Blessed Advent, dear friends!
Last week I wrote to you on the cusp of this Advent, reflecting on how the routines of this season can be so grounding for our faith – and it’s absolutely true. Even in the midst of running about this past Sunday, making sure everything was as prepared as it could be, tradition felt like a great buffer.
The night before, I had hung a simple Advent decoration in our living room (the cats will chew on an Advent Wreath and, as my wife sits next to me studying veterinary toxicology for finals season, I don’t need her googling ever bit of greenery that enters our home). I reset the little altar in my office. Even walking up to the front doors of my parish, the ribboned wreaths set outside, caught me up, met me with their own readiness, prepared by volunteers steeped in tradition.
Still, sometimes all that repetition can feel like a bore. The stories aren’t less important, certainly – there are good reasons to perform the basic nativity play every year, if we do it thoughtfully. We need to hear the Good News of the Christ Child. But if we are to discover new things about our faith in that Good News, sometimes we need to hear the story from a new perspective.
Growing Children, Growing Faith
I rarely write much about older children and youth in this space. That’s because older children aren’t my specialty. The older they get, the less experienced I am and, in many ways, the more I’m still growing into a person who knows how to be in relationship with them. Tiny children undeniably flock to me. But I do teach in the upper elementary and middle school range these days and I do offer youth programming support and increasingly I feel like that work is to look at the points of repetition and to make them both obvious and new.
To put it another way, my work it to help these young people break the code that can make both tradition and community feel inaccessible and to tie the deeply accessible parts to new information because that’s what’s going to transform and reinvigorate their relationships to what they already know. And so, while I confess that I was not at my most prepared when I walked in to teach my older children this past Sunday, I knew we couldn’t just talk about a baby and shepherds and magi. Not if I wanted them to actually be awake and interested.
So, how do you make it work? Here’s some of what I’ve learned over the last few years:
Make The Hidden Obvious: On Sunday I greeted my class with a hearty Happy New Year, which prompted an immediate side-eye. Not yet, they told. Oh yes, yet - let me show you! We talked about the beginning of a new church year, turning to the back of our BCPs to see how this whole thing was structured. But that was just the beginning of what we were opening up.
We next made our way to Isaiah 11. This, I said, may not seem clear to you right now, but after enough time, this will immediately tell you that we’re in Advent. This is a special piece of text. It’s one thing to read, to do the exposition, and another thing to say that the church has its own codes and tricks and if we can put these things into context, the exposition gets that much easier.
There a whole piece here about the many ways we have to crack traditions and tools open in the church, and how we have to teach adults to crack open their own practices and invite young people in, but our faith traditions are full of things that can be so opaque until someone helps make it all clear.Get Weird. Everyone’s favorite internet memes are about the ridiculous realities of faith, about the things we’ve made nice or pretty instead of Biblical. As I asked them about the contents of their families’ nativity sets, they mentioned the usual players – Mary & Joseph, shepherds & sheep… oh yeah, doesn’t ours have a camel? (The one I brought down is Bolivian so it has an alpaca), and of course, an angel.
Well, let’s talk about that angel.Yep, we talked about seraphim. Doesn’t this make the declaration “do not be afraid” make so much more sense?
”But they’re kind, right?,” asked one of the younger children in the group.
Scary, but kind. Bearers of good news! And you know what – this will stick. Because it’s weird and surprising and wow what a thing.Hold The Terrible & The Wonderful: To be fair, we do this with Godly Play, too. Good formation demands it because this is another way of saying, “be honest.” Yet, we’re often selectively honest. So what does it mean to insist that talking about the Magi means also talking about how, by protecting Jesus from the Emperor, the result was the slaughter of the innocents? That is how dangerous this little baby was to the world as it was, as it is.
Unexpected Magic
After I was a downer about the Slaughter of the Innocents in the morning, I invited one of my upper elementary schoolers and her high school sister to be our St. Nicholas magic-makers in the evening. Equipped with treats, they set them in the younger children’s shoes while they heard the Godly Play St. Nicholas story and oh they remembered that magic from when they were younger. But best of all were their conspiratorial grins as, watching the children return they told me they’d put an extra orange in the smallest child’s boots, as they watched him trotting back to his parents holding them, delighted with this surprise.
This is, I think, a piece of the puzzle so many families struggle with around Santa and the magical fictions of Christmas, and also the solution so many are seeking. Our faith is not magical, but it is full of calls to be our best selves, to spread Good News. And sometimes that Good News is an extra orange for the little boy who just joined the church school in the past eight weeks because you remember how much fun St. Nicholas was when you were little. It’s staying connected to joy in new ways.
For me, growing up, magic lived partially in the shift from Santa to Midnight Mass because you needed to be old enough to step back from Santa to go – because mom needed to wrap things and haul them up from the basement between bedtime and church. Growing up holds a different kind of magic that is tied to a changing place in the community. My own growing up, as a young adult working in formation, continues to be similar – and my place now is to break the codes for another generation so that they can envision being young adults whose faith is not just relevant but anchored in understanding and wonder and a sense of continued belonging.
Peace in this Season and Always,
Bird
P.S. While I really enjoyed singing some traditional carols at my parish’s Advent Tree Lighting, I’m also vibing to this new track from The Many - enjoy! Keep Awake!