Make of Yourself a Light

We are doing something new here today. Parents are registering their children for next fall’s classes on April l. This is one part of a whole new approach that lay leaders in religious education, along with Diane, have crafted to meet the challenge of our growth. We have 360 children, babies through 8^th grade, and another 100 high school youth.

As we search for more space for classrooms, Gary, Margaret and I will move our offices to the Wright Tavern at the end of spring. Spring, incidentally, is a season between winter and summer!

As William Ellery Channing once put it, we are trying to grow souls here. Some of us are parents, others are not. Our children are small, or they are grown and gone. But we are all on a spiritual path, trying to grow ourselves, learn, change. How do we plant the seeds of faith, at any age? How do we make of ourselves a light?

Children have been learning here since 1635. Imagine! Grown-ups too. Today I’m remembering especially the transcendentalist tradition of progressive educators and thinkers.

Bronson Alcott, for instance, a self-educated man from a hardscrabble farm in rural Connecticut. He gave up his boyhood name, Amos B. Alcox, to become A. Bronson Alcott. And in the fall of 1834 started the Temple School at the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street, a place you can visit today. He started with thirty students, most under the age of ten, from some of the best families in Boston.

Alcott’s methods were unusual for his day. He did not drill new material into young minds so much as he tried to draw out what was already there. I like to teach “the inward things,” he said. He invited them to muse with him on the actual or symbolic meanings of single words. On February 4, 1835, the word for the day was “birth,” and they began with Wordsworth:

“It is not now as it hath been of yore; Turn whereso’er I may, By night or day, The Things which I have seen I now can see no more.”

“What was Wordsworth talking about? Had things changed or had he himself changed? Wordsworth had changed, said a ten year old. Have you experienced change? asked Alcott. Yes, the boy said, and more in this last year than in all my life before.

“How many of you feel that a schoolroom is a different place from what it was the first day? All hands shot up. We know more, the children said, and think more. You know us, you have looked inside us. We behave better.

“Alcott nodded. Knowledge is chaff of itself, he told them. But you have taken the knowledge and used it to govern yourself better. If I thought I gave you knowledge only, and could not lead you to use it, I would never enter this schoolroom again.”
(Carlos Baker, Emerson and the Eccentrics).

Alcott’s assistant, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, rushed to publish verbatims of these conversations. Her Record of a School was popular among transcendentalists and even reached Mr. Emerson in Concord. He was sufficiently intrigued that he visited Mr. Alcott’s classroom. Watching “the gradual dawn of thought” on the children’s faces made Emerson reflect that truth knows neither age nor season, since “we are all alike before the great Whole.” The friendship between Alcott and Emerson would last forty years.

So we stand in a line of remarkable souls like these who encouraged us to think about spiritual education in new ways. We are still trying to do that to this day.

Rabbi David Wolpe has written one of the best books I’ve ever read on the spiritual questions children ask. Its called Teaching Your Children about God. Here, of course, we speak different theological languages. God, Goddess, Buddha. We are earth-centered, we are humanist, we are Christian. Translate his words into your language, but listen to what he has to say:

“Parents who listen to their children’s words hear belief. Children do have a natural capacity for faith. But all too often their faith is untended and lost.

“Faith is untended, because we as teachers and parents do not know how to react to religious questions. We find it hard to talk about God. If our children don’t ask, we maintain a grateful silence. If they do ask, we give the briefest of answers and pass on to other subjects. But we know inside that this will not do. Adults pride themselves on being open to all sorts of discussions. We will arm ourselves to answers questions about sexuality, friendship family- anything. We are ready to delight in children’s insights. Yet we are stumped when the subject is the most important subject of all:  Where do we come from? What does life mean? Is there a God or are we alone in this world?”

We want our children to learn a language of faith. That’s hard because it’s a language most of us are still learning. We feel inarticulate, tongue-tied, sometimes silly, afraid. But it gets at some of the finest and deepest parts of our hearts, of our lives, doesn’t it, so we keep on trying.

I think of three things we try to give our children here at First Parish:

1. Home. Children feel at home in their bodies, souls, minds and hearts. When they run and play somewhere, when they sit and learn, when they are attended to and feel, they matter. We want children to feel at home here, in some bodily, heartfelt way. Where humor, freedom, and fun are a part of the picture, as well as moments of wonder, awe, stillness. When I come to Terrific Tuesday suppers or Bingo Night, Maundy Thursday chowder, or the Seder, I see children who feel at home here. And that is very good.
2. Habits. Brush teeth, comb hair, what are the spiritual habits we want to see a part of their day, a part of our day? Meditation or quiet time, grace at meals, blessings at bedtime? Prayers or poems they learn by heart to take into later years?
3. Wrestling. We want our children to wrestle. We encourage here a kind of critical thinking about religion. Doubts are welcome. Questions are welcome. It is a fine and delicate balance:  rigorous thinking and deep faith. That is the strength of what I would call liberal religion.

I didn’t think so at the time, but I have come to believe, over the last twenty years, that I was given a treasure as a child. It was the gift of belonging to a liberal religious faith community, King’s Chapel in Boston. We never talked about faith in my family but we went to church, Sunday after Sunday. In a childhood that sometimes knew isolation, I was part of a larger community. I felt at home there.

I experienced silence, soaring music, glimpsed something I would now name as reverence. I watched my parents bow their heads to pray, week after week. This was the church where my father had buried my mother, married again, where we had been christened. Only later would I understand that’s why we drove miles to get there. Any community that had fed my family during those life experiences was too precious to trade away for a church more convenient.

So the seeds were planted in childhood, but they took hold really as a young adult, when, early in my 20’s, troubled and tempted, weary and worn, I returned to church. I didn’t believe in God, didn’t consider myself “religious,” but there was a language there that spoke to me. Words about suffering that rang true for me. I was suffering. Words about hope. I needed hope, so badly.

I didn’t understand half the language I heard at church, but the roots were going down deep, taking hold, in these words that somehow “spoke to my condition,” as the Quakers would say. I went back again and again, finding there a kind of lighthouse in what had been a great storm. I still believe that sacred place helped get me to the other side.

We plant seeds here. We know that our children will grow, change, reject, drift away. Some will return to church, others will not. We don’t know what will happen, but we know we will have done our best, tried to give them a grounding in what we hold dear.

“Make of yourself a light,” said the Buddha, before he died. Jesus said it a little differently:  “You are the light of the world.” No one lights a lamp and then hides it under a bushel basket, but sets it on a lampstand for all to see.

The poet Mary Oliver writes:

And then I feel the sun itself as it blazes over the hills
like a million flowers on fire-
clearly I’m not needed,
yet I feel myself turning
into something of inexplicable value.

Could this be what we want our children to take away with them. Could this be their prayer in the morning, your prayer and mine? “Please might somehow today I become a light?” To someone, family, neighbor, colleague, friend? Might the light within me somehow shine out of me, the light that is within you shine out of you? Might I bring to this day the spirit that only I have been given, the soul that is only mine to grow? Might I bring that gift to the world and give it away over and over again?

Could this be our prayer here at First Parish? As we walk past one another in the hall, might our eyes meet, the light in my eyes might go out to greet the light in yours? That “something” in me the Quakers would call “that of God,” what we might call a spark of the divine?

This prayer is not only for us as individuals. It is a prayer for us as a congregation. “May we make of ourselves a light.” My hope for us is that we might begin to know ourselves as a light to the world. Not in an arrogant, bragging sort of way, but in understanding that we offer something to a culture that is much in shadow. My hope for this congregation is that we would not hide our light under a bushel basket, but set it out for all to see. That means letting other people know that we are here. Preparing for them. Inviting them in.

They will come, as you have, and I have. Bringing here the light that shines out from their souls, as you have brought your light. And together, you and I, and you and you, we add our little bits of light to become a flame that shines out bright and strong for all the world to see.

It is a flame for all of us to see when times are hard. It is a flame that turns us, as a congregation, into something of inexplicable value.