This week, the lesson
plan for Kindergarten and First Grade Religious Ed invited them to talk about
the signs of spring they could see. I
was a little worried about this. You
see, we get out religious ed materials from a company called Pflaum, who write
their lesson plans up around six months in advance, send them to us about three
months in advance, and then our catechists put them into action. It’s in general a pretty good system, but sometimes
having your lesson plans written for you months in advance causes problems. And this week, when I was covering K and 1st
religious ed, and saw that I was meant to ask them to point out signs of Spring
they could see… that was one of those times.
The idea
of the lesson plan was a very good one.
It was one that followed Jesus’ lead, adopted God’s own pedagogy, and
invited the students to look to creation to understand their Creator; explore the
world created to be the material object of God’s love, to understand the Love
God is; a pedagogy that trusted childlike human vision to see signs of new life
all around them and be led to wonder at God’s providence, God’s care for each
of us. It was a pedagogy that used story
and narrative, including a tale we read together about a young gardener being
amazed at a beautiful sunflower emerging as a volunteer plant, a spontaneous
bursting forth of God’s giddy sharing of his creative joy with us. It used nature and narrative to try to not
just convey truth intellectually, but to beckon these children into
relationship with the one is Truth, who is Way, who is Life, to not just
sprinkle an idea over their heads but plant trust in their hearts.
But, we couldn’t
do the lesson quite as the lovely people at Pflaum intended. Because we looked around, and we saw winter
coats, ground covered by snow, no flowers springing or baby bunnies
hopping. But I got lucky, because these
kids were gifted with memory and imagination.
I didn’t know going into class whether kindergartners in particular
would be at the developmental stage that they could remember last year’s spring
and make the connection that this would happen again (a connection that many
adults seem tempted to doubt in our weaker moments!). I was worried that my slight modification of
the lesson would fall flat on its face. But
my worry was groundless, because God inspired the hearts and grew the minds of
those children to a point where they could be part of this time of learning. Class ‘worked.’ God gave me what I needed.
I need to
remember that. Like the children, I need
that memory and I need the imagination to see how that can apply in whatever
world of worry next confronts me. The
Constitutions of the Congregation of Holy Cross tell us that to engage in the seeking
of the kingdom that Jesus calls us to, disciples will need the competence to
see as well as the courage to act. The
competence to see… to see that our cold snowy home is awaiting Spring…
the competence to see that God will provide, even when all seems hopeless. And this is what can undergird the courage to,
in faith, make God our only master, not to grasp at illusions of
self-sufficiency, of security in possessions, of thinking that things could
give us ultimate happiness. The courage
to live in a stance of faith and trust, and not in a trembling of worry, a
fearful future of our own construction.
That
takes real courage, because the snow piles up real high sometimes, and the
burgeoning flowers can be microscopic.
But they’re real. In can be hard
to live lives of faith and trust. It’s
hard to open the bulletin each week, look at the financials and do that. It’s hard for so many of our families to look
over their books and do the same. We
could visit bed after bed in Memorial or St. Joe hospital and meet patients
anxiously awaiting test results and it would be crude to glibly tell them “just
quit worrying!”
So, we
need to can the glibness. We need to
take a page from Isaiah’s book, who takes on the role of comforter, one of the
tasks of the suffering servant, and says: look to nature, human nature, look to
a mother’s love… see in that your God’s tender care. Isaiah marshals one of the most powerful
feminine images of God in the Bible to try to dispel worry. And Jesus takes this nurturing and comforting
and, through suffering, fulfills it.
Jesus
suffered to dispel worry, because worry can be a master as powerful as Mammon,
and Jesus wants to win us for himself!
Worry’s just as needy a master as Mammon is, and just as tempting, and
just as corrosive of faith. Because God
will provide. We need to form in
ourselves and in our neighbors the memory and the imagination to see God’s
providing, but we can’t even begin to do that alone. “God will bring to light what is hidden in
darkness,” St. Paul assures us. God will
bring it to light. That spring flower
obscured by ice packed into snow… God will bring it to light. There will be melting, and even if that causes
flooding, remember how God cares for people in floods! Remember how Jesus sleeps in our boats when
the storms rise and awakes when we panic and calms them. Remember the house built on rock that was
buffeted by just as powerful a storm as the one on sand, but survived. Remember, and imagine: how might God be with
me in this storm? What might God be
about to make visible? How is God
providing for me? Our faith is little,
our vision blinkered; God’s gift is extravagant.
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