Most of the time, as a professor, I am busy with meetings and photocopying and reports and classroom preparation and writing and so on, and then when I come home, I am inundated with housework and cooking. Throw in a few other non-home or non-work commitments, and you could say I have a rather busy life - non-stop.
You might think that one of my non-work commitments, working as a Catechist of the Good Shepherd at my parish, would be one of those things that just adds to the busy-ness.
I suppose in a way, it does. My atrium started up again this week, and I am exhausted from doing the cleaning and maintenance of the space that I must do to be ready for the children. For my readers unfamiliar with the terminology, the atrium is the name for the environment I set up for the children in my Catechesis of the Good Shepherd program on Sunday mornings. I am a catechist for 3-6 year olds. I hope one day to add the next level (6-9 year olds) and perhaps even 9-12 year olds. It is an "atrium" because it is meant to be not quite church, not quite home, but a place that opens up both of those spaces. The word is a recognition that children receive most of their catechesis from their church and home families, and only a small bit from the 1.5 hours they have with me on Sunday mornings.
Not that what we do on Sunday is unimportant - quite the contrary! The atrium is a place where children can come and learn about the mass using small replicas of the altar table, chalice and paten that they see in church. They think about the mystery of life and death by growing wheat seeds and thinking about Jesus's saying: "Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a single grain...." We use 2-D wood figures of a good shepherd and sheep to think about what Jesus means when he says "I am the Good Shepherd... I know my sheep and I call them by name...." How great it must be to be known that way, to be called by name! All of these are ultimately aimed toward helping the young child fall in love.
Ah, but it's a way for me to fall in love too.
Because the atrium is a time for me to remember to be contemplative too, to recover my practices of prayer that went out the window with all the activity of the summer. Just as I show the children that they cannot move quickly or suddenly, so my own pace becomes slower. And I always have to remember not to speak and move at the same time - for younger children get distracted if you do too much. Being with the children is an unschooling of my multi-tasking ways, which is a very good thing. It turns out, pretty much anything I want to do turns out worse if I multi-task than if I can focus on it long enough to do it well.
At the end of each week's atrium session, I turn out the lights and light the candles; I might read a short Psalm with the children, and we just sit. We enjoy the light and the silence and each other.
I'm always amazed that the children are able to sit still for so quiet and so long - but maybe I'm even more amazed, these days, that I can sit still for so long too....
Showing posts with label Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Communion
Clearly, the fact that maternity leave is over has impacted my ability to post on this blog. Well, that, and the fact that I am assistant editor to the new catholicmoraltheology.com blog. (Check us out - 15 or so North American theologians comment on news, liturgy and other reading...)
But today in the communion line, I was definitely confronted with one of those issues that confound both the mom and the theologian in me. As I was herding my children in the communion line, I looked down to discover that my three-year-old had her hands held together in the typical Eucharist-receiving gesture. It was clear she wanted some - and equally clear, as the Eucharistic minister leaned down to say (I am quoting) "Hello there, little girl!" - that she was not going to get anything in the communion line.
That makes my heart hurt. That is not to say that my experience here should govern what we do theologically - while I think that experience has some kind of place in theological questions, I get concerned when experience becomes a driving force for theological thinking. That said, in this particular case of Eucharistic communion, I don't really get why, in the Roman Rite, children younger than seven can't receive. I actually tend to "get" arguments about closed communion because of theological disagreements between Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox much more than I get refusing communion to young children.
I know that one of the standard arguments is the "Age of Reason." Numerous people have made jokes about how strange it seems to proclaim an "age of reason" for Eucharistic communion when one of the things we believe about the Eucharist is that it is mysterious - that the Paschal Mystery itself is bound up in our theology of the Eucharist. Mystery, here, means something that is not plumbable by human rational standards, though of course we can think about the Eucharist (and we do). But it isn't clear, ultimately, what an "age of reason" is supposed to confer in this case.
Perhaps we could say it is analogous to driving cars or drinking - both of these have age requirements for our children because we know that certain levels of mechanical skill, experience, practical wisdom, and mental acuity are required, in varying degrees, for these activities. But the Eucharist, to me, seems much more analogous to a fine dining experience than to driving cars. Yes, we want to take care with the fine china and the tablecloth - and there are specific gestures and rituals that go along with fine dining that we wouldn't encounter in the drive-thru. And maybe that IS the working analogy here, for I know that many families do not use their fine china with their younger children. Babysitters are called for when some people invite others over for fancy dinner parties; young children are excluded.
That is arbitrary, though. It is not a given that young children cannot learn to use fine china and cannot care for special table linens. Paul says not to take the Eucharist unworthily - can children equally be taught to respect the Eucharistic table without necessarily understanding it (which is a lifelong process in any case). I think here of the work I do in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS)- a Montessori-based religious ed program for kids from ages 3 to 12. In the early years, it is clear that everything the children learn is moving toward Eucharist though it may not seem so at first.
An entering three year old in my Atrium (the name for CGS classroom space) will spend the first few weeks doing what we call "practical life" - lessons in rolling and unrolling mats, walking slowly and carefully, and pouring - first pouring dry beans from one pitcher to another; then pouring liquid. If they spill, they learn to sweep up or sponge up the mess. What they are learning is how to control their bodies so they can do the things they want to do (just as in potty training, around the same age) - but more than that, they are helping to create an environment with other children that allows for prayer.
After those first few weeks, then the children learn about the altar table and see, touch and name the objects that are on an altar table - like the chalice and the paten. A bit later in the year (early in Lent in my Atrium) my three year olds will begin learning some of the mass gestures, with the hope that they become more engaged with the mass they attend. One of these lessons is called "Preparation of the Chalice". Here, their pouring exercises come in handy, for now they are pouring wine and just a tiny little bit of water into a chalice. (When they are four or maybe five, they'll continue to meditate on this mass gesture by learning the words the priest says and thinking about what these mean.)
This past year, I asked a group of children about the chalice. "Why is there so much wine but only a little tiny bit of water in the chalice?" Hmmmm, the children thought. A couple of them knew that the wine would become Jesus' blood, so they talked about the wine being God. Ah, I said. "But what about the water?" "Maybe the water is us," a shy girl said. "Yeah, and maybe there's more wine because God is THIS big [his arms stretched as far as they could go] but we're only this big," shouted a boy.
Indeed. And they were three and four years old. (Now I know that some theologians among my readers will take issue with the idea of the bigness of God, as though God could be adequately described in human terms - but I hope you'll at least give my preschoolers the benefit of the doubt - after all, Augustine, for a while, spent time thinking about God as a big man, and he was far older than these kids....)
So isn't some kind of "age of reason" rather arbitrary?
But more than that, if we believe that the sacrament is about God's grace - and is more about God than us - then it isn't clear to me that the Eucharist requires some kind of "reasoning" about it, nor a minimum age.
Philosophy PhD Husband and I have thought about this before. At one time, we considered attending a Byzantine Rite Catholic Mass, which does commune anyone who is baptized, including babies. For a variety of reasons we have not done that - but seeing my daughter's open hands at mass today made me want to think about it all again.
But today in the communion line, I was definitely confronted with one of those issues that confound both the mom and the theologian in me. As I was herding my children in the communion line, I looked down to discover that my three-year-old had her hands held together in the typical Eucharist-receiving gesture. It was clear she wanted some - and equally clear, as the Eucharistic minister leaned down to say (I am quoting) "Hello there, little girl!" - that she was not going to get anything in the communion line.
That makes my heart hurt. That is not to say that my experience here should govern what we do theologically - while I think that experience has some kind of place in theological questions, I get concerned when experience becomes a driving force for theological thinking. That said, in this particular case of Eucharistic communion, I don't really get why, in the Roman Rite, children younger than seven can't receive. I actually tend to "get" arguments about closed communion because of theological disagreements between Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox much more than I get refusing communion to young children.
I know that one of the standard arguments is the "Age of Reason." Numerous people have made jokes about how strange it seems to proclaim an "age of reason" for Eucharistic communion when one of the things we believe about the Eucharist is that it is mysterious - that the Paschal Mystery itself is bound up in our theology of the Eucharist. Mystery, here, means something that is not plumbable by human rational standards, though of course we can think about the Eucharist (and we do). But it isn't clear, ultimately, what an "age of reason" is supposed to confer in this case.
Perhaps we could say it is analogous to driving cars or drinking - both of these have age requirements for our children because we know that certain levels of mechanical skill, experience, practical wisdom, and mental acuity are required, in varying degrees, for these activities. But the Eucharist, to me, seems much more analogous to a fine dining experience than to driving cars. Yes, we want to take care with the fine china and the tablecloth - and there are specific gestures and rituals that go along with fine dining that we wouldn't encounter in the drive-thru. And maybe that IS the working analogy here, for I know that many families do not use their fine china with their younger children. Babysitters are called for when some people invite others over for fancy dinner parties; young children are excluded.
That is arbitrary, though. It is not a given that young children cannot learn to use fine china and cannot care for special table linens. Paul says not to take the Eucharist unworthily - can children equally be taught to respect the Eucharistic table without necessarily understanding it (which is a lifelong process in any case). I think here of the work I do in the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (CGS)- a Montessori-based religious ed program for kids from ages 3 to 12. In the early years, it is clear that everything the children learn is moving toward Eucharist though it may not seem so at first.
An entering three year old in my Atrium (the name for CGS classroom space) will spend the first few weeks doing what we call "practical life" - lessons in rolling and unrolling mats, walking slowly and carefully, and pouring - first pouring dry beans from one pitcher to another; then pouring liquid. If they spill, they learn to sweep up or sponge up the mess. What they are learning is how to control their bodies so they can do the things they want to do (just as in potty training, around the same age) - but more than that, they are helping to create an environment with other children that allows for prayer.
After those first few weeks, then the children learn about the altar table and see, touch and name the objects that are on an altar table - like the chalice and the paten. A bit later in the year (early in Lent in my Atrium) my three year olds will begin learning some of the mass gestures, with the hope that they become more engaged with the mass they attend. One of these lessons is called "Preparation of the Chalice". Here, their pouring exercises come in handy, for now they are pouring wine and just a tiny little bit of water into a chalice. (When they are four or maybe five, they'll continue to meditate on this mass gesture by learning the words the priest says and thinking about what these mean.)
This past year, I asked a group of children about the chalice. "Why is there so much wine but only a little tiny bit of water in the chalice?" Hmmmm, the children thought. A couple of them knew that the wine would become Jesus' blood, so they talked about the wine being God. Ah, I said. "But what about the water?" "Maybe the water is us," a shy girl said. "Yeah, and maybe there's more wine because God is THIS big [his arms stretched as far as they could go] but we're only this big," shouted a boy.
Indeed. And they were three and four years old. (Now I know that some theologians among my readers will take issue with the idea of the bigness of God, as though God could be adequately described in human terms - but I hope you'll at least give my preschoolers the benefit of the doubt - after all, Augustine, for a while, spent time thinking about God as a big man, and he was far older than these kids....)
So isn't some kind of "age of reason" rather arbitrary?
But more than that, if we believe that the sacrament is about God's grace - and is more about God than us - then it isn't clear to me that the Eucharist requires some kind of "reasoning" about it, nor a minimum age.
Philosophy PhD Husband and I have thought about this before. At one time, we considered attending a Byzantine Rite Catholic Mass, which does commune anyone who is baptized, including babies. For a variety of reasons we have not done that - but seeing my daughter's open hands at mass today made me want to think about it all again.
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