Pentecost Birthday Party

Right off the top, I need to apologize for the party blower. I realized as soon as Orie opened the bag and put it in his mouth that I was going to causing a great deal of annoyance for parents of 3-12 year-olds. Why did I even put that in there?? It's a party, that's why!
This week, if you have a kid preschool aged or older, they will receive a package to celebrate the birthday of the church. Not OUR church, but the whole idea of there even being a church. It's when the followers of Jesus shifted. They went from being a small cultish following of a particular guy to being a people who'd never even met or seen Jesus following and believing in a resurrected Christ who'd embodied the non-violent love of God.

Now, you don't have to put it quite that way with the little ones. But I hope that the little booklet that comes with this package will begin to tell that story of how the church was born and why we continue to celebrate today.

Your teens may even have received their envelope already, since teens who don't have a younger sibling will get theirs by mail. Families with younger kids I'll be making drop-offs this weekend. Inside will be a personal birthday cake mix - including frosting and sprinkles.  The Pentecost zine and recipe card - you can make your own mug-cake mix if you're so inclined - and for the elementary set, a balloon and the aforementioned blower (again: sorry.)

Take the opportunity to say the prayer for Pentecost on the back of the zine and give thanks for the things that you are grateful for about church and the presence of Jesus in your life. This is how we build the language of faith. Happy Pentecost! Happy Birthday Church!

Learning to Bless

 The past couple of weeks at the end of my storytime with kids I've use the ASL sign for 'God bless you'.* We've blessed each other as we say goodnight, learning one more way to speak our love without words. ALS signs have become a meaningful way to connect with each other in our congregation, longing as we are for ways to communicate and signal our care for one another.

In the same way that it takes observation, imitation and practice to learn the signs that we have, so we learn the language of faith. Blessings (ASL or not) are one very simple way of speaking our faith out loud. Unlike other other forms of prayer which are directed at God or other form of the Divine, our blessing are directed at the person we share them with. They speak into the presence of God our desire and hopes but are not directed at God. They invite God into the space with us.

Tami Keim, director of the Early Childhood Program at Hesston College, and contributor to the Building Faith blog (Mennonite Early Childhood Network), reminds us that blessings are all over the Bible. If you want to offer a blessing there's no need to make up your own or come up with the words yourself. To paraphrase Lavar Burton: Take a look, they're in a book! I'm a language person and I like getting creative with blessing words, but even I default to scriptural classics when I'm stuck: "May God bless and keep you. May the face of God shine on you and bring you peace." There's nothing like it.

When we speak blessings, we get used to having the language of faith in our own mouths and we model the use of this language to our kids. In the same post that Tami talks about the blessings in the Bible, she suggests a daily blessings at bedtime (she even created this handy list of blessings you could print). I do like the idea of daily blessings, but teens who go to bed later than their parents (only me?) get left out with that particular suggestion - though it's a good one - and there's no bad time to bless. Morning blessing over breakfast? Great! Blessing as you log into school? Sure!

I also like to mark special or difficult or new experiences with blessing. The beginning of school is a time to bless our children with courage and wisdom. A new bike might be cause to bless a child with safety and the joy of the ride. A blessing for patience and grace would be appropriate when they're going through a hard time with a friend or sibling.

*In this link, start at the 0:50 mark if you really don't want to watch the whole 2 minutes, but I love this pastor and have watched several of her signing tutorials. She's kind of awesome, so you probably won't be sorry if you watch the whole thing.   

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Photo by Sai De Silva on Unsplash

Police and Prisons, Our Kids and Ourselves

I got a new picture book this week: Milo Imagines the World, a collaboration between two of my favorites: author Matt de la Pena and illustrator Christian Robinson. In it, a kid named Milo and his sister are on a long ride on the subway. It's an opportunity for Milo to imagine and draw the lives of all the people he sees, including a boy about his own age. Readers discover that Milo and his sister - and the other boy - are on their way to a correctional facility, where they are going to visit their mom. The way that de la Pena gives language to the emotions that Milo is feeling is poetry ("These monthly subway rides are never ending, and as usual, Milo is a shook-up soda.) And Robinson brings life and not only to Milo, but to Milo's imagination.

Milo's journey to the prison is also a journey of realization. When he sees that the other little boy, who he had imagined as someone who's experience was very different from his own, is heading for the same destination he is, Milo understands that the way he imagines the people in the subway might be way off and the pictures he made of them might have been all wrong! Readers begin to see that the ideas that we have about people - including people in prison - might also be based on biases or false narratives. You can read more about Milo at Social Justice Books, or listen to Christian Robinson talk about the book and illustrations on Vimeo (4:33-10:28 are particularly relevant).

At the same time as I'm enjoying Milo, I'm also reading We Do This Till we Free Us, essays on abolition by Miriam Kaba (much more slowly than the rest of the church book group, though I'm grateful they still let me listen in). Kaba writes about seeking justice beyond prison and punishment, building community as an alternative to policing, and transforming how we deal with harm and accountability. I'm not the only adult right now who's beginning to get on board with the idea of police and prison abolition. This awakening in our country is also happening in our denomination. Y'all may already have heard of the curriculum on abolition that MCUSA has created to help churches explore this idea.

But what about kids? The prevailing narrative in dominant culture is that police are the 'good guys.' They are here to help and keep everyone safe. From Paw Patrol to Brooklyn 99 (two programs popular with the young people in my family) media reinforces this narrative. Cops might be goofy or bumbling but are ultimately well intentioned and uphold justice with care. White children especially, who may rarely have had an encounter with police, don't have this narrative interrupted.

We know, though, that not every child does have life-experience to backs up the cultural narrative. Garfield Highschool teacher Jesse Hagopian tweeted last year about an assignment that his first grade son was asked to complete. The assignment invited students to read a page entitled "Police Protect Us" and then answer questions about the reading:

What are some of the things that police officers do? They pepper spray people like when they sprayed my dad.
Why do you think a police officer’s job is important? Nurses, doctors and ambulances are important, but not police!
What would be another good title for this story? Police don’t protect us.

In fact police had not protected this boy and his family. He and many other children have the experience that police threaten and/or do violence and harm to them and their communities.

In parallel to the dominant narrative about police being good, the narrative about prisons and the people in them is that the only reason people go to jail or to prison is that they're bad. Books like Milo make it clear that people in prison are loved and love others, have families, like to read stories and have dreams. They might be there because of limited choices, because they didn't have money to pay for representation or to pay bail, because of complications related to addiction - like illustrator Christian Robinson's own mom.

Milo Imagines the World is one of very few books that give children like Milo a mirror in which to see themselves and children like mine a window through which they can experience understanding and empathy. In addition to her writing and advocacy for and with adults, Kaba also wrote the picture book Missing Daddy because of her frustration finding materials that can help children deal with the “loss, grief, and trauma” of having a parent incarcerated. And there's a list of more books that address policing and prison at Social Justice Books which includes books for children as well as teens and adults.

Though I've been fumbling through attempting to interrupt the narrative about police in myself and my kids for awhile, I still find it helpful to hear new ideas. For example I found a post from the Oakland Public Library on Evaluating Children's Books about Police very helpful and applicable beyond just book and beyond just children. It offers language and questions to test when watching, reading or encountering other media. I also found the teaching guide created by Penguin Classroom helpful; the questions it asks of the books (it includes the author/illustrators other two collaborations as well) are questions we could ask of our own experiences and assumptions as well.

My learning curve now with myself and my family is in trying on ideas about alternatives to police and punishment. It's continuing to build alternatives to policing by creating stronger communities and connections, building empathy and resilience, practicing alternatives to punishment and adopting transformative practices in my own life. I look forward to our congregation continuing to deepen our understanding of the movement to abolish prison and policing.

I will certainly be engaging with the MCUSA curriculum and will likely adapt it to use with youth in fall or winter. I'd be curious if there are parents interested in working through it together with an eye toward how we talk to our children.If you are interested in practical alternatives to police and punishment you can use right now, check out Seattle Area Alternatives to Calling 911 and If You See Something, DO Something: 12 Things to do instead of calling the cops . May we all work together for a just peace!