Dear Friends –
& Welcome new friends! We’ve got some new folks over here care of the podcast And Also With You and my friend and colleague Rev. Emily Garcia of A Good & Joyful Thing, and I’m so glad you’re here! Right in time for Holy Week & Easter!
On Sunday, my Godly Play group cut more links off of our Countdown to Easter paper chain, which hangs just above the Circle of the Church Year. It’s a nice extra piece to have because we color-coded ours to mark the Sundays in Easter as different from the weekdays, as well as marking Holy Week in red. I’ll also we be able to bring it out for our Good Friday program, as it enumerates each day, rather than the weeks. We could see how close we are getting to Easter!
Still, we most pause. We must be here, now, still. It’s hard to do, especially if you’re one of the people whose job is planning the operations. This recent post from Grow Christians really points to that struggle. Where are we now, in this week before Holy Week?
If You Find Yourself Caught Up In Love…
Yes, that is a Belle & Sebastian reference.
I wear a lot of hats and I keep a lot of notebooks in order to know which one I’m supposed to be wearing. One of those notebooks contains simple month-long spreads for my parish formation work. In February, as we entered Lent, I wrote a quote to one side of that spread:
“The cross is the school of love.” - St. Maximilian Kolbe
Kolbe’s perspective was that without sacrifice, there is no love, and that Christ’s death on the cross is the ultimate model of that sacrifice. And, indeed, his death was the death to end all death, and I think we can hold that to be true without believing that Jesus’s death should be imbued with a sense of guilt and shame or even sadness (and I again refer us back to the Meredith Miller post I shared last week). Rather, as with the passage from the Gospel of St. John, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends,” the cross is actually a school of love that we are invited into because we too can sacrifice in the name of love. Kolbe, who died at Auschwitz after volunteering himself in the place of another man, knew this with great clarity.
All of this is to say that when I think about what it means to be fully present to the moment, I think about love.
I am not a parent yet, but when I think about what it’s like to look into a baby’s face, or even to be with my circle of children at church, that the magnetic presence of those moments is fundamentally rooted in love. It is love that leaves us kneeling beside a crib, counting an infant’s breaths (as a teen, I did this with my youngest sister who was born when I was 16). It is love that I am experiencing as I line out a hymn with one of my emerging readers. Love roots me in the moment. And, in the experience of the liturgy, when are we pulled most fully into presence than during so much of Holy Week when we are called to love each other through service (the washing of feet) and to bear witness to our failure to love (one interpretation of the cries of “Crucify Him”).
How does love unite you with the challenge of living in the present moment? How do we help children stay in the present moment, rather than urgently seeking what is next?
How will we experience these remaining days of Lent instead of skipping ahead to Easter?
Let It Be Boring
When we talk about how hard it is for us as adults to remain in the present moment, it’s generally because we feel like we have something more “important” or pressing to do. I can’t think about what we’re doing this week because I need to make sure everything is ready for Easter and the choir director wants the children to sing on Pentecost, so I’ll need to work out the church school schedule there, and what about next Fall?! We’ve all been there in one context or another, though it’s especially tempting to let our minds wander to that next thing when we’re doing something dull.
Children, of course, are not so different, but usually they are thinking about the next thing because of excitement and anticipation. Of course, they’re drawn this way all the more if they’re doing something they consider boring. It’s hard to stay in the boring thing, but is there a benefit to the boring?
Last week, Living Church published an article called “Kids Don’t Get Anything Out of Church.” Clickbait much?
The real power of the thing, though, was in the subtitle: And You Don’t Have to Either.
Wait, what?
Lately, my “middles” – many of my 6-9 year olds – are disinterested in one of our generally beloved practices: going up to the altar to watch Holy Communion up close. Their, we follow along, watch what the priest does, repeat his postures, learn how the altar is set. The youngest children are still on board. Sometimes some youth will come up to see this more closely. But the middles are done. They’re at an age when order is not a major developmental need, unlike the younger children. They’ve learned what we do up there and they’ve had enough for now. They’re on to something else.
And, you know what, that’s okay! As Barbara White writes for Living Church, it’s okay for church to be boring sometimes, for children and for adults. We don’t need to be there with some sense of “getting something” out of the experience. Some weeks we won’t. But being there still matters. Being present still forms us.
White explains, “The trouble with looking to “get something out of” worship is that it is fundamentally mis-ordered; it places us, and not God, at the center of our worship. It indicates that we are thinking about worship as a show directed at the audience, and not a sacrifice offered to the glory of the one who calls us to worship in the first place.”
We are headed into a season that can feel as much like a performance for an audience as it does worship of the God who creates and redeems and sustains us. We’re headed into a season when worship can feel exciting and engaging and unusual. But what about when it gets boring again? Let it be that. It’s okay.
Battling Boredom…
I know, I just said boredom is okay. Boredom is neutral. But I have a caveat – and we’ll come back to this on the other side of Easter.
While boredom is neutral in the simplest sense, boredom can also be dysregulating. As I prep for another talk on neurodiversity in worship settings, I would be remiss not to mention this (and if learning more about this sounds like something your volunteers/parish/diocese/etc. could benefit from, you can contact me through my website). It’s something I’ve experienced, not so much in worship, but in classroom settings over the years. Being bored isn’t easy for many people, but cognitive differences can make it impossible. When that’s the case, we have opportunities to think creatively about what it takes to maintain engagement, presence, and physical and emotional regulation.
The coming days will keep us plenty busy, ensuring we’re anything but bored, but make sure you pause and recognize the present moments in the midst of that. Look to what you love. Let yourself be caught up in it. Let it teach you something, even if that something is a little more patience with the boredom.
Peace,
Bird