Dear Friends,
Last week marked Maria Montessori’s 153rd birthday – and I lead the sort of life that means this was one of the first things that social media made me aware of that morning (and then my therapist had to hear a lot about Montessori philosophy at 9am).
Now, I wasn’t raised with Montessori practices. I went to the sort of preschool that middle class suburban parents put their kids in during the early-to-mid 1990s, in those final years when preschool was still really seen as optional in our community, I think. For two years, I spent a few hours a week in the classrooms in my church’s basement, the same rooms I went to Sunday School in each week. We had circle time and a playground where I mostly remember *not* going on the tire swing. And when those two years were over, I moved into NYC’s public school system, in all its varied forms – its successes and failures – for 13 years. My sisters would tread similar paths, including the same preschool. I never really gave Montessori a thought.
Of course, coming to Godly Play significantly shifted my relationship to children’s education and to Montessori specifically – and people often ask if a lot of Godly Play practitioners are Montessori guides. Certainly there are some, and there is a great love for Maria Montessori’s philosophy, but perhaps the pattern that is more familiar to many of us is that we become immersed in Godly Play and, as a result, want to know more about the Montessori method. If anything, it can seem like Godly Players become Montessori teachers, rather than the other way around.
Of Knives & Fire
Many years into the church preschool’s existence, my mother began working there, offering a variety of supplemental programming. She taught music and gym, offered toddler separation programming, worked in aftercare and monitored nap time. Of all the programs she ran in those later years, though, perhaps the one that was most beloved and talked about was her cooking class.
The after school cooking program, which also included young children through kindergarten or first grade from the community, was deeply structured by Montessori philosophy, even though she likely didn’t know that. My mother was the sort of person who casually gathered a group of preschoolers in a big kitchen with knives and didn’t worry too much about it. When I would tell people about this program, the response was often the same: “Your mom is brave.” But the reality was not quite that. My mother didn’t give children knives or let them use the stove because she was brave (perhaps bordering on reckless), but because she respected children’s ability to navigate these situations wisely because of their own internal motivations.
In Godly Play, I think many of use proceed similarly when it comes to fire. We light real candles all the time, and we let children be near them. Just a few weeks ago, as I was planning a pop-up toddler program for my parish, the older cousin of some of the intended participants popped up and recommended I tell them the Baptism story. And she’s right that Baptism is an excellent story. It’s also kind of long for a first toddler session and it has a lot of fire. To me, though, the attention span piece certainly felt riskier than the fire (I ended up telling the creation story).
Childhood can be many things: weighted with risk or swaddled in bubble wrap; filled with independent exploration or hovered over and fussed at. And, I think for most of us, it’s somewhere in between. So, as we all enter into this season of beginnings and returns and transitions, wherever you are on this journey, how do we make space for appropriate risk taking? And why does this matter, theologically speaking?
Love & Risk
Love is one of the riskiest acts, and this applies to all kinds of love. I know (cognitively at least), that for each of you who sends your children out the door to school, you are placing the ones you love the most at risk, physically and emotionally, and I don’t mean that in (just) the pessimistic state of the world way. I mean, you are also sending them out with the great hope that others will love them well. It’s one of the privileges of my work – loving other people’s children.
Our lives are God’s act of great risk. I wish I remembered where I first encountered the interpretation of the Fall and the existence of free will as part of God’s desire for us to participate in creation & creativity, but I remember the first time I got to extend that interpretation to a child. Let us recall that Godly Play’s core creation story does not take us through Adam & Eve and the Fall. That’s the Second Creation, which young children don’t typically hear. So, when presented with a storybook Bible in which he encountered this moment of “sin,” he had questions.
God offered us the ability to sin, so to speak, because we are made in God’s image. Which is not to say that God is sinful; that would be a convoluted. But we are given free will and free will is necessary for us to be creative. God really and truly wants to see what we can do! And that’s a big risk. In many cases, that freedom has made a great mess of things. But it’s also revealed the very best parts of us. And, when our creative powers lead us in the wrong direction and cause harm, we are offered the tools for repentance, the possibility of mending things, and the mercy of a loving creator. At our best, when we extend opportunities for risk taking to children, we do so with the same grace, acting as the safety net that kisses the scrapes and models meaningful acts of apology and restoration.
So, here we are, confronted by the risk of a new season in our lives and our anxious common existence. Let us enter this season aware of those fears and open to the gifts that come with these new experiences. As the song I’ve been playing on repeat recently reminds us, “You don’t have to know the way… Trust the way. Feel the way…. The way knows the way.”
Children trust us to trust the way, even – and maybe especially – when the way is bumpy. And we, in turn, do our best to trust that God knows the way. So let’s get on our way, resting in the goodness of Emmanuel, God with us.
Peace,
Bird