A Holy Hill

The Beatitudes & The Promise Of Liberation – Starting with Children

Dear Friends,

Hills are a peculiar thing. Right now, I live in a very hilly neighborhood, but it’s a neighborhood full of the sort of hills I often don’t notice, with the exception of one particularly steep stretch. Growing up, I lived at the top of a small hill that made bicycling exciting; if you could push your body up the steeper stretches of hill, you could fly down so fast. And in between those times there was a “holy little hill,” as my friend Brother John Magdalene always calls it. That holy hill was the home of the beloved church where I first came to know Godly Play.

Hills live at the heart of metaphors – making a mountain out of a mole hill, a hill you are (or aren’t) willing to die on. They’re part of myths and mythic jokes – Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill, the grandparent who walked uphill (both ways!) in the snow to school. And hills are vital landmarks, in literal ways and mentally. You remember struggling up a hill on a run or the buildings you seemed to approach from below. I was a high school runner. We practiced running up hills and felt the freedom of flying down them, stride elongated, risking a headlong tumble that never came.

In this week’s Psalm, the psalmist asks, “Lord, who may dwell in your tabernacle?
Who may abide upon your holy hill?” It’s hardly the only hill imagery in the Psalms - try “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills” (Psalm 121) or “For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills” (Psalm 50) or “the mountains skipped like rams, the hills like lambs” Psalm 114 – but because of the way people dear to me have used this phrase, it stood out to me.

So, what’s up with all the hills? Hills are sites of majesty, of peak spiritual experiences, of closeness to God, and that is in many ways my experience of them. The view from the top of a hill is often glorious, even in unexpected places. Climbing a mountain fills us with accomplishment. Being a runner flying down a hill is as close as I’ll ever get to flying without an airplane (I assure you, there is no hang gliding in my future).

Highs And Lows And Other Reversals

There are so many reasons to love the lectionary, but one of the reasons I enjoy looking at it closely from week to week is so that I can see more fully the careful intention that weaves the different parts together. It makes so much sense that we have this Psalm - “who may abide upon your holy hill” – alongside the Sermon on the Mount. Hills and mountains. High points. They’re essentially interchangeable in the text, synonyms for those peak experiences. But not only that –

We are told in the Psalms that those who do what is right can live on that holy hill, and given a list of right actions. This is then followed by a Gospel lesson that can best be understood as the ultimate expression of Jesus’s preferential option for the poor and vulnerable. And do you know who comes out “on top” in that formulation? A lot of overlooked groups, but most certainly children.

The Sermon on the Mount by Jorge Cocco

One week on that holy little hill where once I worshipped, in our children’s chapel gathering, we talked about how Jesus declares that “the first shall be last and the last shall be first,” which is another articulation of the Beatitudes, and we live in a culture in which children are fundamentally last. Too often we fail to consider their desires, their autonomy, their capacity. But Jesus doesn’t overlook those things. Jesus tells us we must become more like children. Failing that, though, we can at least try to honor children more fully. After all, we are called to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. And as much as we want to instill the ethos of the Beatitudes in children, modeling that starts with us.

Liberation & Revival

In the 1960s and 70s, children’s liberation was a movement that really seemed to have legs. I had the privilege to work on this movement a bit as a research assistant to a favorite professor during my undergraduate years, but it’s also a topic that’s been at the center of conversation a lot more lately, specifically with one of my friends and colleague’s in children’s ministry. And it’s a movement that seems to be coming back to life, and one that churches an families benefit from being attuned to.

So say that we need to consider children’s liberation in the church is to do a lot more than just accept babies babbling during the sermon or the installation of a “prayground” behind the back pews. It is to do more than to offer children’s choirs or encourage youth to acolyte. No, it includes actively supporting Christian education that center the child and isn’t afraid of the scary questions.

Consider how many of us have turned to Montessori-based practices like Godly Play and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, that follow children’s curiosity and empower them to make meaning. Montessori understood the centrality of this kind of liberation, not just because she worked with children, but specifically because she worked with poor and disabled children. She approached these children with a clear belief in their abilities, supporting them so that they could

arise, reviving and opening up towards interests that give life to their intelligence, to witness the happiness that comes to them through every activity in which the hand becomes capable of achieving something. It is really man arising from death to the joy of living.

Aren’t we all most alive when our curiosity is fostered and supported? Why should children be any different? What do we gain by letting go and letting children lead?

Whether this week finds you feeling quashed, with your curiosity dulled or muffled beneath snow, or finds you energized and excited, perhaps having powered to the top of a hill, may this message find you well. We live with the promise of a world remade, of the humble raised up, the last put first. Here, there is no worthy or unworthy, so how do we make it so?

Peace,
Bird