Faith, Fear, & Everything All At Once
St. Catherine & A Short Note On Startling Statements
Dear Friends,
I have undoubtedly said here at some point that I wear a lot of hats.
It’s a common enough turn of phrase, but I think that I say it in large part because of the way my dear friend Will says – in which he mimes taking different hats on and off as he names his roles. I don’t do that part, but I do use the phrase a lot as I describe the sprawling shape of my professional and professional-adjacent undertakings:
Church School Director
Godly Play Trainer
Church Programming Consultant
Ministry Coach
That’s just the start of the list and doesn’t even begin to touch on my personal life, and it’s a list that is incoherent when set alongside who I thought I would be, even into my early-mid twenties. (I know that’s young, I know, but as someone who is just hitting her mid-thirties, I think I should get some credit!) And, it’s an incoherence that felt very much on display this past weekend, when I had the opportunity to preach at my home-base church. Several people asked if I was a seminarian or had gone to seminary.
No, I took another road here. And yet, there are some unusual pieces to my story.
As I assemble this week’s newsletter, one of the things that stands out to me is this week’s writing on St. Catherine of Sienna over at Grow Christians. There, Allison Sandlin Liles describes young Catherine’s seemingly extreme claims: that after beginning to receive mystical visions of Jesus Christ at age 6, she declared at age seven that she had taken a vow of perpetual virginity. God had plans for her and she was on board with those plans. But, as Allison writes from the perspective of a mother, children tend to make some peculiar claims regarding their professional aspirations at that age.
Personally, when I was six, my father and I built a deeply sub-par birdhouse and I declared I wanted to be a birdhouse builder. I wanted to build a lot more birdhouses so that I could learn to do it correctly. And my mother would say, in the way you respond to a six year old who wants to be a princess or an astronaut or, sure, a birdhouse builder, “Of course you can do that. Just be the best birdhouse builder you can be.”
I have never built another birdhouse, but I recognize the motivations of the child who declared a career path based on a deep desire to perfect a craft. Instead, I’ve got a pile of jobs that don’t really come with the perfection standards of a beautifully crafted, balanced, and detailed birdhouse. I think I would have envisioned tiny Victorian homes just on a scale meant for sparrows. But that’s besides the point.
St. Catherine’s statement as a child was perhaps the most extreme version of professing a religious calling, but I do think that very few families are prepared to have a child declare that they are going to devote their life to God. It just tends not to make the career day list. But why? What is the barrier?
Priority Propositions
The most countercultural thing about St. Catherine’s bold declaration of faithfulness was her family’s social position: they were a wealthy, prominent family, and so something like entering the convent was out of the question. And while the mechanics of our particular social hierarchies look different today than they once did, I do think many people’s relationship to the institutional church and its work looks a lot like the problem St. Catherine’s family faced: the priorities weren’t lining up.
When I run a youth ministry summit for a congregation, particularly when the goal is revitalizing youth programming, one of the first questions I ask the teens and adults gathered is what they spend the majority of their time doing outside of work and school. Not everything that we spend that time doing is an actual priority – often it’s assorted secondary necessities, from laundry and cooking to driving kids around to various practices, but given how much of a role time plays in people’s complaints around church programming engagement, this question helps cut to the core of what things are given permission to dominate our time. At least a few actual priorities will emerge through this question and it forces the group to consider where church fits amidst all that and whether they’re willing to make it a priority. This can be an uncomfortable question. As someone who group up in a “church is a priority and you cannot do XYZ things that will interfere with church and church-related programming” household, I have been known to make this sort of thing an uncomfortable subject.
Now, I’m sure St. Catherine’s parents were more than a little uncomfortable with her age seven declaration that she had taken a vow of virginity and would wed herself to the Lord, but that sort of thing isn’t actually uncomfortable until it has consequences for our daily lives. They probably didn’t think they actually had to worry about it, that she’d change her mind in a month or a year. But they also probably didn’t lift up the idea either. They probably weren’t as outwardly agreeable as my mother was about the birdhouses.
What We Don’t Dare Say
In her reconsideration of The Godly Play Foundation’s traditional St. Catherine story, the Rev. Emily Garcia reframes why Catherine is remembered as “Catherine spoke up for God” rather than Catherine was “fair for God.” It’s one of several excellent insights on a lesson that I don’t use much for a number of reasons – but it’s a good reminder that a lot of the anxiety the families many of us serve have about being more deeply embedded in church life, whatever that might mean, is unspoken. It lives in past bad experiences, cultural norms, and a whole lot more.
How do you invite people to say the things they don’t want to say about the place of the church in their priorities? As most of us look ahead to the summer months, when priorities tend to be at their most topsy-turvy, and how can we prepare the ground for deeper engagement? Whether you’re planning small experiments or a major programming overhaul, I hope you’ll try something. The invitation, the overture matters, because we aren’t just asking about how people prioritize God, but how they prioritize community.
Peace,
Bird
P.S. Want to re-envision some part of your parish’s programming? I’m available for consultations at abirdinchurch.com