The First Parish in Bedford Unitarian Universalist 75 The Great Road, Bedford, Massachusetts 01730 On the Common 781-275-7994

 

These Are the Things That We Want You to Know

A Sermon about the Religious Education Program

Delivered on Sunday, February 25, 2001

At First Parish in Bedford

 

 

 

Song: These Are the Things that We Want You to Know
(to be sung to the tune of “My Favorite Things”):

Written by Doug Muder & friends

 

Don’t pester your sister and don’t sell your brother.

Be helpful and kind to your dad and your mother.

Remember those legoes hurt on the bare toe

These are some things that we want you to know.

 

You don’t have to like folks, but you shouldn’t hate them.

It’s shameful and shocking, the ways that we rate them

The color of skin, or the clothes that they wear.

Look beneath those to the things that you share.

 

Chorus:

Sunday mornings, when we gather.

What on earth is this?

The place is alive with all ages of folks

The noise is the song of bliss…

 

Your mind is your own and it’s okay to use it.

Your view of creation… feel free to choose it.

Your thoughts, dreams and feelings have come from somewhere

Come seek out that something for which you can care.

 

Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Krishna

Gospel and sutra and veda and mishnah

Channing and Emerson, Parker, Thoreau

These are some things that we want you to know.

 

Chorus

 

 

 Mallory LaSonde (Student Minister):

Opening Words:

Life is a journey and it is said that journeys begin with a single step. Actually, our human journey begins long before that first step, even before our birth. It is the nature of humans and human interaction that we learn and we teach. While we are in the womb we are already learning whether we like spicy food and chocolate and the moment of our birth we are teaching those around us who we are and they are teaching us about the world we have entered.

One of our greatest responsibilities as people is to provide one another with knowledge and skills. As we teach, we learn. As Unitarian Universalists we are proud to be always on a spiritual journey and never to be satisfied that we have arrived. So on our journey we carry our knapsack or suitcase full of tools that we have picked up along the way. When confronted with some new challenge we open our bag and pull out the tools of understanding or compassion or curiosity. We dig around and find our imagination or our empathy or our ability to tell stories.

Those tools are our gifts for the road. We get them from parents, siblings, friends, mentors, and teachers of all kinds. Religious education is about teaching and learning, about giving one another those tools, fillings our children’s knapsacks and suitcases, and helping them along their path as they begin their spiritual journey.

 

 

Cori Doud (Co-Chair, Religious Education Committee):

 

This is a reading from “The Gift of Faith”,
by Jeanne Nieuwejaar, entitled “The Children”

Whether we wish it so or not, our children are religious, spiritual beings. From within their own magical selves they know feelings, intuitions, and impulses. From the people, stories, songs, and media of their environs they hear religious words and messages and see religious symbols and images.

From the experiences of their daily living they encounter religious events.

·      They see dry sticks sprout pulsing green leaves.

·      They see the deer killed on the highway.

·      They watch their teacher’s tummy grow round with new life, and bid farewell to their uncle dying of AIDS.

From the demands of their living and growing in the world they face situations that require from them a religious decision, response, or interpretation.

We cannot choose whether they will be religious, but we can choose how and to what extent we will support, guide, and celebrate this dimension of their nature.

 

Luanne Livesay (Co-Chair, Religious Education Committee):

 

When I stop to think about why I bring my kids to church, I keep going back to a service that John gave about 2 years ago. In it he read portions of Anne Lamott’s book entitled Traveling Mercies. In explaining why she brings her son Sam to church she states: “The main reason is that I want to give him what I found in the world, which is to say a path and a little light to see by. Most of the people I know who have what I want—which is to say, purpose, heart, balance, gratitude, joy—are people with a deep sense of spirituality. They are people in community, who pray, or practice their faith; they are Buddhists, Jews, Christians—people banding together to work on themselves and for human rights. They follow a brighter light than the glimmer of their own candle; they are part of something beautiful.”

I have been a member of the Religious Education or RE Committee for about 4 years. Approximately 3½ years ago, some parents and RE teachers came to me and others on the committee, feeling disillusioned and frustrated with the RE “experience” being provided to their children. They felt impassioned to make a change. As it turned out, there were even more parishioners who shared their frustrations and wanted to make Religious Education programming special and sacred for the children—not just Sunday School, but a spiritual journey. The wheels and process began to turn—there were meetings with the then Director of Religious and RE Committee. A subcommittee was formed to look at our religious education community, format, curriculum… and facilitate change as appropriate. These wheels of change slowed during construction, but began turning with new vigor upon entry into our new space and with enthusiastic support from our now DRE.

So, What are we seeking for our children? We seek to:

·         Improve their faith identity.

·         Increase their opportunities to participate in and learn about worship.

·         Teach them values to grasp onto and mature with.

·         Provide them with more experiential learning tasks.

·         Increase their participation in intergenerational activities.

·         Create more opportunities for outreach to the larger UU community and beyond.

·         Develop consistency in program content, by creating and using curriculum that introduces younger children to basics themes and expands into more complex ideas and information as they mature..

In short, we seek to create a learning environment that is distinctly different from school. We want to make First Parish not about the comings and goings of a single classroom, but a community — a whole life experience, so to speak.

What are we seeking for our teachers and the adult community? We seek to:

·         Invoke passion for the material they teach and the children whose spiritual lives they tend to each week.

·         Empower them to be great educators and mentors.

·         Create a more supportive teaching environment.

·         Promote a desire to volunteer and contribute to the religious education of our youth.

·         Finally, to provide more opportunities for adult religious education in forums outside of our weekly worship service.

And where are we now? We find ourselves in the midst of a three year development of program and program content. Why did we embark on this project? We want our kids to experience mud puddles.

Mud puddles…

We want the people of this community to discover their own mud puddles.

Mud puddles…

We wish that the old and the young of this parish splash together in some mud puddles — as we all are traveling on a spiritual journey.

In an article by Sally Patton of the UUA she writes: “often we want to give the ocean to young children when splashing in the puddle is enough. We fall into this trap by the ways we choose to share our adult faith with our youngest children. In our hurry to communicate our faith, we often assume that words are the most effective vehicle. Yet by using only words, we may fail to engage children in those common mud-puddle experiences where faith and spirituality are most visible, such as sitting on a person’s lap and hearing a story, helping to bake bread, sharing a doughnut, or going with someone for a walk… These are the simple ways by which adults nurture and tend to the religious experiences of children.”

At First Parish we create and splash in puddles that flow beyond our classroom doors to the first 20 minutes of services each week, common fellowship hour, and intergenerational worship… to programs such as our weekly RE in-gatherings, the annual pageant, and our growing youth choirs… to rituals such as lighting the chalice and the sharing of joys and concerns in the classrooms… and to many First Parish service projects.

The way we teach and inspire our children is very important to us as a caring and spiritual community, and is reflected in how and what we communicate to our children during their religious education journey.

 

Cori:

 

This reading, also from “The Gift of Faith” by Jeanne Nieuwejaar, is entitled “The Religious Community”

In recent years we have heard so often, and in so many contexts, the phrase, “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” Nowhere is it more true than in the discussion of the religious nurture of children.

Community is a central part of this nurture for many reasons; for the support and ongoing religious education of the parents… for the embodiment and transmission of tradition, ritual, and story; and for the modeling and teaching offered by others in religious community.

But the most important reason is that to be a religious or spiritual being means to be in relationship with others. The central religious qualities of love and care become real only as they are lived, tested, and deepened in community.

Compassion and forgiveness are meaningless in the abstract. They are learned only in part through lessons.

They are learned fully through life, through the experience of being cared for and of being accepted and held even when we have been weak, wrong, or hurtful.

They are learned by being among others whose hearts and minds are truly open to one another.

They are learned as we are coached and held accountable for such virtues, as we are expected to live them out.

 

Rebecca Kelley-Morgan (Director of Religious Education):

Splash in puddles? What happened to religious EDUCATION? What happened to my job??????

Of course we’re going to teach. Of course we have things that we want our kids to know. But are we just going to tell them ‘stuff’? Sit them down in little classrooms with tables and chairs and markers and workbooks? Not a chance. We’re going to welcome them to church.

The religious education committee has spent hours planning and applying programs to do just that. Today we articulate some of the things we have been called to do in this ministry we call Religious Education.

Christian educator, Maria Harris, a voice for holistic religious education in this generation says, “We refuse to limit curriculum as it has been limited in the past. Curriculum is more than materials and techniques, it is intended for adults as well as children and it is offered through more forms of education than what is called schooling. The global and creative vision sees all facets of the church’s life as the church’s curriculum.”

Our religious education committee refused to limit curriculum to the Sunday classrooms, to dated and irrelevant resources and the division of generations within the church. The church is the curriculum. Think of everything we do as the work of religious education. Our worship lives. The messages on Sunday mornings. Evening meetings. The work of social justice. The connections and community made in the social life at First Parish. These are the things that we learn from and teach through.

It’s an enormous subject and we barely scratch it today. For now, I describe the three elements of foundational work we lay in building a cogent and coherent religious education program. Community, faith identity and permanence.

Community. It doesn’t come in tidy little dosage bottles doled out during an hour on Sunday morning. Nor is its contribution to religious and spiritual ‘growth’ measured in progressive and predictable increments.

I’ll bet by now, you’re saying, “That’s interesting, but what ARE you doing with the children?” Generally any experience that is meaningful for adults in search of community, we offer in some form to our children and youth. Think about what brings YOU here. Is it the uplifting music, the familiarity of the place and the people? The intimacy of candles of cares and joys? Or the social ambience of coffee hour? Do you come to quiet your mind in the peace of worship? Or do you actively engage with the ideas of a sermon or lecture? Do you participate in social justice and institutional change as an expression of who you most want to be?

Would you come here if it weren’t alive?

What are we doing with the children? We’re bringing church to life. We’re giving them a community.

As a faith community we must also find ways to connect our children with their religious identity.

A friend at First Parish tells a wonderful anecdote about her then five-year-old daughter. The child, bright and inquisitive, was trying to sort out the puzzling world of religious affiliation. Pointing to her neighbors, she said “They’re Jewish. . .am I Jewish?” Her mother replied in the negative. “My cousins are Christian . . . am I Christian?” Another no. You could see the wheels turning behind her serious frown. And then her face cleared. . .I know, she said excitedly. . .I’m Italian!

We know what we’ve had. We know what doesn’t work anymore. And the UUA agrees.

A long-range project is underway to develop a ‘core curriculum’. However, we plunged ahead of the UUA — we needed something for the Unitarian Universalists growing up in Bedford now. And if we want to raise Unitarian Universalists, we have to at least tell them that that’s what they are! And find them religious role models, and tell the drama of our heroes and our causes and our pedigrees. That’s how children make those connections, through reiteration of stories that become their own. Connection. To each other, to First Parish and to their faith.

Their faith – the one that invites them to pursue ‘the free and responsible search for truth and meaning’. We are asking much of young minds when we tell them they are charged with defining for themselves what is good and real and true. We ask them to find something of meaning to place at the center of their emotional and spiritual lives. We ask them to decide for themselves what to behold with awe and wonder. We ask them to ponder what constitutes a ‘good’ and ethical life. But the questions will uncover few answers unless we give them a set of tools to use in the excavation.

One of the issues we raised in our curriculum-writing project was the question of application. How do we offer a theological and religious education that one can take out and apply to their life? How do we instill a sense of permanence? Fluid and enduring permanence, like the cycle of the seasons or the ebb of the tides. What tools would we use? The answers were so obvious as to be almost embarrassing.

Starting with values. Our values. Our Unitarian Universalist values. Acceptance, Inclusion, Compassion, Honesty, Reason, Justice and More.

Sue Philly tells this (true) story: A librarian was reading to a group of children from a book with a Native American hero. At the end of the story, one child scornfully said, “I didn’t like that story, there are no such things as spirits.” Another girl in the group said, “I liked the story. I thought it was interesting to think about spirits.”

Reason? Acceptance? Curiosity? Values worth educating for. Timeless values which grow an intellect as well as a soul.

We found another tool to dust off. Depth. The radical step of limiting our theological focus in the didactic practices of Sunday morning. It has been a truism of Unitarian Universalist religious education that we offer a broad range of theologies to our children. After a generation or so of this, we ended up with confused and disenfranchised adults.

Secular educator Ted Sizer asks us to consider an ‘essential learning’ — cultivating the deeper thinking which we cannot experience when we hop skip and jump around the world of religious beliefs.

I have a letter that Cathy Cordes passed along to me. In it a college-aged Unitarian Universalist says, “I spent my whole childhood learning about every religion but my own.”

Depth. Contemplation. Roots.

And lastly, our children need a worship life — familiarity with the rituals of our faith learning to find meaning in communal worship, even on the days when ‘that sermon didn’t work’. Every child who comes here, even if they only walk in the doors three times a year will see the chalice lit, split and carried around to each classroom. Each child who comes here will hear an ingathering message here and in the Common Room. Each child who comes here will hear announcements, which indicate more clearly than any ‘discussion’ what is important to us. Each child who comes here will have a chance to bear witness to the truth of others’ experience.

It makes for a noisy church. I remember years ago, a young mother carried a crying baby from a baptismal service in a Catholic church. The priest, from the pulpit asked her to return to her family. “That is the most beautiful sound in the world, for it means we have a future.” He’s right. The noisy church has a future. The silent church (and I’ve been in a few) is a dying church.

And that is ultimately why we are here. We are voicing the commitment to our future, the commitment to children who ARE that future. We hold open the vision that we are not only beneficiaries of our faith, but stewards of it as well. That our children are the gift we tend in faith. That they are the prophets of all the institutional and religious values we do not want extinguished from this world.

That they and their children and their children’s children will continue our vision of Unitarian Universalism when my voice is silent and we have all crumbled into dust.

We hold that future in our hands. A future that has not yet told its story in the lives of our children. We, and they, hold all the possibilities. That is the thing that we want them to know.

 

Mallory LaSonde:

Closing Words:

We are each on a spiritual journey. We are looking and learning, exploring all the richness of the world’s religions have to offer. Reaching across the breadth of human spiritual discovery to seek out truth. And we are searching beyond the breadth offered by Moses and Jesus and Buddha and Krishna to find depth in human spiritual experience. We seek to develop the spiritual discipline these ideas offer. Whether it be Zen meditation or prayer, yoga or a journal, we seek to deepen our understanding.

And so here in this place where, at least for a time, both the breadth and depth of our journeys have thankfully come together, we have learned a little about what we, as a community, throughout religious educators, are doing to help prepare our children for their journeys. As we go out into the day, into the world, onto our spiritual paths, again I invite you to celebrate the vision or members of this community and all the teachers along your path who have helped you get this far. AMEN and Blessed Be.