Dispatch #38
Friday, October 18
Rockford, Illinois

We're just about to connect the dots of our itinerary into its final shape: a large, wobbly loop. We left from Chicago on the 17th of August, will return to Chicago again on the 19th and 20th of October. On the 20th in the western suburb of Schaumburg, we'll hold our second last rally; on the 21st, then, it'll be the last rally in my own home territory, on the campus of Valparaiso, Indiana.

And this is likely to be the second last dispatch I'll send home from some dot on the map of this itinerary to you, readers still limping with me toward blessed conclusions.

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Tonight, the children! A large choir of young children will sit in the choir's section to the right of the chancel as the congregation faces it. At the right time during the rally, they will rise and sing.

However could I ignore them?

I will walk over to them and look them in their eyes till they look back in mine; I will touch them--and I will call them by name.

How blessed are those congregations who welcome little children into the fullness of their worship--for worship must be of the whole people, adults recognizing the right of all the baptized even to rituals the children do not understand, children growing into the proper habits of worship, as a whole congregation participates in the necessary job of accepting (first) and kindly (second) teaching the children among them.

Thanne and I knew that much of our children's behavior would be learned not by explanations nor by scoldings but by habitual activity. If we always prayed before we ate and then again when the meal was done, then, even though they may not understand it, it becomes for them both the right and the fulfilling thing to do. It is as if we are preparing a cup in each child's life and expectation, a habitual cup which, though in children it may be nearly empty of understanding, will nevertheless remain in the child's habit until understanding and personal agreement have filled the cup to the brim. But if there were no cup, then to train them in holy activity later will seem profoundly legalistic and void of necessity.

Every lasting culture has known that to keep its truths alive through succeeding generations requires that their children dance the ancient dances long before their intelligence can understand. Ritual (especially worship) is the way we dance our dance: music, repetitious movement bearing the sense of mystery (such as kneeling, rising, approaching the altar for a brief, transcendent meal), repeated language uttered in a manner not common to Monday through Saturday, dressing clean and pressed for God, solemn discussions and teachings, the crucial reading of Biblical texts. When the children are invited to dance, they are not unlike the children of aboriginal people who watch in an awful silence as their elders accomplish mysteries in their own dances, action at a level that gazes toward universal power. In our case the supreme is not power only, but love as well.

So Thanne and I brought our children to church. No denying it. And Thanne sat with them near the front, that they might see and be genuinely a part of the sacred dance. And I, when I preached, would walk near to them and offer things in the sermon they could comprehend ... naming them.

And when a child would begin to cry, it became my habit to pause in the preaching, to acknowledge the crying as its own piercing prayer, its own hymn, speaking of this event until the people had made peace with the child's presence and I could go on. You can do such things, you know. The invitation to accept the child's sound actually eases the people (who make the communal gift of accepting) even as it eases the atmosphere around the parent and the noisier child. Soon enough they grew older, grew used to our Sunday dance, grew quiet, entered the children's choir (however young they might be) and became lead dancers thereby.

I know how much that grave deity Efficiency has come to demand our obedience. It is the god of the Thousands (or the mulitudinal Hundreds) all trying to keep worship within some specified period of time, planning how folks can move efficiently in and out of parking lots, reading studies on how long a person can sit in a pew and pay attention. But Jesus never knew that God. If he did, he might have neglected the woman with an issue of blood, saying, "Look, I have an appointment. Jairus was here ahead of you, I wrote his name in my Daytime Planner (lesser angel of the Deity Efficiency) and I have got to go there first to raise his daughter!" Instead, despite time, he pauses not only to acknowledge the healing of this woman, but to chat a while. He pauses so long that the folks come sadly to Jairus shaking their heads, saying, "Too late. She's dead."

If children are whisked away for the sake of efficiency, for the sake of the adult's quietude, for their own Sunday School, then the greater lesson is lost on all generations: that we are--all of us together--the body of Christ, the worshiping family of God, and that there is among us (if we would truly recall the early church) a radical equality male and female, rich and poor, young and old.

Yes. I admit that this can be done infinitely better, more comfortably and with less strain in the small congregation. Parishes whose memberships have grown above a thousand must needs industrialize--and that takes a serious juggling of jobs and times. And yes, I know that the general population is coming to view worship as less personal, more the self's fulfilment, an event of which they require efficiency; more and more people like to worship among large numbers. And so the times of the culture have begun to dictate the times of our worship. And it is our calling to preach Jesus to as many as we can--and how else can this be accomplished except according to the severe commandments of efficiency? It is a knotty, knotty problem.

Spiritually, it lays the burden upon parents to do what congregations once did (while many parents of the smaller parish acting together for the sakes of all their children made a watchful network that served any one mother or father).

And the concerned Parishes of The Thousand are to be praised for creating smaller groups of parishioners, each family in a group committed to the other families therein (the children included), meeting with a religious regularity.

But I return to the original thought, now put as a question: how shall we keep our children as integral parts of our sacred ritual? How shall they know from infancy their genuine inclusion (as much in the tough stuff as in light, kiddy things?) And how shall that knowledge grow with them into the very behaviors that guide their adulthoods?--since, I believe, it is behavior that begets behavior; it is the unquestioned behaviors of the adults around us, who do from time unmemoried walk us with them through those behaviors.

Now I must thank you for having read this far into this dispatch; for we together end with questions. My earlier resolutions of the matter are born of my bias and my experience (small churches being one of these).

Perhaps we, as the larger church body, can put our various biases together, never to let these questions to be answered by the general, unexamined evolution of our church, but rather to seek and to follow a better way.

The children will sing tonight. And how could I not acknowledge them as part of this larger company? I will walk to a place close before them and grin and speak to them alone ... while the adults are invited to overhear.

Walt

Do we lose young adults because they were somewhat marginalized as children?--given ceremony and rewards and pleasures of their own?