by Richard S. Gilbert, Parish Minister, First Unitarian Church, Rochester, New York

I was intrigued by a recent Gary Trudeau cartoon in which Michael Doonesbury and his wife J.J. are talking with their daughter Alex: "Alex, honey, Mom and I have been talking, and we've decided it's time for us to start attending church as a family."
Alex: "Church? Church is boring!"
Michael: "Well, we thought you might say that. All kids think that..."
Alex: "Didn't you think church was boring when you were a kid?"
Michael: "Well, sure, I hated going. But church was good for me, so my parents made me stick it out. You may end up hating church, too, but you have to come by that feeling honestly. You have to put in the pew time like Mom and I did."
Alex: "Oh . . . . What if I like it?"
Michael: "Like it? What do you mean?"
J.J.: "We'll cross that bridge when we get there, honey."

Many of the "boomer" generation like Michael and J.J. are talking about religious education with their children. Going to church school is to many something like eating your spinach, brushing your teeth or going to the dentist. You don't really want to do it, though you know it will be good for you.
But what if you really like it? I mean, what if the process of growing meanings, values and convictions is really fun? What if delving into the mysterium tremendum is not a bore, but an exciting adventure of the spirit? What if wrestling with the moral dilemmas of 20th century life is scintillating? What if the people you meet there become your life-long companions of the spirit? What if church isn't boring, but feeds your soul, and you like the taste? What if religion and theology are not some chore to be done like cleaning the house, but instead are endeavors you want to be engaged in? What then? Well, we'll cross that bridge if we come to it.
Though I confess I come at this from a biased viewpoint, I tell you that religion is exciting business¾I think the most exciting business there is¾and I don't mean be a professional religionist. I mean going about the business of discerning what life is all about, what one's own life means, where we are going in it, what we are doing with it, and why. If there is anything more important or more stimulating I would like to know.
If you have ever wondered "why bad things happen to good people," whether earth's ultimate destiny is to be a "republic of insects and grass," if creation is a "cosmic fluke," or how Unitarian Universalists can behave virtuously without Heaven and Hell, then you are in danger, serious danger of falling into theology. And be forewarned, you may even come to enjoy dealing with these issues. And if you find out that you do, your life may well never be the same.
This process we call religious education¾which is not "just for children." Rather, it is a central preoccupation of each one of us from cradle to grave. It is a lifespan undertaking, for we are all, each of us, going to the school of life from the beginning to the end of our days.
I think of a monograph from our denomination which tells of an experiment at the First Unitarian Church of Miami, Florida. The assistant minister revealed its nature at the last of three adult education workshops on liberal religious principles. It was a high powered and intellectual treatment of fundamental beliefs "on a rather advanced level which seemed to satisfy the highly intelligent and mature participants. What was not announced was that all the points of the lectures, without exception, were taken from one or another of the . . . textbooks used in our church school for children between the ages of four and fourteen." The report continued, "The purpose of the experiment was to demonstrate that the religion of children, the curriculum of our church school, is not something to be smiled at or patronized, but rather is an approach . . . to the most profound and significant and pressing problems of (humanity)."
There is no question that this experiment could be successfully replicated today. Take but one example. In teaching a Religion in Life seminar for high school students, I always ask them about their church school experience. As they recall their earliest years, almost without exception they point to "Haunting House" as most meaningful. Why? Because it provided them a spiritual place to be, a space for their questioning, a haven for their doubts, and practical embodiment of their liberal religious faith.
But it is not easy to do religious education at any age in our movement. Why? Because that process is decidedly not a catechism class. Sofia Lyon Fahs, our legendary religious educator, once told about a professor from a foreign country who was visiting her junior high church school class. Invited to speak about his observations, he said that he was very interested in al that had happened, but "This is all very different from the way we do in my country. There we teach the boys and girls the Catechism."
"What is that?" asked one of the class.
He explained, and when he finished one of the boys said thoughtfully, "Professor, that is perhaps all very well in your country, but it wouldn't work with us. It seems to me you are setting up a kind of ladder, but it has only one rung and that's at the top. It's all right, if you can reach that far."
That was a very perceptive observation of the way we do religious education at every age. There are no one-rung ladders here. There are many steps for all of us to climb and no guarantee we will ever make the top. We can only guarantee that climbing the ladder and beholding the ever-changing view is rather exciting stuff.
On the opposite end of the educational spectrum from teaching by catechism is the notion that to give a child any religious instruction is to corrupt the mind; that to tell a child what we believe may take unfair advantage of one younger than ourselves; that we will somehow bias the child if we confess our convictions.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was once involved in discussion with a man who firmly believed that children should not be given formal religious instruction of any kind. They would then be free to choose their own religious faith, he reasoned, when they reached the age of discretion. Coleridge did not disagree, but later invited the man into his somewhat neglected garden.
"Do you call this a garden?" exclaimed the visitor. "There are nothing but weeds here!"
"Well, you see," explained Coleridge, "I did not wish to infringe upon the liberty of the garden in any way. I was just giving the garden a chance to express itself and to choose its own production."1
There are many weeds out there to spoil the social garden in which we raise our children. Who is really raising them? MTV? Their peers? Rock stars? What values does the culture convey? What is the theology of contemporary culture? I would describe it as dominated by a secular trinity of money, sex and the power. A bottom-line morality is all pervasive and the marketplace is God. Sex is not a treasured dimension of human existence, but a topic for exploitation. Power over others in a no-holds barred competition is the political correctness of our time. To me, then, one of the roles of our church community is to act as a counter-culture¾teaching values transcending the marketplace, that human gentleness is to be cherished, and that cooperation is not a cop out but is morally superior to an "I deserve all I can get" power morality.
And then, how do we prepare our kids, as a minority faith, for the real world, with so many so much more aggressive about their faith? Can we, should we, inoculate our kids against fundamentalism and dogma? How do we support our kids when they actually do things out of their own convictions but which is against the conventional wisdom of our time?
And so, between the indoctrination of the creed and catechism and the anarchy of neglecting the religious education of children, we seek to create a learning web for all ages. Now some will wonder if children can engage in these rarefied religious undertakings. They are, after all, not miniature adults. Perhaps we had best wait until they are more mature before we engage them on these difficult issues.
I hasten to affirm, without equivocation, that children do have moral and spiritual experiences. The child is not only a "going to be," but a partner with us in the long journey of the spirit. Robert Coles of Harvard in his books on the moral and spiritual development of children testifies to the depth of their experiences. He suggests that religious questions are never very far from our ordinary life. "Children try to understand not only what is happening to them, but why; and in doing that, they call upon the religious life they have experienced, the spiritual values they have received, as well as other sources of potential explanation."
Coles illustrates the point by describing a young African-American girl who integrated a school in North Carolina beset by mobs of angry, screaming white parents. "I was all alone, and those (segregationist) people were screaming, and suddenly I saw God smiling, and I smiled. A woman was standing there (near the school door), and she shouted at me, 'Hey, you little nigger, what are you smiling at?' I looked right at her face and I said, 'At God.' Then she looked up at the sky, and then she looked at me, and she didn't call me any more names."
Coles interviewed a ten-year-old Hopi Indian girl about her beliefs. Her experienced world was infused with religious ideas. "The sky watches us and listens to us. It talks to us, and it hopes we are ready to talk back. The sky is where the God of the Anglos lives, a teacher told us. She asked where our God lives. I said, 'I don't know.' I was telling the truth! Our God is the sky, and lives wherever the sky is. Our God is the sun and moon, too; and our God is our (the Hopi) people, if we remember to stay here (on the consecrated land). This is where we're supposed to be, and if we leave, we lose God."
This story depicts a child whose totality of the human and natural environment leaves her with values that are the warp and weft of her very being. For those who consider religion a kind of hobby, a part time activity, one choice on the experiential menu, this is a powerful illustration. There is no gap between the theological and the practical. Life is one and infused with the holy.
Religious truth is too often thought to be some abstract notion about esoteric matters. In fact, there is nothing more earthy and practical than religion. Religion requires constant opportunities to be practiced. As mere theory it is incomplete. Philosopher and educator John Dewey illustrated the point by telling about a swimming school of which he had heard that taught swimming without having the students enter the water; they were merely drilled in the appropriate motions. When one of the learners was asked what he did when he eventually got into the water, he calmly replied, "Sunk."
Daniel Webster once defined Christianity as "my old aunt in New Hampshire." Religion needs embodiment, enfleshment; it is a drama in need of actors. As actors in the drama of our lives and those of our children, we are co-creators of religion. We teach by all we are and do. Our church teaches by all that it is¾in the classroom, in the seminar and out. That religion requires community is graphically illustrated by the Chinese ideograph for belief, which is two persons talking¾a metaphor that captures the necessary dialogue which is the essence of the learning process. We are part of the great conversation.
My seminary mentor and religious education pioneer Angus MacLean had a way of relating this truth in anecdotal ways. Once he sat with his young son in a country house during a severe electrical storm. There came a mighty thunder clap that shook the house. Baby Colin, quick as a flash, looked in his father's face. Angus was significantly resigned to fate¾to accept and not transfer whatever fear he had. Without reaction, his son returned to play. How better to teach basic trust in the natural order? We teach by what we are.
Angus once told of a question asked by a father confronted by his five-year-old son, "'If God made everything, who made God?' So he asks me what answer to give him. My answer was for the father. I told him that the verbal answer he might give would probably have little significance, but that taking advantage of the relationship the question offered for facing life's mysteries together was the only difficult answer. The boy has not only a physical universe he wants to understand but a need of a psychic cosmos in which to feel at home. Live with him on the edges of the immensities and mysteries and if you have any wisdom, he'll get it."
The fact we do theology in community is accentuated by an African proverb: "I am because we are." The church community is the rich soil in which people grow their meanings and values and convictions. All of us¾cradle to grave¾live by a mystical process of spiritual osmosis. We learn from one another no matter what our chronological age. In the words of my ministerial colleague Max Coots, "We are neither saints nor sinners, but seekers."
In religious education we get our fingernails dirty with the work of the world. We are gardeners of the spirit, mixing the mud pieces of our natural existence with the holy water of the moral and spiritual journey we have set out on together. The holy is as common as mud.
I don't know how young Alex Doonesbury will make out in her religious education program. My suspicion is that if she were to attend our church school she just might get to like it. And what is more, Michael and J.J. might just get to like it too. As will all of us who regard ourselves as "gardeners of the spirit."
Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick wrote in the preface to William James's classic Varieties of Religious Experience, "We defend religion too much. Vital religion, like good music, needs no defense, but rendition. A wrangling controversy in support of religion is precisely as if the members of the orchestra should beat folks over the head with their violins to prove that music is beautiful. Play it!"
Just this week I heard a story about a grandmother and grandson. The boy asked about where he thought his heart was. He pointed to his posterior and was asked why there. "Because my grandmother pats me there and says, "Bless your little heart." Children learn by osmosis.

1. The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1985).

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