Dear Friends,
I am preoccupied by language. There are, of course, a dozen potential reasons for this, but as a child who spoke in full sentences by my first birthday, language and its mysteries have always fascinated me. So reading the Bible and telling Godly Play stories are things that capture my attention in a particular way. What do specific words and questions communicate, exactly? What could they say differently with just a subtle change? How have the valences of language shifted what we hear over the centuries?
Reading this week’s Gospel, then, which is includes the familiar rhythms of the verse, “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” from Matthew, I found myself thinking about the word treasure.
Treasure is a word with fantastical conjuring power. Pirates and leprechauns, princes and princesses, adventure tales and so much else from the world of the not-quite-real. It’s not a word we use terribly much in our contemporary lives – though children, with their games of “what if” talk of it more often than the rest of us. It’s a word that stretches the imagination, so what do you imagine?
Much like last week’s Gospel, which also contends with the hoarding of wealth (and may I point you to this charming children’s book from 1980, Kermit the Hermit by Bill Peet, which my associate rector used in her sermon this past week, for a good summation on that theme), Jesus pushes us to consider what we value. And there’s a gap in the language we use that strikes me: treasure versus blessings.
Count Your Blessings, See What God Has Done
Children’s religious music and children’s religious books have come a *long* way in the last few decades, and classics that I grew up with, like “Count Your Blessings,” are, as the youths would say, CRINGE. But it’s also a lovely message in its way -
Count your many blessings
Name them one by one
And it will surprise you
What the lord has doneCount your blessings
Name them one by one
Count your blessings
See what God has done
Our bank accounts are not a blessing. Our retirement funds, if they exist, are not a blessing. Our best shoes and clothes, our college degrees, they are not blessings. They are the treasures we have stored up for this world. They are the things that will pass away.
We’re currently trying a linguistic experiment within a small community of Godly Players where, instead of asking children what the biggest gift they ever received is during the opening of the Creation story, we ask instead what their favorite gift they ever received is. It’s a shift we developed as a community engaged in equity work, taking the emphasis off of worldly metrics – biggest – to heart measures – favorite.
Just the other day I was telling my wife about one of my favorite gifts from my childhood. The gift: a small stuffed monkey that actually came free with the purchase of a sweatshirt I was given. About the size of a Beanie Baby, which I avidly and cautiously collected, this monkey was an object that went everywhere with me during that period of late elementary school. It was my favorite gift that year, something no popular item like a Furby or scooter could compete with.
This week, I invite you and your family or community to consider how you think and talk about value. Drawing on this idea of treasure, I wonder:
If you were a pirate, what would you put into your treasure chest?
If you were the Little Mermaid, what kinds of things would you collect? (The Little Mermaid soundtrack was one of my absolute favorites as a kid and all I can think of is Ariel with her forks.)
What is your favorite thing to share with your friends?
What is the difference between treasure and a blessing? Are they the same? Should they be?
Maybe your child or another young person you know has crafter a blessing tree, or a thankfulness tree at some point. It’s a popular school project around thanksgiving, but there’s no reason not to have one around to add to year round. Our blessings are boundless, even when they are hard to see, and so…
Count your blessings, count them one by one. Count your many blessings, see what God has done.
Peace,
Bird