CHILDREN AND LITURGY - #3

Medieval art portrayed children as miniature adults. Childhood was not a distinct stage. Seventeenth-century capitalism created the category of childhood. Children now spend years learning skills for the work place and for entry into the prevailing social system.

Because children need protection and care we imagine them to be passive. Children make demands. Adults respond; they do things on their behalf. Douglas Sturm indicates that children are not passive. They are active makers of meaning. Each child "(i)s an agent, a creative participant in the matrix of interactions that constitute the child's world of possibilities....(T)he growing child is an intentional actor constructing a life project with consciousness....Becoming in the world involves a dynamic self-representation....(T)he child is a historical being, a maker of history, a meaning-maker....(T)he child lives in open communion with the world, and the world, in turn, invites exploration from the child....(T)he world and the child are formed and reformed....in sum, children, like adults, are creative participants in the world. They are centers of understanding and action....(T)hey are citizens of a world community to be respected as such. They manifest a keen ability to interpret and to respond to the signals and disclosures that constitute their setting....(They are) sources of novel possibility and surprise (Solidarity and Suffering. Albany: SUNY, 1998,p.47-48)."

How can we help children to participate creatively in worship?

First, we can help children do ritual prayer. We can cultivate our children's experience of liturgy. We should not dumb down by providing children with distractions during liturgy. We disrespect our children when we have them read children's bible books or we have them color religious coloring books during liturgy. We respect our children when we help them do ritual prayer. Children worship by singing, seeing, listening, gesturing, sitting, and moving in procession. If our liturgical space deprives them of these actions, then we need to redesign our churches. Children learn the ways of God by doing ritual prayer. The doing of the ritual schools the imagination and the heart. The consistent, Sunday-after-Sunday doing of community prayer births intellectual understanding and cognition. When children and adults do ritual prayer together, the meaning and the sentiment of the rites are inscribed on the wax tablets of human hearts.

Second, we can cultivate our children's engagement with symbols. We can encourage the fullest and the most authentic use of our symbols so that they can manifest the mystery of God among us. Children need to see robust candles dripping with warm wax. They need to see clouds of sweet smelling incense rising up. They need to see abundant waters flowing forth in baptismal pools. They need to see loaves of hearty bread and flagons of rich wine readied for the welcome table. Similarly, our children need to hear and to hum beautiful church music during the liturgy and at home. They need to get used to the smell and the feel of symbols. God and God's people communicate meaning through all our senses.

When children are baptized into the church, they are brought into the fellowship as children. Children learn God's ways by enjoying and employing all their senses.