It’s no secret that I love books and reading, but this post isn’t about objects with pages. It’s about reading what Barbara Brown Taylor calls, “God’s first book, the book of creation.”
I’ve long referred to creation as God’s original cathedral, as in, “Let’s skip church and worship in the original cathedral today,” when I take a walk instead of attending a service. But I like this First Book language, too.
In a talk I attended in 2020, Brown Taylor reminded us of Job 12:7-10,
“Just ask the animals, and they will teach you. Ask the birds of the sky, and they will tell you. Speak to the earth, and it will instruct you. Let the fish in the sea speak to you…. For the life of every living thing is in his hand, and the breath of every human being.”
“For ever since the world was created, people have seen the earth and sky. Through everything God made, we can clearly see his invisible qualities.”
So we can learn about God from what God has made. She quoted Meister Eckhart, “Every creature is of God and full of God.” There are several benefits to connecting to God through what God has made. Brown Taylor called it, “re-enchanting the world for your children”:
It can enhance reverence for God.
It can help children not fear the world beyond their screens, possibly even not fear the dark as much.
It can help them develop love for all God’s creatures.
It can show them the unity of creation because so many natural systems are connected and support each other in so many ways.
We don’t need to engage in any formal study or even go outside to do this, although it’s certainly great to do so. Here are some activities:
1. Keep something growing indoors, and pay attention to what’s happening with it: blooming, growing, dying back. What can it teach us about thriving and resting and over- and under-feeding?
2. Notice the animals around you. Count whiskers or spots on a pet. Turn out the lights and use a flashlight to find your pet. Look out a window and consider the birds. Put up a bird feeder, squirrel feeder, bat house, and see what comes. What kind of insects make their way into your home? What do you read there?
3. Read a poem to a tree. The poem can be written by the children, or chosen by them. This one seems silly, but people can be surprisingly moved by it.
4. Tape a moon calendar to the fridge or bulletin board and make sure you notice what phase the moon is in. Make a practice of noticing the moon; praise the child who’s the first one to see the moon every time you go outside.
5. Sit in front of a fire together. She said, “fire is a great fascinator.” Candleflame can also work.
6. Turn over big stones and investigate what is revealed. Bring a plastic bag or a shoe box on walks or to the backyard so kids can gather things that interest them.
7. Teach children to recognize the call of one wild bird, and try to learn it in the wild, as opposed to on an app. Brown Taylor said, “Every bird has its own voice, just like we do.”
8. Keep a Nature Bin to store the treasures you find in creation. My nature bin has items I’ve kept since college, some my parents had collected when they were younger, as well as things my children and I have gathered over the last 20+ years. You don’t even need a bin! Friends of mine pile their collection on their porch steps, where it becomes a great conversation starter.
My church set up a nature offering table during Creation Season last year. It contains many items from my nature box, but also offerings that other people brought.
You don’t even have to make the spiritual connection for children. Brown Taylor says: “Trust the Spirit to speak. I trust the Spirit that erected the world to continue to create the world.”
I love that curiosity about the world can lead us to God. Shared curiosity can lead us closer to each other, too. My children are in their 20s, but they still bring me feathers they find in the wild because they know how much I love them. Re-enchant the world with each other while you read God’s first book!
What have you read in God’s first book?
How have you read it together with children?
This summer I went camping in the The Thumb of Michigan, and yes, I did hold up my hand and point to the spot on my own thumb when telling people about it.
The Thumb was beautiful and, unlike at west-side campgrounds, we could get a great spot only a month before we wanted to head out. I think we’re going to make it an annual thing.
But it also meant that we were only 30 minutes away from a place I’d wanted to visit since I learned about it in 2019: Sanilac Petroglyphs Historic State Park. This park is dedicated to educating visitors about and maintaining the stone carvings that were made by Native American people there between 1,500 and 300 years ago. The carvings are called Ezhibiigaadek Asin, “written on stone,” in the Anishinaabemowin language.So much history is told from such a small location. From how the petroglyphs were discovered: two fires devastated The Thumb in 1871 and 1881 and cleared the brush so people could see this rock again (the 1881 fire burned so hot and moved so fast that the technology didn’t exist that would allow people to outrun it so whole families jumped in their well to try to save themselves). To how Native American tribes used that land both to sustain their lives and to commemorate and pass along their history and worldview.
The Anishinaabe (original people) used this Marshall sandstone outcropping by the Cass River as an important gathering place, a place to talk about who they were, where they came from, where they were going, and what their values were. An elder would gather the people, take a stick in hand, and deliver a teaching while tracing the figure being spoken of in the sacred rock. With each repetition, the figure was carved deeper into the sandstone.
The above figure is the archer, who shoots knowledge into the future for coming generations. The items around it are offerings of tobacco, copper, and feathers that contemporary Native American people have given in gratitude for these gifts their ancestors made for them.
If I remember correctly, this is the thunderbird with wings outstretched, creating thunder with each flap.
This figure has been subject to more erosion than others, so it’s no longer as clear. At the bottom right corner of this photo you see a round hole in the rock–vandalism. At some point, someone dug a figure out of the sandstone and removed it. Which is why there’s now a high locked fence surrounding the site.
There were stories the interpreter couldn’t tell us because we were a group of men and women, and some teachings were only for men and others only for women.
This line of circular indents was a mystery until someone used a compass and realized it was a perfect north-south line.
I felt so connected to those long-ago storytellers. For hundreds of Sunday mornings, I have knelt or sat in front of a group of children and talked about how God loves us with a never-ending, always-and-forever love; that God always wants to hear from us; that God is involved with our lives in mundane and amazing ways; that the life of faith is one of both comfort and challenge.
While I tell the stories, I move my hands over sand, manipulating wood and clay and felt figures as I tell a rotating group of 80ish stories. Over and over and over for the last 24 years. Carving them deeper into my own heart and life, while hoping to plant seeds in the children’s hearts and lives.
I can say the beginnings of many stories from memory:
The desert is a strange and wild place. During the day, it is burning hot. But at night it is freezing cold. The wind comes, and as it blows, it shapes and molds. The desert is never the same. So many important things happened in the desert that we have to have a small piece of it in our room.
Once there was a man who said such wonderful things and did such amazing things, that people began to follow him.
This is the season of Advent, the time we are all on the way to Bethlehem. But who will show us the way?
Words, images, repetition.
These have been the way people have done faith formation forever. This trip was a beautiful reminder of that.
For Lent this year I’m doing a new thing: the devotional, Vincent Van Gogh and the Beauty of Lent. I feel so worn down by the state of the world, by constant flux and big changes at my church, by my car being in the shop for over a month after a small fender-bender, that I couldn’t bear to give anything up for Lent. Instead, I’m adding a practice that involves looking at light and color and the gorgeous art of Van Gogh.
One of the most intriguing questions so far is:
If you were to depict the idea that the Holy Spirit moves through both Scripture and the arts, how would you compose the picture? To what page would the Bible be opened? And what work of art would you place beside it?
The Van Gogh painting that week was Still Life with Bible (above). The Van Gogh family Bible is open to Isaiah 53, which talks about salvation coming through a suffering servant. The book near the Bible (Vincent’s own copy of Emile Zola’s Joie de Vivre) is about a woman who was orphaned and undergoes adversity and harm–a modern-day suffering servant. While some see this painting as Van Gogh contrasting the heavy religion of his father with his own faith. Others (including the devotional writers) as Van Gogh pointing out two strains of the same idea: the raising up of a suffering servant.
This activity captured my imagination. Here are a couple of pairings of artwork and the Bible passage I’ve thought of (note, these will not be beautiful, and probably not even visually interesting, I am a word person, not a visual artist).
Thankfulness
I’d pair Colossians 2:6 with Fire Keeper’s Daughter, by Angeline Boulley. The main character, Daunis, is the most striking fictional practitioner of the spiritual discipline of gratitude I’ve ever read. She has a Native American father and a white mother, and while she grapples with her sense of belonging in both communities, she embraces and lives out the Anishinaabe spirituality she has learned. She is grounded by her practices and she overflows with gratitude, even while facing traumatic events.
Colossians 2:7 NLT
Let your roots grow down into [Christ Jesus, your Lord], and let your lives be built on him. Then your faith will grow strong in the truth you were taught, and you will overflow with thankfulness.
Love
In February, my father turned 80. After his cancer diagnosis last year, right as they were moving and downsizing from their house of 20 years, and the subsequent removal of his bladder, we would’ve done anything he wanted for his birthday — including watching a 2-hour-38 minute-long serious movie. So he finally got us to watch the 2012 film of Les Miserables. As the last gorgeous strains of the music played, he said, “That film sums up my theology.” In the line: “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Yes. It is beautiful theology. And the songs are still running through my head, over two weeks later.
I’ve paired it here with 1 John 4:12, 16-17:
No one has ever seen God. But if we love each other, God lives in us, and his love is brought to full expression in us…. God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them.And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect.
Hope
I’m thinking about this pairing, but I don’t have anything solid yet.
Last month, I asked God to strengthen my hope muscle. It had gone flabby due to disuse. He’s done it by throwing article after article, meme after meme, poem after poem, photo after photo at me, all about hope. It’s starting to work.
Your turn. Are there any Bible verses and art expressions you’d pair as expressing the same spirit? Do you have something to share that could strengthen my hope muscle?
I went for a walk today in the Calvin Nature Preserve and noticed this trio of mushrooms all snuggled up with each other. It made me think of one my favorite moments of this past weekend, when I sat on the same couch between my two adult children, watching the Euro soccer finals. We live in the same house, but we aren’t together for that long too often these days. It was delightful.
And then I saw this trio.
After that, I really wanted to find a third instance, just so I could call this post a trio of mushroom trios.
Now is a great time to walk in the woods in Michigan if you love mushrooms. I don’t know what any of them are called, but I love to spot them–the bright ones, spotted ones, cupped ones, ruffled ones, tall skinny fairy umbrellas, tiny ones, meaty ones.
There are lots of solo mushrooms, lots of duos, lots of clumps of singles, but very few trios. This quest messed with my stated reason for going on this walk: so I could reset my neck after staring down at a computer all morning. But I couldn’t help myself.
At last, success!
Not quite as snuggly as the other two, but I’m counting it.
It was quiet and dim in the woods on this cloudy day. I got to commune with a little green snake, a beaver, and a young deer. (We will not mention the 1,000,000 bugs and the fact that I forgot bug spray even though I thought I’d learned that lesson just two days earlier.) I am grateful for the gift of the woods, for the lack of other walkers because the animals weren’t hiding themselves as they often do, for the beauty and fruitfulness of this world. Its literal fruitfulness, thanks to this first handful of blackberries.
What simple pleasures have you enjoyed lately? What is delighting you?
Yes, this is how my daughter used to do her homework.
This is my gift to all you beautiful grownups who are now having to homeschool your children when that is not at all what you signed up for. My kids and I benefitted greatly from that daily time away from each other, and they know I’d have been way tougher on them than most teachers they had, so the traditional schooling model worked well for us for a long time. But now nobody has that option–and I love you and feel for you.
Plenty of people with education degrees are putting up suggested schedules, and your kids’ schools most likely sent home workbooks and online coursework. But there will be times when you’ll feel like you should be doing something educational but you’re Just. Too. Tired. Yet you don’t want to just set them free to do whatever yet again.
This list is for you.
These are cool things to look at or listen to online that can count as social studies (learning about other cultures), field trips to museums, language arts, maybe even a little science. I’m trying to focus on things that aren’t being shared everywhere, so hopefully you can find something new to you. They’re good for multiple ages and grades. I hope you find something you and your family can sit back and enjoy. We’re all in this together.
Language Arts
Free Rice: This is a vocabulary game/quiz. For every correct answer sponsors donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Programme. It shows stats of how many grains of rice your game has donated, and how many were donated total the day before. You can run it on a computer or as an app (link on the site above). When I played, the vocab words were: build, snack, workout, chef. So this is an elementary-student-level quiz. And it’s charitable!
Storyline Online: Professional actors reading picture books accompanied by professionally edited video of said books. Yes, please! Great variety of stories–silly, serious, touching.
Story Time from Space: Many videos of picture books about space explorers (both real and pretend) and scientists and space itself read by astronauts while they’re floating around the International Space Station.
The Spanish Experiment: Children’s stories read in Spanish with slow audio. Well-known children’s stories translated into Spanish and spoken by a native Spanish speaker. Read along in Spanish or English.
Scribd is offering unlimited audiobooks and ebooks for 30 days without having to enter a credit card number. This could be lifesaving since libraries are now closed!
Audible Stories: Audible is now offering hundreds of audiobooks for free on their platform. They are available for streaming, not downloading, but the selection is fantastic. There are stories for toddlers through teens, classics, Audible originals, stories read in French, Spanish, Italian, German, and an Asian language I could not recognize. Mostly fiction, but I found a few nonfiction.
Field Trips
MapCrunch: Every day, this site plunks you down in the street view of a new, random place in the world. All you have to do is visit and explore. On Thursday, March 26, it took me to Lago Moro, a lovely lake surrounded by mountains in Italy.
5 minutes of a log over a stream in the mountains of Pennsylvania. It’s amazing the variety of animals that cross this log–bears, foxes, mountain lions, wood ducks (my favorite duck), kingfishers with fish, and more. The guy who owns the wilderness cam has a list of all the animals at the end of the video. And the best part: the only sound is a babbling or occasionally rushing stream.
Cincinnati Zoo Home Safari: Every day, the Cincinnati Zoo posts a 20-or-so-minute video to their Facebook page and then to this page, introducing one of their animals, and including two activities you can do at home. So far, sloths, ocelots, and a baby hippo!
Georgia Aquarium Webcams: There are 8 webcams here of beluga whales, whale sharks, penguins, puffins, piranhas, sea lions, sea otter, jellies (this one is mesmerizing), and more.
International Space Station with Commander Chris Hadfield: I’m choosing him because I’m Canadian and he’s Canadian. You want to find an American astronaut’s videos, have at it 🙂 This is a great collection of videos about life in space. Hadfield is a great explainer–from wringing out a wet washcloth, to crying in space, getting a haircut, clipping nails, what happens to your eyesight, and some tours of the ISS.
Quokka: Quokkas are adorable little marsupials that live mainly on Rottnest Island off the Western Coast of Australia. This is just an adorable video of a quokka eating a leaf–could inspire a whole research project 🙂
Calvin Nature Preserve’s incredibly loud frogs on 3/35/2020
Shadow Tracing: On a bright day (or inside, use a flashlight), place an item on a piece of paper so it casts a shadow, and then trace the shadow. Chunkier items will be easier for younger children. Experiment with toys, vases, food, shells–anything you have around the house! BIG OPTION: Pose one person so they cast a shadow and have everyone else trace the shadow, either on the pavement with sidewalk chalk, on a big piece of paper or cardboard if you have any on hand, or with paint on the grass (the grass will grow and it’ll get cut off eventually).
“Stained glass windows” on fences or sidewalks: If you have painter’s tape, tape off a “window” with a frame and then fill in the “lead” with the tape to make a design. Fill in the “glass” with different colors of sidewalk chalk, peel of the tape, and you have a stained glass window that will wash away in the rain 🙂
This Is Sand: Mesmerizing! Click and drag your cursor to make layered colorful sand art. You aren’t in control of what color gets laid down, but you control the shape of the mountains and mounds. And it sounds like you’re pouring sand into a box, too.
My most recent non-masterpiece.
Kenneth Kraegel: Grace Church’s own author/illustrator will be sharing an illustration step by step on this site on March 30, 31, and April 1 at 11:00am. As with most Facebook Live events, the videos should remain on the Schuler Books Facebook page afterwards.
Science and Math
Demonstrating the Wonder of Chemistry: Discovering God’s Majesty in the Minuscule This is Prof. Larry Louters from Calvin University doing his big show. This was always a massively popular field trip for my kids in 5th grade, and Louters shows off all the cool stuff chemistry does. This is from a January Series, so Louters doesn’t start talking until minute 4; around minute 8 he says some cool stuff about Psalm 19 and being a caretaker of the earth; the actual demonstration starts at minute 13:30. There’s a singer, painting with weird things, bubbles, flames. It’s fantastic.
Quarantime with Science Mom and Math Dad: A daily Quarantime video about science and math concepts, about and hour and a half. Also tons of other videos to explore, including a series on Science Mom vs. Math Dad that looks entertaining.
Radio Garden: Explore radio stations from around the world! Move around the globe, click on any green dot, and you’ll get to hear a radio station from that spot. Most places give you a choice of several stations. This one is from Gouda, in the Netherlands. But you can go to the Shetland Islands, Kampala, Uganda, or Jerusalem. Also counts as a geography lesson since there are no country boundaries on this globe!
Faith Formation
The Bible Project: Loads of animated videos, not just about stories from the Bible, but about ideas, personalities, word studies. Very solid and engaging.
Kids Corner: Produced by Reframe Media, this has a ton of audio content for kids, including Bible stories, Bible activities, printables, devotionals, and an audio series starring a group of talking lizards.
So instead of inviting general prayer items in children’s worship with, “Does anyone have anything they want to talk to God about?,” I’ve been getting more specific, both as a way of teaching the kinds of things we can do in our prayers, and of getting beyond the first things that come to kids’ minds.
What do you know about God that you think is awesome?
What do you want to ask God about?
What are you sorry about doing or not doing or saying or not saying or thinking? (I let them answer in their minds.)
What do you want to say THANK YOU to God about?
Is there anybody you know who needs help?
Yes, we’ve still spent a lot time praying about kitties, and thanking God for them, and celebrating God’s creativity in making kitties. But we’ve also asked God just how he made things out of nothing. And some kids who are always jokey and rarely chime in with a prayer item have responded to the last question with some heartfelt requests that showed that, no matter how they might talk, they love their younger siblings.
But last Sunday things went off the rails.
Miss Natalie: “What do you know about God that you think is awesome?”
Child: “That God made the whole world and the Xbox.”
Miss Natalie: “I’m with you on the whole world thing, but God is not responsible for the Xbox. People made that. God made people to have creative and intelligent and curious minds so they were able to come up with the Xbox, but I don’t believe the Xbox was divinely inspired in the same way that the Bible was divinely inspired. You can’t pin the Xbox on God.”
And they were OFF.
Five kids between 4th and 6th grade tried to come up with arguments that would prove that God was responsible for one of the things they love most in the world. They tried to come it with God’s all-knowingness–“If God knows everything, then he knew that the Xbox would be invented, therefore God created it.” They tried that argument again, but louder.
I tried to come at them with an analogy: If your teacher tells you to make a clay pot and you make the clay pot, your teacher knew that you were going to make the clay pot, but you’re the one who still made it, not your teacher (or it might have been, “Your parents made you, you make a clay pot, you’re responsible for the pot, not your parents,” frankly it was so loud that I forgot what exactly my clay pot-related analogy was). They responded but the teacher/parents still knew….
When they started challenging me about what we really meant by the word “make,” I knew that the debate had essentially come to an end and they were prolonging it because it was fun. It was fun. I don’t know what the children’s worship room across the hall thought we were doing; I felt a little bad because the leader of that room always creates a calm environment, and here we were having a debate so raucous that kids were getting up and pacing.
I don’t know that I won, but I held my ground. God is not directly responsible for the Xbox. So when it came time to pray, I thanked God for creating people with such creativity, curiosity, and intelligence that they came up with the Xbox, but also thanked God that those same things lead us to debates about what God did and didn’t do, and then I had to thank God that we could laugh during prayers (because we were all laughing).
Did the kids learn anything valuable through that exchange? No idea. But I hope they took away that I will listen to them, and take them seriously, and that we can always laugh about things, and God loves us through it all. They also learned that I can be side-tracked–but they already knew that.
So, my fellow people who minister to and with children, what are some of the debates you’ve gotten into? I can’t be the only one fielding comments like that!
I am frequently very silly with the children in the church programs I run, but I also love to take them very seriously. If a kid makes a reasonable suggestion, I follow it. Thanks to one young man, we now have small recycling bins in each children’s worship room. When they ask a question, I answer it, even when the answer is, “that’s one of the hardest things for even grownups to understand and agree about,” and even when it takes us on wild tangents that I have to work to take us back from. When our Sunday school class makes a group art piece to reflect a Psalm (we’ve done Psalms 1 and 23 so far), I let the kids have pretty free rein so they feel like the product is truly theirs, even if that means there are misspelled words and it looks more messy than aesthetically pleasing.
So this year, when I received two letters from kids, it was my privilege to take both of the writers very seriously–even while I inwardly pinched their cheeks and ruffled their hair because of how adorable their young spelling and printing was (but it really doesn’t do to ever show them that).
Letter One
The first letter was anonymous:
A note in child’s handwriting: Don’t ban Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho from this church.
Most of the children love to sing “Joshua fought the battle of Jericho” (which, technically is, “Joshua fit the battle of Jericho,” but that would involve too much explaining). They line up and pretend to be the wall of Jericho while the leader sings the song and then they decide whether or not to fall at the end–falling is often dramatic, delayed, or acrobatic.
Most of the leaders do not love this song with a similar passion. With a group of 8 kids, it’s fine, but you get 10-16 and they rile each other up to further heights and no matter how many times you explain the biblical story basis of the song, it just becomes about who can get away with doing a near cartwheel.
So I’m clear with the leaders at the beginning of the year: they are free to say, “We’re not doing that one today,” or even, “We don’t do that song when I’m leading.” I frequently say no, and I’m clear why: “You all are too wound up already today. No stand-up songs.”
They must’ve had a bunch of no’s in a row for that child to write that note. Although I would weep no tears if we never did it again (and certain kids who don’t like it when things get crazy wouldn’t be upset, either), this was my response:
Letter in adult handwriting reading: Dear members of the 2nd-3rd grade Children’s Worship room: Thanks you for letting me know of your concerns regarding “Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho.” It is a song that kids at Grace have enjoyed for many, many years, and I promise that I will not ban it. However, I do not promise that you will get to do it every week. The song selection is up to each leader, so sometimes you will have a leader who does the song, and sometimes you won’t. That’s how it is in grown-up church, too–the songs are different every week. You must’ve had a few leaders in a row say “no,” bringing about the fear that we banned it. In fact, I am your leader this week, and I promise that we’ll do it! Yours in Christ, Miss Natalie
This felt like a good response because I was
letting the kids know that I saw them and understood what they liked to do,
treating them like they were worthy of an explanation for why the song choice system is set up like it is,
demonstrating that I’m willing to join in the fun and give them something that they love.
And 10 out of 12 kids were overjoyed–you can never please everyone.
Letter Two
The second letter was handed to me by the child on Easter Sunday.
Letter in child’s handwriting: Dear Ms. Natalie, Sorry for being inappropriate at Palm Sunday. Next time I will not do that.
This letter was prompted by the parent due to said child’s behavior at being forced to participate in the parade of children and adults waving palm branches during the service. I’m going to guess it was an epic scowl; I was at the front of the parade, so I had no idea what was happening behind me. (I should note that we had 3 dozen or so kids in the parade that Sunday, a number of whom participated under duress, so I’m not singling out the lone scowler. I also have the child’s parent’s permission to post this.)
I accepted the note, and a couple of weeks later, gave this to the child:
A letter in adult handwriting: Dear [name], Thank you for your note, apologizing for being cranky about joining in with our palm waving on Palm Sunday. Can I tell you that it was a lovely surprise to me that you’d agreed to do it because I know you don’t normally like to do that kind of thing. Also, can I confess something to you? When you gave me your note on Easter, I was hugely cranky about things that[continuation of note] had happened in the church service and before the service that morning–so I know what it’s like to serve God even while being cranky about it! I even have a prayer that I pray: “Dear God, you’re going to have to give me your patience, because I have none of my own left.” It works! Anyway–I know how you feel. And I am grateful that God accepts you and me and our cranky service and everything else. But I do hope Palms are more fun next time. love, Miss Natalie
I really had been in a mood Easter Sunday. Sometimes when I have heavy responsibilities on a Sunday morning I can still lose myself in worship, but that day I could not. At all.
There’s a children’s song that I have a hate-tolerate relationship with, “God loves a cheerful giver, give it all you’ve got, He loves to hear you laughing when you’re in an awkward spot.” I was not cheerfully giving or serving, and all through the service, I could not laugh. It is entirely possible that I was muttering at points. And aggressively crossing and recrossing my legs.
But still, I served.
Oh I can definitely relate to my letter writer. I’m not always cheerful about what I do for the Lord. But when I serve prayerfully–even when the prayer itself is a childish footstomp of a request/demand–and with a heart that is open, God will help me see something that will take me outside of my crankiness and will even open to door to joy.
That Easter Sunday it was so many moments: heartfelt narration, a girl playing Jesus in one scene, an anxious kid nailing his lines, the disciples doing Fortnite dances when they saw the risen Jesus in the upper room, the host of angels, and the generalized chaos that are my liturgical skits with their room for readers, nonreaders, children, adults, people with developmental disabilities, people who show up for rehearsal and people who don’t, people who are on time for church and people who are late.
Indeed, I am grateful that God not only accepted but transformed my cranky service on Easter Sunday–and I hope my letter writer gives palm waving another shot and lets God transform it, if not into something joyful and fun, then at least to something not horrible and torturous.
Jonathan Levine, Colleen Thompson, and Dave Benson in the rehearsal space. Photo by Richard Mulligan.
The people putting on The University Wits‘ (TUW) presentation of All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten, by Robert Fulghum, might be many years past kindergarten, but there are enough firsts among them to keep things feeling almost as electric as that first year of school.
This production is Richard Mulligan’s directorial debut in Grand Rapids community theatre, Colleen Thompson’s first appearance on a stage in downtown Grand Rapids, Jonathan Levine’s first role in scripted theatre in Grand Rapids, David Wood’s first time in a University Wits production, Dave Benson’s first time singing and dancing on stage, and CJ Namenye Wood’s first time dancing on stage with her husband (David Wood).
Mulligan was sitting in the audience of TUW’s presentation of Jeffrey last year when he saw that they were looking for directors and that Kindergarten was on their schedule–a play he’d twice directed as head of the drama ministry at Genesis United Methodist Church. He’d been drawn to the play in the mid-2000s after seeing the Kindergarten Creed (a poem that appears in the play) in one of his son’s classrooms:
“It’s about how people should treat each other, how to treat the world, how to be a good person. The basis of the poem makes sense.”
The cast is finding a lot to relate to in the play on that basic, how to be a good person, level. When asked about their favorite pieces, Levine and David Wood both mentioned “Pigeons” (although Wood isn’t in that piece), which is about a grandfather watching his granddaughter chasing pigeons at the zoo. He wonders what she’d do if she caught them, and concludes that possessing the pigeons isn’t the point of it for her, just as possessing her isn’t the point of their relationship. Levine said, “Having two daughters that are very much their own persons and don’t belong to anyone, who are going to do what they want to do, I appreciate ‘Pigeons.'” David Wood finds spiritual meaning in the piece:
To love something and to possess it is not the same thing. This is true in human relationships and between us and God–we’re not just puppets. When you love something, it isn’t that you set it free, but you allow it to love you back on its own terms.
Like David Wood, Thompson’s favorite piece is also one she’s not in, “The Bench.” In particular, there’s one line that really speaks to her, about things going exactly as they’re supposed to go. Thompson said that, in her life, during times of change she often gets that feeling of rightness with what she called “waves of enlightenment” that encourage the change she’s making. She recently made the big life change of moving to a small apartment downtown, and is enjoying ticking off “appear at Dog Story Theater” from her bucket list.
For Namenye Wood it isn’t that she has a favorite piece, because “there are none I don’t relate to. There’s something in every vignette,” but when pressed, she, too named one she wasn’t in, “Problems and Inconveniences”:
There are problems, and there are inconveniences, and learning to know the difference between them is meaningful and necessary. Learn about the things that really matter and then recognize what is fleeting and let that go, because our energy is fleeting and we should put it into things that are meaningful and purposeful.
Benson likes his favorite piece, “Charles Boyer,” not because he had an immediate connection to it, but because he’s working with it as an actor in a different way: “Richard is having me talk more personally and picture my wife and make it personal to me and be more emotional than I’ve done in a play before.”
This aspect of bringing in the personal highlights something interesting about Kindergarten for the actors: it’s not a play with a beginning, middle, and end, and they are not each playing one character who only speaks to other characters while ignoring the audience. Kindergarten consists of about two dozen individual stories that the actors tell to the audience. Namenye Wood explains it this way:
We’re narrating, talking to the audience, sharing with them. We’re not characters, we’re who we are, telling stories–someone else’s stories, but we’re ourselves.
There are times when there are multiple actors on stage, acting out and telling a story, but their focus is on the audience. Thompson said that it reminds her of the Moth Radio Hour and other NPR storytelling shows.
It’s been over 10 years since Mulligan last directed this play, and he’s found different takeaways than he did the last time. The piece, “Christmas/Valentine’s Day,” which centers around how a wife deals with her aging husband’s repeated forgetting, is more poignant because, in those intervening years, his mother developed dementia and then Alzheimer’s. And these days he sees one of the pieces as nothing less than a rallying cry:
What resonates with me now is the story and song, “Reflect the Light.” One of our cast members is knocking the song out of the park, but more than that, it’s an important message for our times. If you think of light as being knowledge and truth and compassion and all the good–if you have a mirror, you can reflect that light into dark crevices of the world, dark places in people’s minds and hearts. It comes from the true story of a philosopher and theologian after World War II who was asked about the meaning of life. People laughed at the question, but he answered sincerely that the meaning of his life was to be a mirror and reflect light into dark places.
This makes it sound like the show is nonstop heartwarming. It definitely has pull-out-the-tissues moments, but there are plenty of laugh-out-loud moments, too; Levine describes it as “touching-funny.” There’s a man who ties balloons to a lawn chair and manages to take off, another who mishears “hallowed be your name” as “Howard be your name” in the Lord’s Prayer, and there’s an entire song made up of different iterations of the phrase, “uh oh.”
CJ Namenye Wood in the rehearsal space. Photo by Richard Mulligan.
The University Wits’ presentation of Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten is playing at Dog Story Theater at 7:30pm on April 19, 20, 25, 26, and 27, with matinee performances on April 27 and 28. Go to dogstorytheater.com for ticket information.
A section of prairie grasses and big sky at Corkscrew Swamp in the Everglades.
Last week I did something wonderful and marvelous: at the tail-end of a polar vortex and in the middle of an ice storm, I went to Florida. It was the first time in my adult life that I’d gone somewhere warm during the winter–a glorious cliche–and I made the most of it.
Since I work four jobs, one of which takes place on Sunday mornings, I rarely have an entire day off, and I have to plan in advance for any weekends off. I hadn’t missed a Sunday since Labor Day weekend, and I was capital-t Tired. More than that, I was teetering on the edge of Burned Out. Even so, it was hard to commit to taking five whole days away. But I needed it.
Proof of how badly I needed it: I swore at my gentlest child when he objected to how I was driving when we were late to the airport. I’d never sworn at anyone like that before, and I never will again. It upset me to the very core of my being and dramatically showed me how I need to build in more time for rest and spiritual renewal so I can better manage stressors.
Once he granted me forgiveness (and thought it was funny how upset I was), I could bask in the sunshine and settle into all the new things I got to see and learn in Naples.
Like how prehistoric pelicans look. They are so pterodactylish.
A pelican with ruffled wing feathers, standing on a pier (photo by Richard Mulligan).
Ever cooler: a group of pelicans is called a squadron.
The local squadron at rest (photo by Richard).
That’s exactly what they looked like! I didn’t manage to get a photo of it, but I watched them fly low over the beach in a tight V, their big bodies, huge wingspans, and long beaks making them more imposing than other birds that fly in the same formation. And there’s just something about that folded-up neck when they fly that makes them look more aggressive. A squadron. Perfect.
Speaking of cool birds: the anhinga swims underwater to find food, poking its head up now and then to breathe. My boyfriend, his niece, and I spent several minutes at the Corkscrew Swamp watching one in a pond thick with water lettuce, squealing every time we spotted it coming up for air. Okay, maybe it was just me making the high-pitched noises, but I am not ashamed of how enthusiastic I get about things like this.
A tiny black head and neck of an anhinga poking through a thick matt of swamp lettuce.
But the anhinga has no protective oils on its feathers so it needs to dry off after it dives. Happily, this drying off is done by lengthy posing for photos.
An anhinga on a branch with its wings spread out, drying itself off.
I know, I know. The bird is a wild animal and not puposefully posing for photos, but it sure seemed that way: of all the places to sit and ways to face, it chose to face people and their cameras in a tree less than 10 feet from the boardwalk.
Of course, this being Florida, right near the bird was an alligator. According to the sign, this was a smiling alligator, but we saw no evidence of said grin.
The back of an alligator is just visible to the left of the tree where the anhinga dries itself.
Besides learning new things and seeing all kinds of wildlife (black rat snake, water moccasin, otters, limpkin, pileated woodpecker, egrets, little blue heron, racoons, lizards), we took time for whimsy. We watched two little lizards, a brown one and a green anole, and made up stories about why the green one was dancing around so much while the brown one stayed so still; we were unprepared for when the brown one pounced, but luckily the anole was, and skittered away safe and sound.
Not the green anole we told stories about.
And look at these lovely ladies in the swamp. They reminded me of debutantes in their cinched-waist dresses, so I call it the Cypress Swamp Cotillion. The tree in the foreground on the left wins poofiest skirt. At least two of those trees near the center don’t like each other at all and are gossiping about each other to the other trees. And the one in the right foreground is holding herself so straight and tall despite her low level of pouf, going for dignity instead of fashionableness, but winding up by herself. So much drama.
Cypress Swamp Cotillion
Nature and learning and whimsy restore my soul, but so does doing nothing. I made sure I got that in, too.
I highly recommend the Audubon Corkscrew Swamp Sanctuary if you are in the Everglades. It’s a three-or-so mile walk, all on a boardwalk, with ample opportunities for rest, and some great viewing platforms.
I also highly recommend not waiting until you are hovering on burn-out to take a serious rest. For heaven’s sake, I’ve written about the need for people in ministry to take rest seriously, both in terms of Sabbath and vacations, but I stopped being intentional about it. Which was a mistake.
So in January I joined a gym. I February I went to Florida. What cliche thing should I do in March?
It’s relatively simple to make a picture book for children out of the stories in the Old Testament–Noah’s ark, David and Goliath, Daniel in the lion’s den, the Good Shepherd of Psalm 23. Likewise, the life of Jesus contains a wealth of simple, visual stories–Zaccheus climbing into the tree, feeding the 5,000, calming the storm, walking on water. But there’s not as much scope for child-level storytelling in the early years of the followers of The Way. Those letters from the apostles get pretty theological, and don’t lend themselves to visual storytelling.
But Chris Raschka has made a wonderful picture book out of all the letters of Paul! Each two-page spread contains a distillation of one letter along with an illustration of Paul writing, as well as some items he might typically have around him as he wrote. In some images he’s eating or drinking, in some he looks pleased and in others down,
in some he’s in jail,
in others he’s got company.
Usually, the messages are uplifting.
Sometimes, Raschka chooses one that scolds.
But his distillation shows something that I never noticed about Paul: how important friendship was to him. In many of the two-page spreads, Raschka takes room to note who Paul sends greetings from, and who he wants the readers to greet for him: “Greet Priscilla and Aquila. Come see me soon. Only Luke is still with me” (II Timothy). “Luke, the doctor, and Demas say hello” (Colossians). It makes Paul feel so human, and less like a Big Theologian. He was a person who travelled around and relied on his friends in this very young faith. And he was writing to friends, to people he knew and who knew him. The letters feel more intimate.
Which reminded me of listening to a friend read the entire letter to the Ephesians at a Bible study. Paul’s letters are so meaty that we rarely hear them as the early church did: out loud in one sitting. I was surprised at how positive the letter felt, and how cared for I felt after listening. The letter seemed like a long prayer, like Paul was pouring out his hopes and prayers for his friends in Ephesus, and telling them what they needed to hear in order to be encouraged and keep going. Raschka’s book inspires that same feeling.
