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Why spiritual practice?
We sense that the time has come again for the Christian faith to be practised, lived and loved, more than just learned as knowledge (as important as that is). The disciples learned a way of life from being with Jesus as well as from hearing him teach. So the Christian path is something that we do, even something that we become, as much as something that we believe. We hope that you personally will find this reorientation towards a life rooted in spiritual practice liberating and life-enhancing, and that this will be an experience that you will share with the children you work with. When working with this material ask yourself:
• What could this practice look like for me?
• What could this practice look like in the lives of these children?
• How can I help them to explore these possibilities in the time we have together and in other settings (home / family meal / school / church / all-age service etc)?
The practice:
God with others: a life rooted in community
Background
Place in the Christian tradition
From the beginning of the movement that grew up around Jesus and his story, the practice of community has been seen as vital. The Jewish faith in which Jesus was formed was concerned with both the individual and with the community; for example, in the Psalms and the Prophets the individual story is always woven in with the story of the people, and so Jesus formed a community of disciples from a variety of backgrounds.
Members of this community learned together, stood by each other, fell out with each other and went on to change the world together! The early Church saw community as the natural context for their following of Jesus and also the way in which the Jesus story would be shared more widely and encountered by others (see the opening chapters of Acts). In a wider theological context the church is always rediscovering what it might mean to be the people of a God who is Trinity - a God whose nature is both one and community. Theologians employ the word ‘perichoresis’, suggesting that it is in community that we truly discover who we are.
Our contemporary context
In an increasingly fragmented world the place of community faces many questions, such as, ‘does community matter?’ and ‘can we be community with people not like us?’ But the practice of community is also proving to be surprisingly resilient. New ways of being community are emerging, such as the highly connected world of social media. What remains is the desire and necessity for human beings to be in communion.
This month’s practice
• …builds on the first practice in this series: a simple practice of stillness and prayer that we can access both in specific prayer times and at any time in the day or night.
• …is about nurturing a conscious approach to the life of faith as a journey shared with others.
• …focuses on an act of hospitality emerging from a practice of seeing the light of God in other people.
• …encourages children to both receive and offer hospitality, and to create an environment where hospitality can thrive.
• …leads naturally towards Holy Communion as the ultimate practice of hospitality in the Church.
The practice in four steps
Combine as many of these as will work in your setting:
Who do you see?
Put out a mix of picture books, papers, magazines and artwork featuring faces. Ask the children to pick out a face from all the faces and ask them: ‘Who do you see?’ Encourage them to talk about the person they see and ask, ‘What do you think this person is like?’
I see you
Now explain that we are going to ‘see’ each other, and that this is about recognising that all the people we see matter to God, and therefore to us. One way we have understood this within Christianity is that we are seeing the light of God in each other. Jesus said that not only was he the light of the world, but so are we (Matthew 5:14)!
Ask everyone to greet someone else in the group with the phrase: ‘(name), I see you’. Encourage them to look at each other’s’ face as they (and you) do this. In a small group you could begin this process by looking around at everyone in turn and saying: ‘(name), I see you’. Encourage each person to say the same back to you with your name: ‘(name), I see you’. Take your time with this simple but profound practice.
We ‘see each other’ feast
Ask the children to plan and create a feast at which everyone is welcome. This could be anything from a simple sharing of drink and biscuits, a party-food gathering or a full meal. Explain that the planning, preparation, setting up and clearing up matter as much as the eating and drinking. We ‘see each other’ in the making of the feast, in the feast itself and in the clearing up.
May we see God
At an appropriate moment ask everyone to pause - to see each other, and then to explain that in the sharing of this feast we may ‘see’ God. This seeing is usually not a visual thing, but we may sense that God is somehow close to us.
Jesus shared a feast with his friends and asked us to remember him whenever we eat and drink together. Say a simple prayer: ‘Jesus our friend, help us to see each other, help us to see you’. You could make the link here to the practice of Holy Communion / Lord’s Supper / Eucharist / Mass.
The practice in your main settings
Solitary ideas
Seeing others is only truly possible if we can see ourselves with love. Encourage your child to use ‘I see you’ as a simple prayer - expressing our faith that God is seeing us with love, and our hope that we may see God, sensing God’s life around us and within us. We can also let ‘I see you’ act as a simple prayer word in time with our breathing (see previous article). A child could stand in front of a mirror and point to themselves as they say ‘God sees you’.
Ideas for the family
Families - parents and children - could use the phrase ‘I see you’ as a welcome to each day. Not as in, ‘I’m watching you - look out!’ but as in, ‘I see you, and I love you’. The phrase could be shared at breakfast, or perhaps practised whenever they are tetchy with each other! An alternative phrase could be, ‘God sees you, I see you’.
Ideas for a Sunday School group
Make the feast the central point of the Sunday School session.
Ideas for a family service
Set up the whole building (physically or notionally) as a feasting space. Talk about the history of community in our tradition and let the feast transition naturally into a simple service of Holy Communion.
Other ideas for this practice
• With younger children as we say ‘I see you’ it can help to point to our eyes and then point to them (and encourage them to do the same) to bridge any gap between the conceptual and the physical reality.
• Family is perhaps the area of greatest growth and concern in children’s ministry at the moment. We suggest that as much of the four steps practice as possible could be done in a regular family context, perhaps at a special weekly meal.
• With the children create a ritual of preparation for and clearing up after meals.
• You could include some elements of inclusion. What can the children do for those members in the group who have special needs? How can they consider and provide for those?
• Ask the children to take it in turns to bring the biscuits / cakes / fruit for the group.
MORE RESOURCES
The practices have emerged from our own experience and study of practices within Christianity. For more information and source material for the practices see Cave, Refectory, Road and Running Over Rocks (Ian Adams), Slugs and Snails (Carolyn Edwards) and belovedlife.org
