"Mother, Where Is The Me?"

Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne
September 14, 2008

Reading:

from Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth, by  Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick

“You gaze at your baby’s round, soft face in the glow of the night light.  You watch your toddler clunking along the hallway in Daddy’s shoes.  Or you walk to the bus stop with a five-year-old whose eyes shine with nervous anticipation on the first day of kindergarten.  For any parent, these are the times when a child’s innocence and vulnerability are almost unbearably precious, times when we are achingly aware that he or she is…a very fragile treasure.  They are moments that make parenting, despite its endless drudgery, so deeply rewarding.

These wondrous moments are glimpses of something more as well…These moments might be called ‘revelations’ of sorts, revelations of a beauty and generosity at the heart of life that is deeper and more mysterious than we may have ever imagined.  One father described it, ‘The first time I held Ben curled against my shoulder and felt his breath on my neck, heaven opened to me.’ …

How brightly the beauty of creation shines in one so young! … We yearn to offer them something that will enable them to hold on to that inner beauty, something truly lasting. … In the words of one mother who struggled to find the ‘something’, ‘I use words like respect, and beauty, fairness, and savoring life with my kids,’ she said hesitantly.  ‘But I guess what I’m really talking about is spiritual.’ …

I use the word spiritual to refer to an awareness of our sacred connection with all of life. … Through spiritual nurture, we seek with our children to celebrate the myriad connections [to our earth and all of its creatures] in the most ordinary acts of everyday family life. … Through spiritual nurturing we are blessed with the opportunity to share with our children something more enduring than the hope of success or even happiness … We offer them the chance to discover their spiritual center, defined in some cultures as nothing less than learning to be human.”

Sermon:                                              

"Mother, Where is the Me?"  by Rev. Bruce Russell-Jayne

The Reverend Sophia Lyon Fahs modernized Unitarian religious education in the 1940s and her theories are embedded in our current children’s curricula.  Fahs’s experience included teaching in experimental schools and Sunday schools and graduate degrees in education and divinity.  Her ideas about the religious lives of children were shaped and sharpened by her observations of her own five children’s natural curiosities, questions and growth.  She often recounted a conversation she had with her daughter, Ruth, who at seven and a half years of age queried, “Mother, where is the me?  Where is the me?  It seems to be always my hand, my foot, my head or my skin, but where is the me?” 

After many conversations with children about life’s difficult problems Fahs came to the belief that children have an innate curiosity and creativity and are religious beings in their own right; they are not just partially developed adults.  The child is her/his own primary agent in discovering meaning and truth.  The role of both religious education and of parenting is to help children draw from “their own direct relations with the universe, their own lessons and patterns for living.”
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“The 19th-century Unitarian abolitionist, the Reverend Theodore Parker, my hero, told about a childhood incident.  Walking home one day, he saw a lovely pond with rare flowers in bloom nearby.  He stopped to enjoy it and saw basking in the sun a spotted tortoise.  Parker wrote: ‘I lifted the stick I had in my hand to strike the harmless reptile; for, though I had never killed any creature, yet I had seen other boys out of sport destroy birds, squirrels, and the like, and I felt a disposition to follow their wicked example.  But all at once something checked my little arm, and a voice within me said, clear and loud, ‘It is wrong!’ 

I held my uplifted stick in wonder at the new emotion.  I hastened home and told the tale to my mother, and asked what was it that told me it was wrong?  She wiped a tear from her eye with her apron, and taking me in her arms, said, ‘Some call it conscience, but I prefer to call it the voice of God in the soul.  If you listen and obey it, then it will speak clearer and clearer, and always guide you right; but if you turn a deaf ear or disobey, then it will fade out little by little, and leave you without a guide.  Your life depends on heeding this little voice.’  I am sure no event in my life has made so deep and lasting an impression on me.”

Parker’s mother lent her interpretation to his experience.  It was based upon her religious beliefs, ones not uncommon to the fledgling Unitarians of her time.  Parker learned his mother’s religion, but it was the event itself which imprinted ideep in his psyche.  
:::
Through lived experiences young people come to a private sense of things that shapes their spirituality.
When twelve year old Eric was asked to describe his sense of religion he said, “My thoughts, you mean, when suddenly they come to me, about God and the world and what it’s all about—my really strange ones they are lots of times.  I’ll be riding my bike, and one minute I’m looking at the people and houses, and I’m wondering how much time I’ve got, before I have to do something else; and the next minute I’m all into myself, and I’m thinking the kind of stuff—I guess it’s what philosophers think.  I’m thinking that I’m here now, but one day I’ll be gone.  That’s far off, I hope, but it could be tomorrow.  Look at what happened to my cousin Ned.  All he was doing—he was crossing the street and that truck went wild, and he got killed.

One night after that happened; I guess Ned’s death really got to me.  When I really do some ‘thinking’ at night, I’ll lie there with my arms behind my head, like an extra pillow, and just look up at the ceiling and think!  That’s what I did, for a long time: I just stared, and I thought.  I was conscious of my whole body. 
I made my toes move, and my hands; I bent my legs and lifted my arms—strange!  I said to myself, ‘You’re Eric, and you’re alive!  Ned is gone—there’s no more Ned.  You’re still here, but there will be a time when you’re gone, too.

I asked myself if I believed in God.  You wonder sometimes.  A neighbor lady said, ‘God took him.’  Mom said she wished there was a God and He did take Ned; then there’d be some ‘sense’ to it, but there isn’t any, just an accident.  That’s what I thought about as I was in bed, lying and thinking.  That’s life!  My mother, my dad, they both say to us, ‘That’s life.’  I was telling myself the same thing in the night—and the next thing, it’s morning, and you’ve got to get up and get going, because ‘that’s life,’ too.”

Eric responded to his awareness of the distinct possibility of death by asking searching questions about the nature of things and by trying to comprehend the mysteries of life and death.  Children ask the same eternal questions as our philosophers, theologians, and ordinary human beings have posed over the centuries.   The task for boys and girls, no less than for adults, is to weave together their personal spiritual impressions with what they learn from their family and with the teachings of their religious tradition into their own particular spiritual fabric, and then ponder their prospects as human beings who will someday die.
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Two of Sophia Fahs’s children did not live to adulthood.  Sensitized by her own loss, Fahs noted that most children by age five had experienced the death of someone in their extended family.  She observed children asking serious and probing questions about death.  She wrote, “What kinds of thoughts of death do we most care to have our children hold?” She thought adults should not avoid talking to children about important issues because to avoid doing so left them with no support at some of their most troubling times.  She hoped that parents and teachers would create a supportive atmosphere and encourage children to question.  In this way, teachers and parents could allow and guide children’s inherent nature to unfurl and grow.

As that nature unfurls, you may witness a child’s capability to think philosophically.  Children not only question, but they can construct rather elegant theories and beautiful worlds of their own.  Consider the case of five year old Kristin: Sitting on the bed talking to her father, she commented, “I’m sure glad we have letters.” Kristin’s father was somewhat surprised at that particular expression of gratitude.  “Why?” he asked. “Cause if there was no letters, there would be no sounds,” explained Kristin.  “If there was no sounds, there would be no words. If there was no words, we couldn’t think, and if we couldn’t think, there would be no world.” :::

Kristin’s chain of reasoning is breathtaking and its conclusion, ‘Without letters (or thought) there would be no world,’ has been pondered by the great philosophers for millennia.  The philosophical comments and questions of young children have a freshness and inventiveness that is hard for even the most imaginative adult to match.  The pronouncements of a child may be priceless gifts to parents or teachers who are willing to listen.

In The Philosophy of Childhood, Gareth Matthews wrote, “Learning to be comfortable with naïve questions is an important part of doing philosophy well.  Parents can learn to recognize philosophy in their children, respect it when it happens, and even participate in it and encourage it on occasion.  There are at least some contexts in which they should be considered our partners in a joint effort to understand it all.  In important part, philosophy is an adult attempt to deal with the genuinely baffling questions of childhood, and we often fail to appreciate what children have to offer adults.”
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When it comes to dealing with life’s important issues, the questions of youngsters are not those of disinterested observers.  They want to know what their families believe and what they should believe.  Whether prepared for it or not, parents are called upon to teach their children religious values and to help them answer life’s ultimate questions.  Parents are often the only people who are close enough to a child to be able to see the connections between their children’s spiritual lives and other aspects of their day-to-day existence.  They can collaborate in their children’s learning by beginning where the children live and walking along with them in their quest for spiritual grounding.

Universalist professor and Minister of Religious Education, the Reverend Angus McLean, an important contributor to liberal religious education, said, “The home environment is the most powerful center of religious education; the setting for most of the child’s growth, most of his or her experiences, whether good or bad; the setting where love and trust are experienced and learned.”  What people believe about themselves comes primarily from their parents and family, and what children believe about themselves is “like the main stem out of which the body of their faith must grow.”

If children believe about themselves what their parents believe about them, it follows that parents who project a hopeful attitude toward their children increase their potential to attain a positive view of themselves.   A positive understanding of children’s nature would ask us to treat each child as essentially good, even though they are capable of evil.  We would nurture their capacity for goodness while focusing on gifts, not dysfunctions.  We would assume that each is capable of making their own unique contributions to their family, church and school. 
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Treating children as if this were true about them has been proven to generate positive outcomes in their lives.  A study was done on 200 boys in a Baltimore slum in an effort to project their futures.  The researchers’ conclusion in every case was, “He hasn’t got a chance.”    Twenty five years later, another team did a follow-up study on the now grown men and to their amazement found that almost all of them had successful careers.  When asked to account for their success, many of them said, “There was this teacher…” and all talked about the same one.  The researchers tracked down this teacher and asked her what magic formula she had used to give hope to those young men slotted for failure.  Her response was, “It was really very simple.  I loved those boys.”  And, she channeled her love for children into ways of being with them which let them know that she cared deeply for what they were becoming.

 The goal of parents and teachers who project hopeful attitudes toward children is to help them form an outlook which will help them to successfully engage their own lives.   We wish for children that they come to a worldview that life is gracious, meaningful and worthwhile.  Our worldview, the point from where we are looking, focuses what we see.  This way of walking along with children has implications for our adult souls.  We may need to reflect on our own point of view.  As parents and teachers, are we ready to operate from such a belief system? 
:::
Where is the me?  Is my conscience the voice of God?  Why did my cousin die and why am I still here?  Like adults, children struggle to find meaning to help them understand their experiences of the world.  For their individual lives and for the world’s future it is vitally important that our children find it in themselves to see life as gracious, meaningful and worthwhile. 

“The great end in religious instruction,” according to the Reverend William Ellery Channing, “is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own; not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own… to inspire a fervent love of truth…to touch inward springs…
In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul.”

Children look for guidance for their actions and create their own version of morality.  They take very seriously the messages about life they learn at home and at church.  They try very hard to apply them as they confront the mysteries of childhood.  We need to recognize what a challenge this can be and treat our children’s spiritual quests as respectfully and tenderly as we do our own.  If we are willing to walk with our children as partners in spiritual growth we may be amazed at what our souls gain from each other. 

I conclude with a blessing from the Reverend Gary James, Minister of North Shore Unitarian Church:
“May we let our children inspire us with their wonder, with their awe, with their gratitude, and with their love.  May we cultivate these deeply human and deeply spiritual impulses in them, and also let them cultivate the same impulses in us.”
So Might This Be, Amen

Texts:

• Susan Harlow, “Sophia Lyon Fahs: Religious Modernist and Progressive Educator,” in Faith of Our Foremothers.
• Sophia Fahs, Today’s Children and Yesterday’s Heritage.
• Gareth B. Matthews, The Philosophy of Childhood.
• Jean Grasso Fitzpatrick, Something More: Nurturing Your Child’s Spiritual Growth.
• Thomas Groome, Educating for Life.
• Robert Coles, The Spirituality of Children, [107-109] Soul searching (Ned’s death) [283-289].
• Theodore Parker, “The Still, Small Voice,” p 18 in Build Your Own Theology.
• Kathy M. Silver, “Doing the Work of Becoming Unitarian Universalists,” in Essex Conversations. p. 248-252.