Dear Friends,
My program year kicked off this last weekend and, as a New York City kid, I’m also still in back-to-school mode. We always had one of the latest start days around, beginning on a Thursday with a two day week, and quickly tumbling into several days off because of the Jewish High Holy Days. And, as I’ve watched some of my Church School kids come back into the building with a few more nerves than others, I have been thinking about the stretch of doing new things.
After getting really into Music That Makes Community’s work this summer, I decided that, since it fit into my train commute, I would start going to their Morning Grounding time on Zoom. It’s half an hour on a Monday morning, an hour before I need to head into my weekly staff meeting. And so, last week, I arrived at work, greeted some folks around the building, and then headed into my office – and in doing so, I discovered a few things.
First, singing on Zoom with everyone but the leader muted is pretty fun. It’s freeing to sing with my door closed, with only one other voice, and yet in community. I’ve always enjoyed singing, but have also always had a bit of uncertainty around it. As a child, my family told me I couldn’t carry a tune and wow did I carry that with me for years, through performances in church and my college choir, regardless of what anyone else said.
And, the other thing I noticed was how much these first two sessions reminded me of being back in school. It wasn’t about the structure or formality or anything of the sort, but rather how I felt like I couldn’t speak the first week. I never quite knew what it was when I was a kid, but the first days of school typically involved absolute silence on my part, at least in class. I couldn’t talk to a new teacher, in front of new classmates for a bit. I needed a better sense of expectation.
I was a star student, but it always took time for me to use my voice. (Anyone who knows me now sees both my loquacious, in my element manner and my total anxiety around unstructured situations and new people.) The first week – nothing. Just singing alone in my office, happy to be there. And then, back to work. But week two, I chatted briefly during introductions. I took turns speaking and singing on mic. I had observed the rhythm. I could enter it, even doing something I always thought I couldn’t do well.
Doing new things is a heart stretch. Like stretching our bodies, it’s good for us.
Caught In The Middle
As adults, we have a lot more autonomy than children, which means that, in more cases than not, we get to choose our new things. We aren’t just thrown into the deep end day after day, low on life experience and flooded with uncertainty. Except for when we are.
Of course, the unexpected, the new and scary – as well as the new and enlivening – happens. We’ve all experienced that acutely over the last few years. But even as we have more control than the children around us, more than many more significantly marginalized groups, we too can find ourselves caught in the middle, trying to make sense of the unexpected, not unlike the Israelites in the wilderness.
Oh how they cried to Moses, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”
The desert can be dangerous. People only go into the desert if they are prepared – or if they absolutely have to. And, escaping slavery, Moses and the Israelites were there, unprepared, because they had to be. So they were caught between their lives in slavery and being similarly trapped in their freedom. Most certainly this did not feel like freedom.
How is freedom, good and bad, shaping you? What is holding you back from being really present to it, even in its difficulties? And how are you being present to the children in your lives as they test the boundaries of their freedom?
As a very small child, school did mean freedom to me, wrapped up in everything else it was, good and bad. Freedom was getting to walk to the corner of my grandmother’s suburban street to put something in the mail – because there was a gas station near that corner, so I had to watch carefully for cars. Freedom was being in the great big garden alone, talking quietly to myself, spinning in circles. I would never choose to be a child again because that freedom came wrapped up in so much un-freedom and uncertainty, but much about those same details continue to spark that sense of freedom in me.
The Church & Child Liberation
Recently, my wife’s classmate dropped by our house while I was at work, and asked about what I do. “Did she go to school for that,” that classmate asked? No, my wife explained – which, to be fair, she didn’t originally go to school with a trajectory that involved becoming a veterinarian, either. But in the course of my peculiar educational path, something I did a lot of work on was histories of the family. And mixed in with other narratives that cracked open normative notions of what makes a family, I encountered ideas around child liberation from the 1970s, ideas that are finally making their way back to the fore, particularly in the context of faith.
Today is not the day I want to unpack all of this, but I do want you to sit with the phrase “child liberation.” What does it mean to you? When you look at the children in your life, what would that phrase mean for them? As I sat at the foot of the altar with my Church School children on Sunday, they cracked open into giggles as our priest read the Blessing of the Backpacks while a younger cousin toddled about, deciding whether to climb up the steps to sit with them. In some churches, that giggling at the altar is a distraction, a sign to clamp down more tightly on children. In ours, it is a reminder of children’s full belonging. What would be more appropriate to the moment?
Freedom. Liberation. That Big Heart Stretch.
We are all returning to our routines, trying to find our footing in the new, and trying to walk with children while they do the same – but we don’t have to solve it all right now. Today, let us keep it simple. Let us tune in to what makes us feel free.
A few days ago, I worked with a group of youth and families to envision what was next for them as a community, with a focus on supporting new youth programming. But to do that we needed two things:
To be open for something wonderful to happen and to look with hope on who they might become. And so, I made them sing:
Be Open by Debbie Nargi-Brown
And then I blessed the process with some slightly modified words from Kate Bowler and Jessica Richie’s “The Lives We Actually Have,” particularly their blessing “for who you might become” – and so I share some of those same words with you.
…Blessed are we, the incomplete,
standing at the edge of what could be,
in this perpetual season of waiting
and looking and longing
for the fulfillment of hope.
Blessed are we, the restless,
grieving what’s over but isn’t done,
what is gone, but isn’t finished.
…
God, what can we do
with what we have now?
And who we are?
And who we might become?
…
Blessed are we who suddenly find
that while we weren’t looking,
the Lord appeared saying,
"Peace, be still.”
This is the clearing
where the light shines through,
where the new can begin.
Never doubt it.
God is writing you into the story
of the world’s healing.
And your own.
Amen, my friends. Amen.
Bird
So much good stuff to think about here <3 Is the Morning Grounding open to the public? Would love more info!