By Derek Olsen
A New Gesture: As a liturgy geek with Anglo-Catholic leanings, I’ve seen and done more liturgical gestures than can easily be numbered. Yet, in the past few months I’ve discovered another. Since it is—to the best of my knowledge—unclassified, I’ll give it a name: the oscular cross. It’s a rather peculiar gesture that involves making the sign of the cross with the first two fingers of the right hand while simultaneously sucking the right thumb. While I’ve not seen it in Ritual Notes or any other liturgical guide, I have an extraordinarily good vantage for observing it; it’s the sign my newly-five-year old daughter makes as she leans her head on my shoulder while I hold her during the Eucharistic prayer. At the various points in the prayer when I lean my head down and whisper “Cross yourself…’ she’ll obediently perform the oscular cross.
It’s also been spotted at bed-time. As we begin the Song of Simeon (the Nunc Dimittis), the oscular cross once again makes an appearance. I have yet to determine if it is a characteristic gesture of a certain age-set, but I’m not yet sure; rather than the oscular cross, my two-year old daughter makes a motion—thumb free from mouth—that resembles swatting a cloud of mosquitoes that have descended all over her upper body.
The appearance of the oscular cross has led me to consider the faith of children, formation, and the Anglican way of being. Let me hasten to add that I’m no child psychologist, no decades-tested Christian educator, and I’m producing no glossy-covered book guaranteeing simple steps to producing a Christ-centered child. But I am a daddy. I do care deeply and passionately about my little girls, and about the ways they think, feel, and live. I have found hope, joy, and solace in my faith—I want nothing less for them. So I present no answers, but more a random assemblage of field-notes on raising up Anglicans.
On Bed-Time Prayers: A common part of Christian family culture is the bedtime prayer ritual. I remember caring for a clergy couple’s children a few years ago, and the look of shock and horror on the young faces when I forgot bedtime prayers. My elder was still non-verbal at that time, but the episode jolted me to an awareness that it was time to consider the concept in earnest! Raised Presbyterian and Lutheran respectively, my wife and I grew up with prayers, but our household spirituality is very much shaped by the disciplines of fixed prayer and the rhythms of the Anglican Daily Office, disciplines we’d like to instill in our children as well. If only there were a trial-size version of the Daily Office, suitable for children and others with short attention spans! …And it turns out, there is. The “Daily Devotions for Individuals and Families” begins on page 136 of your BCP; prayers “At the Close of Day” can be found on page 140. These quickly became our standard prayers.
I’ve seen other options—we’ve got other options on our children’s shelves: books with little prayers helpfully illustrated by picture of cute little sheep and all. We opted out of those for two main reasons. First, the theology of many was rather questionable. If I don’t like a prayer’s theology, why would I teach it to my children? Second, I have a predisposed bias against worship dumbed-down. Prayer, worship, is formational. What we say, how we pray, shapes how we think about and feel towards God. It forms us into Christian patterns of being. I had initial fears that perhaps the prayers were “too advanced” but I felt confirmed in our approach when, at the age of three, our eldest could repeat the entire office from memory—and would often insist on chanting parts of it as well!
Does she understand what everything means? No, not yet—but it’s fascinating to see flashes of insight when an epiphany occurs, one made possible by her memorization. We were driving in the car one day and prompted by both the church service we’d left and the Linkin Park lyrics on the radio, she asked, “Daddy, what’s ‘mercy’?” After I’d finished choking on my coffee, I tried to give her a short answer to a big concept and found assistance by referring to those prayers that she already knew. Looking in the rearview mirror, I saw a flash of insight in her eyes that would have been impossible without her prayer formation.
On Kids in Church: My wife and I believe that, generally, kids understand the messages we adults send and are taught about us and our world by what they see us do. The practice of Children’s Church is a contested topic in our house. We can see some utility for it, but, at the end of the day I believe it communicates to children that the adults don’t want them in their service. If we teach them we don’t want them there—they’ll learn it and may never come back. As a result, we’ve had a policy of having our eldest daughter in church since she was born.
Since my wife is priest, that means that I’ve had the role of dealing with our elder daughter, trying to keep her focused—or at least quiet—in the service since she was born. I focus on quiet because children can be disruptive to the rest of the congregation, and that needs to be taken seriously. At the same time, a quietly cooing and giggling baby is not an offense in my book. The only way to learn how to behave in church is to be there. However, I always sat with an eye to the quick escape where I could remove her if she got truly disruptive.
A few Atlanta congregations remember me as the guy who stood at the back of the church swinging a baby carrier like a censer to lull the little one back to sleep. As she got older, she’d let me know what she wanted. Sometimes during a sermon (or even after the first lesson) she’d simply get up, head out of the pew, and take off for the back of the church to wander around outside. I quickly learned to follow along; the alternative was a messy meltdown.
Now that she’s older still and a newly-minted five-year old, I again choose our seating with care. Now we sit as close to the front as practically possible so she can see what’s going on, often in the first couple of pews. I formerly fretted about the time she spent doodling on pew cards, flipping through books, or coloring sheets rather than “paying attention” but time has taught me to not be concerned. Once after a game of “church” (oh yes, she gathers her mother, sister, and a flock of invisible friends for church complete with hymns, a sermon, and Eucharist) my wife came to me with wonder in her eyes. “She knows the Eucharistic prayer! Not word for word, but just now, she went through virtually the whole thing.” Let’s just say: she didn’t pick it up from Children’s Church…
You may have noticed, however, a certain silence about my younger daughter… That’s because currently while her elder sister comes with me, the younger goes to the nursery. I feel a little bit badly about that, like I’m letting her down, but I know the alternative. I’m just one man and the two sisters together inspire far more mayhem than the two sisters apart. It might be different if my wife were next to me rather than up front, but on the occasions we’ve had a chance to try it—the results weren’t pretty. I’d end up taking the younger out to wander the narthex anyway. Every once in a while, as she matures, we give it a try. Maybe in a few more months (or another year) it’ll be more possible. Until then, for the elder’s sake, for my sake, for the congregation’s sake, it’s the nursery for her.
On Providing Examples: Children learn things that we teach them, but even more than that, they absorb things from their environment—and I don’t just mean a church service environment. They learn our values by gauging what activities they see us do and not do. Once our younger daughter was “helping” us clean up our room by moving a pile of belongings to wherever she thought they belonged. I was both amazed and gratified when she toddled over to me, said: “Daddy book!” and thrust my Daily Office book into my hands. She sees me with it. Maybe not every day, maybe not as constantly as I’d wish, but she knows it’s a part of who I am and what I do.
I’ve seen studies and heard research about attendance patterns in kids. One of the things that I keep hearing is that the children who tend to stay in church during and after high school, during and after college, are those who come from households where the father goes to church. It’s well-known anecdotally that more women go to church than men, and what I take away from this is that it’s families that are engaged in the faith that have the best shot at raising faithful children. Families these days are complicated. Shape, size, format, we recognize that many configurations exist besides the 1950’s nuclear family. When children can see their family—no matter its structure—taking faith seriously, they will learn that it is something to take seriously.
Call for Help: So what do you do? What have you tried? How are your experiences partially—or maybe completely—different from mine? As I’ve said before, I know for sure that I’m no expert, but I’d like to start a conversation about children and faith and more particularly, children and the Anglican way of learning Christ. What do your field-notes look like? Let’s compare!
Derek Olsen is in the final stretch of completing a Ph.D. in New Testament (with a healthy side of Homiletics) at Emory University. His reflections on life, liturgical spirituality, and being a Gen-X dad appear at Haligweorc.