WHAT GOES INTO LITURGIES FOR CHILDREN: CHRISTIAN TREASURE AND PRACTICAL WISDOM
Photo courtesy of the author.
I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for solid food.
1 Corinthians 3:2a
These words from St. Paul have been used for many years to guide Christians in passing on the food of the Gospel to children. Much of this good news is passed on to us in worship. While it’s best for the whole assembly to consistently worship together, there are also times when it is necessary or even preferable to offer worship services specifically designed for children. Christian children should sometimes have milk instead of solid food because their spiritual and intellectual development is at an early stage; something nutrient-rich but easily digested by young spirits and minds can do them good.
A few years ago, under a providential storm of influences, I began to write liturgies and Eucharistic prayers for children. By the time I got to seminary, I had been working with children for eleven years. I had no plans to focus on ministry with children; I suppose I imagined my eleven years of work had been a kind of accident. For my three years of seminary, I ended up working at Calvin Hill Daycare & Kindergarten, a preschool affiliated with and informed by the Yale Child Study Center. In my free time, I became interested in the history of children’s Bibles and Bible illustrations. Then, I took a class on the theory and practice of early childhood education, with Dr. Carla Horwitz, in the same year that the Rev. Sandy Stayner asked me to help her revise their monthly family Eucharist.
All of these pieces have gone into the two Eucharistic liturgies I’ve completed, which are available online. What I’d like to speak about here are some of my own guidelines in developing and then testing and adapting liturgies with children, which I have continued to do.
For this we will need to return to St. Paul’s premise of milk and solid food. Now, milk may not be solid, but it is still food! In fact, it is nutrient-rich food, which happens to have all the things that infants need. In writing liturgies for children, the Book of Common Prayer shows us what the basic nutrients are that we must include.
Tossing out the rites and rubrics simply because children are the primary congregation suggests that there is some invisible gap between children and the people of God assembled for worship. It also shows some confusion over how important “understanding” is in worship, and how much we adults imagine we can understand. Not only do the rites and rubrics set the ground rules, but in doing so they keep our worship with children within the larger community of the Episcopal Church and therefore the Anglican Communion.
The image of milk is also an image to guide us as we think about where to get the materials for which to construct our liturgies and worship. Milk is nutrient-dense and is just the right thing for a baby’s body. Even as doctors and scientists attempt to fully understand and replicate what it contains, it seems there is some additional x-factor that hasn’t yet been pinned down.
So, too, for the church’s children, I believe we should be confident that the global church herself, the whole history of Christianity, contains everything we need as raw materials for our worship with children. While we will happily take up all the practical wisdom from outside (in science, psychology, sociology, linguistics), this should be sifted carefully and attentively. And we do not need to go looking outside the body of Christ for images, words, forms, figurative language, and conceits for our worship with children. What a shame if we were to turn down 2,000 years of real treasure for a bit of pyrite!
The practical wisdom from outside the church from which I have most benefited has been the field of psychology. In particular, my little bit of training has been in developmental psychology and a psychodynamic approach, much of which is now quite mainstream in early childhood education thanks to classics by Katherine Read Baker, Dorothy H. Cohen, Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, and others.
This practical wisdom has been very helpful in writing and planning liturgies (this includes of course the words as well as the overall structure, the movement, etc). Here are a few points of this wisdom, summarized and condensed, with my own understanding of how they can fit within our Christian tradition.
1. Young children know about being “bad” and they are often in a pickle about it. That is, children know there are things that adults tell them they should not feel and express—like anger and jealousy towards siblings or friends—and yet they do feel them. (A child’s home context will determine to a large degree what sorts of feelings and behaviors they understand to be acceptable.) Children learn by doing, which includes making mistakes. They often know intuitively when they have made what the adults around them understand as a mistake!
Children are grateful when we can speak openly and calmly about badness. It is also good for them to have a place of non-parent adults who will speak openly and calmly about what is actually bad (like physically hurting someone) vs. what is not bad (like feeling angry). This fits well with our Christian responsibility to speak truthfully about humanity and human nature, and about our own struggles. It fits, too, with our Christian tradition of trying to suss out which parts of our lives are sin (the absence of God, moving away from God) and which parts are simply the rich and often frustrating experience of human existence.
2. Young children’s big and powerful feelings are a normal part of their humanity. They should not be shamed for them, nor should we be surprised by them. For example: Since I am 32, I have learned to notice when I feel extremely angry, and to (most of the time!) control myself so that my anger is communicated only in appropriate ways to the appropriate people. But a child of 3, 7 or 9 are each learning this in different ways with different words.
This means that we help children when we can speak about powerful feelings in an objective way, normalizing them and giving a vocabulary. This may help us reconsider the different ways Christians have thought in the past—for example, St. Augustine’s view that a child’s crying in the middle of the night is a display of sin. The words and structures of our rites should not tell children (as some of our Christmas hymns do) that we believe it is easy or natural to be meek and mild.
3. “Children think and learn with their bodies,” as Katherine Read Baker says. The curiosity, questions, or decisions that adults can make in our heads (without moving our bodies or speaking) is often “thought out” in the child’s body. Therefore, it is unfair to expect young children to sit still for a long time. (How long is “a long time” depends on their age, with a great range between infant and 8yo. As a general rule, it starts to feel like “a long time” at three or four minutes.) It is sensible and compassionate to incorporate the body into our work with children.
Luckily, this fits in very well with our Christian understanding of liturgy! The whole body is the site of liturgy, not just our ears and our mouth. Our 2,000 years of Christian treasure includes a variety of ways to incorporate the body (moving, sensing, fidgety) in our worship.
4. Children need clear and steady boundaries. They need these boundaries communicated in concrete language, in short sentences, and many times over. It is a gesture of love to set these boundaries and keep them calmly, to say “no” or “not right now” when necessary. For example, in my current placement, I invite children to come very close to the altar and touch it, but they cannot lean on the altar or touch the candles on the altar. This is to make sure that everyone is safe, as I tell them. Because I repeat this each time and occasionally shoo people’s elbows off the altar, most of them are able to abide by these rules each time, which means everyone is safe and everyone is learning about sharing the space respectfully.
Some adults find it hard to say “no” to children in a calm voice, but in fact this need for clear and fixed boundaries fits well with our Christian understanding of boundaries: that God gives them to us in love. God does not say “no” because God is a tyrant or short-tempered—and we adults should not say “no” simply because we can or because we feel irritated. With God’s help we can set boundaries with love and attention for the good of those in our care.
As I hope you can see, this outside wisdom (carefully sifted and thoughtfully applied) makes a helpful addition to our Christian storehouse of treasure. It has provided me with some structure as I’ve tried to gather up materials from the tradition to share with children. Because of it, I prioritize material and sensory practices; I am pressed to condense explanations into short and concrete sentences; I seek out powerful figurative images unlike what my children receive in the rest of their (wealthy, American, suburban) culture; I feel confident in presenting children with solemn and serious rituals and stories; I have guidelines for rethinking and revising each liturgy as I observe children’s reactions.
Perhaps one of the most encouraging things that the wisdom of psychology brings to Christian work with children is that a child’s first seven years of life are enormously influential. Some even go so far as to say that a child’s personality or approach to the world is “set” by that age. This provides us with a positive sense of urgency—we can know that each interaction we have with children is a chance to share this sweet milk of the good news of God in Christ.
For Further Reading
Dorothy H. Cohen, The Learning Child. Random House: 1973.
Ann Freud & Dorothy Burlingham, War & Children. Medical War Books: 1943.
Katherine Read Baker, Early Childhood Programs: Human Relationships and Learning. Harcourt Brace: 2005.
Katherine Read Baker & Xenia F. Fane, Understanding & Guiding Young Children. Prentice-Hall: 1967.
