I've met Rebecca Nye only in book form, as the intelligence and compassion present in her writing, and I am just getting to know her new book, Children's Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters.[1] I have a feeling that, as with Jerome's and Maria Montessori's and Sofia Cavaletti's books, and John Hull's little gem, God-Talk with Young Children,[2] I will be returning over and over again to this one. What has captured my imagination right off is the structure Dr. Nye proposes for assessment and evaluation of one's work as an adult with children, particularly in the area of supporting children's spiritual development. I have used this structure three times now as a way of introducing the topic of children's spirituality at Godly Play trainings.
Most recently, in Juneau, Alaska, as I attached my SPIRIT poster to the wall of the classroom, I heard one participant murmur, "I knew there'd be an acronym." Yes, we move and mean these days through a great gyre of acronyms, and at times it feels as though these capitalized accretions of abbreviated adjectives and nouns clog and diminish the vitality of language as effectively as that great garbage patch of plastic pulsating ominously in the heart of the Pacific has begun to poison the marine environment. To be precise, though, Dr. Nye presents SPIRIT as an acrostic. And it's a word in its own right, hardly a neologism, a comforting and sustaining word by connotation, and the perfect mnemonic for what we're talking about when we talk about children's spirituality. What I've noticed since I began to play with it, is that a lot of the poems and readings and plenary handouts I've collected over the years seem to be finding their place alongside one of the concepts that make up the acrostic, so that my mental picture is beginning to take on the look of one of those wondering sessions where the children have been asked to bring to that spinal cord of Easter Faces something that helps to tell the story. And the shelves empty out! I think that ultimately this might be the best organizational structure for the various resources I'm attempting to assemble in this blog, so copious thanks go out to Rebecca Nye.
Let's start with:
[. . .] the habits which children have already acquired in our school, such as concentration on work, silence, calm in an environment where they are in continual social contacts with other children, and where they must choose their own activities and adapt them to their own needs and those of others, predispose them for the attainment of another moral victory of the utmost importance.
Silence and controlled movements can lead to an inner sensitivity known as a "religious," or "spiritual" sense. [. . .]
A child is extremely "receptive," and an environment that touches his senses exercises a strong influence upon him. Therefore, it is important to realize that in the first period of a child's growth his environment and the impressions it produces are, one might say, engraved on his soul in an indelible way. A mother who takes her child with her to church provides him with an appreciation for religion which no teaching could arouse. [. . .]
Our method encourages children to be both devout and free in their intellectual operations. The result of this is that they are seen to be spiritually strong and robust. Growing up in this fashion, they are neither timid nor fearful but pleasantly self-possessed, courageous, and alert. Above all they have faith and confidence in God, the Author and Preserver of life.[4]
What interests me in Montessori's line of thought is the possibility that a child's adaptation to a developmentally appropriate physical environment, guided in an open rather than a controlling way by the adult presence in that prepared environment, can influence and shape a child's internal environment, or self-construction, thereby producing, to the perpetual surprise of us clueless adults, the silent, self-motivated, peaceful child. The "discovery" of this "new" child, or "true" child, from observations that follow the formulation of the Montessori environment and method, was the good news Maria spent the rest of her life promulgating: What would happen if children were allowed to remake their exterior world after the image of that inner peace?
Dr. Nye and Dr. Montessori seem to me to be pretty much in synch here, and so I would like to turn elsewhere to wonder how these notions of space might play out in the lives and experience of us adults, and whether the poets and other mystics can shed some light on the subject. One thing I do notice with the poets is their call to slow down—to be still, in fact. To make a temporal space, by changing our pace. Adult panic drives the hurried-child machine of our culture; and hurried children grow up to be restless, burnt-out adults. The process escalates, and another positive feedback loop is born. (We humans are getting good at these!)
The kind of silence the poets and mystics talk about may not be the same as the silence Montessori observed in the Children's House, but it can be a silence that will help us as adults to understand and provide support for the space that a child will need in order to develop naturally and holistically. This kind of adult silence seems to have a lot to do with waiting. Waiting as listening. Waiting on the words. Waiting on the Word. What does that look like exactly? Jack Gilbert shows us one way, in this short poem:
Getting It Right
afternoon, trying to write a poem.
Falling asleep.
Are poets born or made? Do their experiences, "significances," begin to nudge them towards this habit of waiting, of listening, of creating exterior spaces for themselves in which interior spaces might appear? Here's another childhood memory from Jack Gilbert, all the more precious a document today to me, having just learned that the poet is in a nursing home in Berkeley, California, suffering from Alzheimer's:
Waiting and Finding
the tomtoms when it came time for that. You had to
run in order to get there first, and he would not.
So he always had a triangle. He does not remember
how they played the tomtoms, but he sees clearly
their Chinese look. Red with dragons front and back
and gold studs around that held the drumhead tight.
If you had a triangle, you didn’t really make music.
You mostly waited while the tambourines and tomtoms
went on a long time. Until there was a signal for all
triangle people to hit them the right way. Usually once.
Then it was tomtoms and waiting some more. But what
he remembers is the sound of the triangle. A perfect,
shimmering sound that has lasted all his long life.
Fading out and coming again after a while. Getting lost
and the waiting for it to come again. Waiting meaning
without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out,
sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives
silent in the middle of the world’s music. Waiting
for the best to come again. Beginning to hear the silence
The affinity becomes a habit that grows into a haunting:
The Answer
Is the clarity, the simplicity, an arriving
or an emptying out? If the heart persists
in waiting, does it begin to lessen?
If we are always good does God lose track
of us? When I wake at night, there is
something important there. Like the humming
of giant turbines in the high-ceilinged stations
in the slums. There is a silence in me,
absolute and inconvenient. I am haunted
by the day I walked through the Greek village
where everybody was asleep and somebody began
playing Chopin, slowly, faintly, inside
Our poet above gives us the outsides and insides of silence in his poetry. Here, below, another poet, Li Young Lee, reflects on the process a little more analytically, in an interview — "from the balcony," as it were:
It happens that, as time goes by and I use English more, it grows less alien to me, but I feel the real medium for poets is silence, so I could be writing in any language to reflect the inner silence to give it body. That is all we are doing. We use the voice to make the silence more present. It's like in architecture where the medium is not really stone nor metal but the space they enclose. We use materials—brick, glass, words—to inflect space both outer and inner. So I would say the real medium of poetry is inner space, the silence of our deepest interior.[8]
I'd like to turn for a moment to a sequence of quotations from Mother Teresa that speak of the preparations, the inner space-making, of a practicing, and practical, mystic:
Before you speak, it is necessary for you to listen, for God speaks in the silence of the heart.
It is our mission also in Godly Play to touch souls. Getting ready to do so involves this same needing to find God, the friend of silence. Nature shows us the way, whether we get it right by waking up under the stars, or by taking seriously our own need for sabbath times or remembering to find the places where we can come close. Where do you go, I wonder? Where do I go? Funny how often I forget to even wonder that. It almost always takes a falling asleep to wake up surprised by what I had forgotten.
The third of Mother Teresa's quotes above is perhaps the most well-known. It speaks also to the next letter in the acrostic—"P" is for Process—but I find in that process the same linking of a prepared physical and emotional environment - (Mother Teresa was known to spend hours at night alone in her mission chapel praying) - to the practical outcome of peace-making that Maria Montessori believed would flower from the fruit of her method, the students themselves.
In visiting churches and talking with practitioners, I often find that the most elusive component of Godly Play is getting these external constructs of physical and emotional and auditory space in place. Especially the physical aspects. People who work with children, as Dr. Nye notes, are often left with virtually un-adaptable facilities in which to create sacred space. This does not preclude creative problem-solving, but budgetary cuts often appear at the children's ministries level first, and old, beat-up, mismatched furniture, or knock-off TARGET or IKEA style shelving, crammed into inadequate, flourescently-lit basement spaces, can create hallucinatory environments where overcrowded materials quickly get lost in the chaos. I'm not even going to begin with the art materials' storage, display and upkeep issues, which usually get me into a dangerously combustible state: folks, I know where I don't need to go to come close.
One of the most peace-instilling environments I have ever been in personally was my own 16' x 24' north-facing log cabin painting studio, overlooking our vegetable garden in northern Vermont. There was a place for everything and for the only time in my life everything was in its place. I have found this quality in Caryl Menkhus' rooms at her Quaker Meeting in Portland, Oregon, and Di Pagel's rooms at her church in Orinda, California. Other Godly Play spaces I have visited flirt with peace, but leave me with one or two niggling questions over potential improvements, and occasionally succumb to a few glaring omissions. A lot of this is beyond CE directors' and teachers' control. The rooms in the program I worked and taught in at Emmanuel Episcopal Church on Mercer Island, Washington, were always shared with a day school program and church meetings, so were always frustratingly in flux. It took us seven years to win one dedicated space, but it was only free on Sunday mornings. The rest of the week it was storage for the rolling shelves from the other classrooms, as well as for stacked chairs and tables for evening meetings. Some compromises work well tucked away flat in the financial ledger, but not so well in three dimensions.
Likewise, I have seen many gorgeous photographs of Montessori classrooms around the globe, but my current public school program has to make do inside a cavernous industrial park hangar. The shelves are in order, but get lost in the outsized container.
There is definitely an art to getting this all right. An example of this for me is Michelangelo's design for what amounts to a vestibule (!) — the entry staircase to the Laurentian Library, in Florence, Italy. When I first visited, I found it hard to leave. I wanted to live there. I let myself do a bit of inner swooning, victim to a mild case of Stendhal's Syndrome (that 19th century French writer experienced it in Florence gazing up at Giotto's frescoes in Santa Croce)[10]. Proportion and light and color and materials all play their part in creating sacred space, and it is hard to re-sensitize ourselves when we spend so much of our time moving through the morass of kitsch and clutter and consumerist imperatives that is our contemporary landscape. (I'm thinking of the preamble to the Advent Lesson here.) One trend that concerns me in this regard is the anti-aesthetic movement away from church spaces altogether, the parking of mega-church populations on folding chairs in industrial or commercial interiors lit only by video screens. As if beauty were anathema, and only ever about elitism and idolatry and ostentatious expenditure.
There is a lot to bring to this discussion, and I should close before I descend into a rant.
Let me signal an ending by gathering up our ideas into a poem by Judy Sorum Brown, a Quaker educator and organizational thinker who has worked with Parker Palmer on his Courage to Teach retreats and seminars for teachers. This poem was sent to me by both Sally Thomas in California and Amy Crawford in Toronto, Canada, so clearly Brown's work has a trans-continental audience.
Fire
What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.
So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.
When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.
We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.
A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
The imagery of laying a fire aligns perfectly with all the kinds of space we need to think about when we begin the task of making room for children to be whole.
A final caveat of an image, suggested by that last sentence, comes from Annie Dillard, who hales like Jack Gilbert from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In her memoir, An American Childhood, a must-read full of memories pertinent to our work, she tells the tragic story of a cocoon stored in a glass jar on her teacher's desk at school. A Polyphemus moth emerges and begins to flap its wings, pumping fluid through the veins that will harden to create the struts and supports for successful flight. But the jar is too small for the large moth, and she remembers watching in horror as the teacher releases the now crippled creature onto the playground where it can only limp bravely down the paved surface of the school driveway, barely flapping its gnarled clumps, unable to take wing.[12]
Not to end gruesomely, but mindfully.
Peace and blessings to you, with another grateful nod to Rebecca Nye.
[1] Nye, Rebecca. Children's Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters. London: Church House Publishing, 2009.
[2] Hull, John. Notes for Parents & Teachers: God-Talk with Young Children. Philadelphia: Trinity Press
International, 1991.
[3] Nye, Rebecca. Children's Spirituality: What It Is and Why It Matters. London: Church House Publishing, 2009.
pp. 42-46.
[5] Gilbert, Jack. The Dance Most of All. New York: Random House, 2009. p. 41.
[6] Ibid. p. 15.
[7] Ibid. p. 49.
[8] Lee, Li Young. Interview: The Sun Magazine. August issue, 2005.
This came to me from Sally Thomas, a sacrificial page torn from what looks like a fancy journal.
Thank you, Sally!
[9] I'll confess to laziness here. These quotes are available all over the internet, but I have no source for them in
book form. I collected them while taking a short Lenten course on Mother T. at church last year.
[10] See more complete definition and anecdote at:
http://www.wordspy.com/words/Stendhalssyndrome.asp
[11] This can be found online here:
http://www.judysorumbrown.com/poems/excerpts-from-excerpted-from-the-sea-accepts-all-rivers-other-poems/
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