Communion: I Serve You In The Love Of Christ

by Jill Clingan

I felt a tap on my shoulder, startling me from my reverie. It was a spring Sunday morning.  My husband was upstairs helping with the kids. I was sitting alone in my pew.  The service was winding down, and it was time for communion.  As I was sitting in that pew, with my head bowed, I probably looked the part of a pensive, meditative worshipper.

But I was not praying. I was staring down at the spiral bound notebook in my lap. The tap on my shoulder was so startling because I was afraid I was going to get caught, and I immediately sought to conceal the small book.

I had not been jotting down sermon notes or composing a pre-communion prayer. Instead, I had been scribbling out my to-do list, a list that spanned laundry and homeschool prep and long-overdue emails and housecleaning. As I stared down at my completed list, I felt overwhelmed and a wee bit panicky that I was sitting quietly in church rather than ticking something off of that list.

The tap on my shoulder had distracted me out of a meditation more tellurian than sacred.

Children and Eucharist

by Genelda Woggon

Our grandson, born in the late 1980s, was blessed to belong to a church that did indeed honor the rich spiritual potential of the young child. At their Sunday morning Family Eucharist he was welcomed at the Table of the Lord to receive the Bread and the Wine along with his parents and the parish community. It is his generation that will be among the first in the Episcopal Church to never remember when he was not fed at the Table of the Lord.

It was his mother’s generation, however, that came of age at the time that General Convention of the Episcopal Church in 1971 asserted that “admission to communion is to be based upon baptism alone, not upon baptism plus Episcopal confirmation.” This was not a decree that came to fruition overnight – but a long . . . slow . . . process that is still unfolding in various stages in different places around the country.

It took almost another 10 years for this to really begin to sink in. In 1988 the General Convention made it necessary to make yet another statement saying it “unequivocally affirms that all baptized persons, regardless of age, may receive communion.”

This was the turning point for infants and toddlers to be really invited to the Table – but always at the parents’ discretion as to the exact and most appropriate time for each child to receive. . . . . It was quite interesting to see the differences in how parishes responded – to some degree based on geography and cultural dynamics more than on liturgical or theological reasoning.

Life After High School

by M. Craig Barnes

I recently went to parents’ night at our local high school in Princeton, New Jersey. The way these evenings work is that parents walk through their children’s schedule, going from classroom to classroom. There we sit in remarkably uncomfortable chairs for a 15-minute introduction to the teacher and the course he or she teaches.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve been in a high school, and memories flooded over me.

As I shuffled down the halls looking at the posters advertising the next dance, a homecoming pep rally and tryouts for the spring musical, I was transported back 40 years to when I walked through high school halls in a blue-collar neighborhood on Long Island. I realize that youth culture has changed dramatically over these years. But the beige linoleum floors, the tiled state-hospital-like walls, the wide stairwells that beg for someone to slap down an armful of books—they are all the same. I walked past one locker that was dented—and prayed for the nerd whose head had been pushed into it. And don’t even get me started on the bathrooms. Have the graffiti artists developed no creativity after so many years?

No one ever gets over high school. I am sure my stepsons’ teachers were saying important things that night as I sat in their classes, but I couldn’t stay focused. The familiar halls beckoned old memories that overtook my mind and soul.

The Spirituality Parenting

More and more people in our time are disconnected from religious institutions, at least for part of their lives. Others are religious and find themselves creating a family with a spouse from another tradition or no tradition at all. And the experience of parenting tends to raise spiritual questions anew. We sense that there is a spiritual aspect to our children's natures and wonder how to support and nurture that. The spiritual life, begins not in abstractions, but in concrete everyday experiences. And children need our questions as much as our answers.  

Click here to listen to Krista Tippett's interview with Sandy Eisenberg Sasso on The Spirituality of Parenting

How Can Adults Nurture Children's Spirituality?

Even with clear evidence that spirituality is an important resource for individuals, and clear mandates to address the spiritual needs of children, evidence-based practices for promoting spiritual well-being in children and adolescents are hard to find. 

What can be found instead are large numbers of books and articles aimed at educators and parents, most of which contain guidelines or suggestions that are loosely based on research but do not rise much above the level of good advice.

In the face of this reality, what can adults who care about children do? We know that children come to us with an innate spirituality, but that spirituality is very vulnerable to the cultural forces that devalue it. It follows then, that the most important thing we can do to nurture it is value it – value it by our words and our actions.

Sundays Are Worth the Effort!

"The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed. It is the smallest of all seeds, but a man took it and planted it in his garden and it grew and grew until it became a tree and all the birds in the air came and nested in its branches."

- Tomie dePaola, adapted from Matthew 13:31-32, Mark 4:31-32, Luke 13:19

Is it easy to bring our children to church on Sunday? No. Do most of us have routines or traditions that celebrate Sunday as special? Not really. Does it make a difference for our children's faith if we do? Yes!

It isn't easy to get the family to church on Sunday or create Sunday traditions, but the impact of this weekly effort on our children is enormous. Maybe it's a struggle to get to church regularly, or we long for a peaceful church service, or we're lucky if we manage to light a candle at a Sunday meal. Yet every effort strengthens our children's experience of Sundays as extra special.