, consumerist culture that has commodified both children and faith. For parish clergy and educators who are trying to help parents find a Christian voice in the midst of what everybody already feels is a toxic culture, Miller-McLemore and Mercer provide a wealth of documentation and language that could bear fruit in preaching and newsletter articles. They also provide cultural history exploding the popular myth that the 1950’s style nuclear family, with father as commuting breadwinner and mother as homebound nurturer, represents in any way either a historical or a Christian norm; and they strongly critique the “family values” patriarchy of the religious right, on scriptural as well as historical-cultural grounds. Miller-McLemore, in addition, takes on the child psychologists, especially Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and a half dozen other books tracing adult unhappiness to profound childhood trauma at the hands of even “normal” or “good” parents).

Both books are fairly abstract and theoretical. They are not strong on vivid anecdotes, they contain no “case” stories; and the “practical” in Mercer’s title does not translate, as the lay reader might think, into concrete suggestions for parish liturgy or program until the last couple of chapters. Even then its readability for a general audience is hampered by the standard academic machinery of lengthy critiques of the work of previous scholars, hair-splitting about definitions, and a sometimes almost laughable postmodern bogging down in contextualization, politically correct circumlocution, and questioning of the validity of the simplest categories (including the category “child” itself).

For a parish with a critical mass of educated parents who would like some help in seeing their parenthood as a Christian vocation and practice, Let the Children Come could make a good jumping-off point for an adult discussion group. The discussion questions that accompany the book are excellent, and the book design is attractive, with wide margins that invite annotation (and, therefore, relatively short text lines that are forgiving of hasty readers who are just skimming, half an hour before class). Unfortunately, even with relatively few words per page, the six chapters are fairly long (25 to 30 pages) and do not readily subdivide into sections that could be assigned and discussed independently of each other.

My suspicion is that participants in an adult class using this book would be all too likely to come to class unprepared, or (unfortunately) to drop out because they hadn’t done the reading. If the parish culture made it clear that people are welcome in class even if they didn’t get around to the week’s reading assignment, I’m guessing that such a group could have a fruitful dialogue based on Let the Children Come if the leader him- or herself had read the book thoughtfully, used the discussion questions skillfully, and was open to letting the participants take their conversation where it actually led them. Heaven knows, such a dialogue is sorely needed.

For a parents’ discussion group about the specific issues of children’s faith, of how to organize parish and family life so that children are welcomed in the Sunday morning worship, and of how to institute and sustain specific Christian practices in the home (family prayer, holiday celebrations, and so on), you’ll want to look elsewhere. The best books for these purposes still seem to be the following, all from the 80s and 90s:

• Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth (Penguin, 1991);
• Joan Halmo, Celebrating the Church Year with Young Children (Liturgical Press, 1988);
• Gertrud Mueller Nelson, To Dance with God: Family Ritual and Community Celebration (Paulist, 1986);
• David Ng and Virginia Thomas, Children in the Worshiping Community (Westminster John Knox, 1981).

© 2006 by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard. All rights reserved.

FAMILY VALUES: A Sunday Paper Editorial

The other day I spoke with a pillar of the Episcopal Church who is thinking of leaving the church in the wake of the General Convention actions on issues concerning human sexuality. This person’s deeply felt conviction is that while it is our Christian duty to welcome gay and lesbian persons as fellow citizens and fellow church members, it is simply not appropriate for them to be ordained clergy, “role models for children.” The same week, I was told of someone leaving the church in despair because the church was not moving far enough, fast enough, to fully affirm equal access to ordination at all levels and to blessing for committed relationships.

Jesus’s only recorded words on what we now call “family values” are found in Mark 10—and its parallels in the other synoptic Gospels—where he tells the Pharisees that the law of Moses allowed divorce because of human “hardness of heart,” but “from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one.’ … What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” This paragraph is followed by a brief discussion with the disciples, and then by the little episode where parents bring their children to Jesus for blessing and Jesus welcomes them over the objections of his followers. Perhaps Mark placed these two pericopes side by side intentionally, implicitly connecting the importance of committed relationships to the care and protection of children.

This chapter is read in Year B, as Proper 22. In the Episcopal lectionary, it is paired with the reading from Genesis that Jesus quotes, allowing the preacher (and the cartoonist) to struggle with the Genesis myth, if desired, instead of Jesus’s words. In the Revised Common Lectionary, however, the Old Testament reading is from Job (“Then Job’s wife said to him, ‘Why do you still hold to your integrity? Curse God, and die’”) so the preacher (and again, the cartoonist), perhaps wishing he or she could follow this advice, has little choice but to tackle the Gospel. What follows below is a considerable expansion of the “Note to Parents” on this issue of THE SUNDAY PAPER JUNIOR.

Mark, Chapter 10, strikes to the heart of the “family values” debate that is tearing apart our civil society and our churches. Asked his opinion of divorce, Jesus reminds us of God’s design in creation: we are made male and female in the image of God. We are to form lifelong bonds of love. And in the next paragraph, Mark describes Jesus welcoming and blessing children.

In the patriarchal culture in which Jesus lived, divorce could be initiated only by the husband, and it left the wife without status, social protection, or economic support. This grave injustice toward women, Jesus points out, reflects “hardness of heart,” and deserves condemnation. In a different culture, the justice equation may compute differently. Most Christians in our culture now believe that there are circumstances where divorce, however sad, is better—more just—than remaining in an abusive relationship or one in which caring and trust have been violated or lost.

What of “God made them male and female”—the issue that now consumes so much ink, and so much time and energy? What would Jesus do? What would Jesus say?

There are honest and wrenching differences of opinion here, as well as much shallow prejudice on both sides, and much cynical manipulation of the issue for the sake of power and political gain, both within the church and within the wider society.

What we do know, if we read the Gospels with an open mind and an open heart, is that Jesus consistently took the part of the powerless, the outcast, the marginalized, the “unclean.” He set far more store on justice than on purity, and more store on love than on justice. We who, in baptism, have turned to him as our savior, put our whole trust in his grace and love, and promised to obey and follow him as our Lord, would do well to bear this well in mind.

The social structures through which we enact our response to Jesus’ love may change. What does not change is Jesus’ love itself. As I have struggled with my own prejudices and the rapid speed of social change, I’ve tried to come to a nuanced response to this issue, and one that I hope addresses some of the real causes of people’s powerful feelings in ways that have perhaps not been articulated before.

I want to begin with one of the arguments raised a generation ago in the controversy over the ordination of women. It has to do with the fact that most people think in pictures. Everybody knows how hard the media work to exploit this simple fact. Until we have enough pictures in our heads of a new idea or social trend, we are likely to find it alien and threatening. This is, of course, doubly and triply so when the picture involves something so basic and primal as human sexuality or religion—let alone the areas where the two overlap. When all the pictures for “priest” in our heads involve a male figure, the idea of a female priest will be felt by many as profoundly bizarre. When the word “marriage” conjures up primarily “wedding,” and “wedding” means “bride and groom”—she, blushing and radiant in gauzy white, he tall and strong and ruggedly handsome—then there is no room in our heads for an alternative image.

And we must tread carefully here, because Scripture is a tissue of images. So is liturgy. Our faith is incarnational and sacramental, and depends on the primal power of images to stir our hearts and inspire longing and hope. We should not want to empty language and images of their traditional meanings in order to replace them with images that are less concrete, less highly flavored. We must not lose the language of “Father” and “bride” that, along with so many other ancient, specific and sensory images—garden, desert, city, mountain, fortress, well, king, sword, shield, shepherd, lamb, vineyard, winepress, bread, wine, oil, salt, water, blood—give us a rich and fertile vocabulary for faith, hope, and love.

What we need instead is to be open to allowing our images of our daily life to be changed and augmented even as the ancient archetypes retain their power. So our image of “mother” or “bride” or “priest” must mean much, much more than (say) June Cleaver or the model on the cover of Bride magazine or kindly old Father Fluster. We need to relearn the difference between archetype and cliché. Archetypes are deep and wide and flexible; they bend and stretch and can absorb new elements while bringing their ancient richness to bear on new circumstances. Clichés are thin and shoddy, easily rendered worthless but hard to discard, and ultimately damaging to the flesh and blood realities that try to adopt them or accommodate to them.

We need to travel more widely in time and space to enrich our vocabulary of images. It is a pure shame, for example, when an eight-year-old girl has only an image of Barbie with fairy wings to draw on if she tries to paint a picture of an angel. We need to tell and see and read many more different myths and folk tales and great works of art, to enrich our imaginations and make us more discerning, less provincial and defensive, about our mental images.

And we need to meet and know real individuals from that category of people we now think of as alien and scary. Thirty years after the first women priests, most Episcopalians have come to know enough ordained women that their image of “priest” has stretched to include a female figure in a clerical collar or eucharistic robes, and have found that their imaginations are no longer challenged, but rather enriched, by that stretching. Incidentally, they are no longer socially or politically prejudiced against women in the priesthood. We may find that “bride,” “groom,” “husband,” “wife,” “marriage” and “wedding” can stretch in the same way, or we may need to call on new words. But we will, inevitably come to know committed same-sex couples as neighbors, colleagues, acquaintances, and friends, out of the church if not in it. Our categories for “couple,” “household,” and “family” are going to change, broaden, and become richer and more complex. To think that they will not is an illusion. Even if we managed to insulate the church from such images, they are everywhere in our culture. And, if Jesus places justice above “purity,” and love above all, we are bound to welcome this change.

Like it or not, we live in a post-Freudian, therapeutic culture, that places supremely high value on individual self-realization and self-expression, and that expects individuals to achieve that self-realization and self-expression first and foremost through intimate (for which read sexual) relationships. Such a culture was bound to give rise to the un-closeting of gays and lesbians, who would demand, in the interest of justice, that in such a culture, this form of personal fulfillment be made available to them in a way that did not deny who and what they most deeply felt themselves to be.

Scripture speaks of “God’s right hand” and we know what it means. We speak of “left-handed compliments” and we know that gauche and sinister, with their obviously negative meanings, are the French and Latin words for “left.” Our archetype of “right” and “left” is alive and well, and very useful; but we no longer feel threatened by actual left-handed people—about ten percent of the population, approximately the same percentage as homosexuals. We long ago gave up trying to make left-handed children change, to do it “right,” to become “normal” like the rest of us. Perhaps some day we will look back and be able to see that our images for human sexual intimacy have also stretched to include those who are sexually “left-handed;” that we can reject the shallow clichés, and respect the real flesh-and-blood people who actually live with us and interact with us in our actual contemporary culture, without our world of archetypes falling into chaos around us.




© 2006 by Gretchen Wolff Pritchard. All rights reserved.