Happy Annunciation Day

As I mentioned in my last blog post, today is Annunciation Day - when we remember the Angel Gabriel's visit to Mary and Mary's acceptance of God's call on her.

Yesterday I made a brief visit to an after-school centre run for first- and second-graders so they won't be at home alone while their parents are at work. I noticed that they seemed to have a little worship area!

It looked similar to a prayer table in a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium. I was also interested because in my Church of England theological studies we just recently been learning about the requirements for "collective worship" in English schools. I asked a few questions of the child I was visiting, but in my excitement I asked too many yes/no questions and too few open-ended questions. *sigh* Still, what I've understood is that they have a little worship time almost every day. It includes a Bible story and a prayer (at least).

The current theme clearly was the Annunciation.

The whole wall above this table was covered with angels. This one was made by the boy I was visiting:

the water and oil of baptism

Although Little Sister initially ignored the Baptism materials in favor of the Holy Family and World Communion, she eventually went back to the attic and turned her attention to the Baptism doll. I accompanied her to a sink/basin where she was able to fill our little jug with water. She carried that through to where the materials were, and poured some out into the bowl. She then picked up the doll by its feet and prepared to dip it head-first into the bowl of water!

Never interfere?? All my training fell by the wayside. I gasped in horror and insisted, "No no no! We take water in our hand and put it on the baby's head that way."

Little Sister was much intrigued by the bottle of oil and asked what it was for. I used a little to make the sign of the cross on her forehead, and she did the same for me. But what is this [the bottle of oil] for? It struck me that I make little use of it in the lesson, since our Finnish Lutheran priests don't use any oil in a baptism. I said that we use it in the lesson to help us think about the Holy Spirit, and wound up presenting a portion of the Baptism lesson to her, the part that introduces the Trinity (The Holy Spirit ... is invisible, like the scent of this oil. It is invisible, but still there), and she went completely silent and gave it her full attention. 

We didn't have the Christ candle out, but I just indicated
what I would have done if we'd had one, and that seemed fine.

Afterwards she continued to wonder about the oil, and as we talked I realized and told her that her baptism had been a little different from her brother's in that she had been anointed with oil and he had not. Neither of her parents had been anointed at baptism; nor had I. Later at supper I recalled (and said) that Vandriver had, like her, been baptised by an Anglican priest. Both she and Vandriver had been anointed with oil at their baptisms.

Too late, it now occurs to me that I could have given her the words of a Finnish priest, Mika K T Pajunen, who said to us in a sermon, We are confirmed into a specific denomination, but we are baptized into the Christian Church. Whether our baptism includes anointing with oil, full immersion, the use of a scallop shell or not, we belong to the one body of Christ.

church in England

Dear five-year-old,

Several weeks ago you asked your parent to ask me, "What is church in England like?" I have been thinking a lot about your question. I go to two churches here. My supervisor (for me to learn about being a priest) is the priest of both of them.

The first thing to say is that The Holy Eucharist is the same in England and Finland. We start with the Liturgy of the Word - there are hymns, prayers, readings from the Bible, and a sermon - and then we have the Liturgy of the Sacrament - the priest tells us the story of Jesus' supper with his friends and his words, "This is my body" and "This is my blood". Your parent would know many of our hymns; some you might even recognize from our church.

Something different is they only have that communion service every other week; in between they have Morning Prayer. That's kind of like the Evensong services we used to have in the big church, or kind of like the Liturgy of the Word but without any communion afterwards. I don't mind not having communion every week, but I really miss The Peace, which isn't part of Morning Prayer.

One of my churches here has a pretty small building, which is sort of modern and boring. There are not a lot of people - usually around twenty I guess, if you count the priest and organist and people like that. Most of them are old. They almost all have grey or white hair. One lady is 100 years old! All of them except me are English. They would like to have younger people come to church and I think if they did come they might stay because these people are so friendly and nice.

My other church meets in a big, old building (not as big as the big church). You can tell it used to be beautiful but now it looks kind of worn out and it's really cold inside. They are worried about how much money it takes to keep it safe (like to fix the roof), let alone for new paint or better heaters. Right next door there is a big house (which is also really cold) and that is where the priest lives. This congregation is bigger than the other one but because the building is so big, it always feels pretty empty.

There are children at this church - one or two babies, several small boys and girls, and three or four teenage girls. At the other church everyone is "white", but at this church there are white people and black people. There's even a young family from Korea. It's hard to get to know the people who aren't white because they never stay to church coffee. I tried to invite one woman one time but she said she has to go to work after church.

They have Junior Church (but not Godly Play). I stay in grownup church and sometimes I help lead it, or even preach. At the end of church the children tell us what they learned about, and one reads a prayer they wrote. The priest always wants the grownups to tell them something about our service, but most of the grownups are too embarrassed. Last week I did it!

GP materials from St. Michael's Workshop

I like church here, but I miss Godly Play and I really miss you and your family!

love, Storyteller

p.s. I should have said that there ARE churches in England who use Godly Play! In fact, I learned how to do Godly Play here in England. But the churches I go to don't happen to use it.

ashes to ashes

photo (c) Pikku Arkki Valokuvaus, used with permission

Trinity Communications, over at CatholicCulture.org, say:

On Ash Wednesday small children are thrilled to receive ashes. We can tell them simply that ashes are placed on our foreheads to remind us that someday we will die and go home to heaven.

It's a post worth reading in full.

Similarly, Carolyn, at Worshiping with Children, writes, The imposition of ashes is amazing to children, but she also notes that:

Other than Good Friday, Ash Wednesday is probably the day on which children are least expected or planned for in the sanctuary. 

And she has excellent suggestions for how to change that.

In the Church of England, as priests mark you with ashes, they say, Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return. In Finland, (Lutheran) priests tend to say something like, Receive the cross, a sign of repentance. If you feel that your child will not cope well with a heavy emphasis on mortality and death at this time, repentance is an alternative theme to emphasise. (This is something also said by both blogs that I linked to above.) Carolyn also mentions the theme of belonging. Many Roman Catholics assume that ashes mark someone off as Catholic; they certainly mark us off on Ash Wednesday as a certain kind of practicing Christian.

All this to say, I hope you'll feel able to take your children to church today. Or, if in the United States, even to seek out Ashes to Go.

licensed photo, used with permission
© Mazur/catholicchurch.org.uk

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For me and for my church this year, we've already had a stark reminder of our mortality: one of our church wardens was found dead yesterday morning. It would seem that she died in her sleep. She had attended a council meeting less than 24 hours before her death and seemed as fit as ever. I believe she was 72 years old.

To my mind Madeline was one of the friendliest and most welcoming people at that church. She could be very frank, yet also came across as accepting. She seemed to be someone you could rely on entirely - an excellent church warden in that regard!

The church organist announced loudly to a small group of us that Madeline had planned her funeral some years earlier, right down to a set of hymns that he claimed had been chosen expressly to annoy him: hymns she knew he didn't like playing. I hope he is able to chuckle about it rather than find that hurtful. If so, I will chuckle along as well!

UPDATE: I checked, and our priest says that the organist "liked the idea of the hymns and will remember Madeline with fondness as he plays." That's exactly as I had hoped it would be.

Lucia greetings

Wishing my Nordic friends well on St Lucia Day!

public domain photo by Niels Henningsen (Helsingør,  2001)

off topic: Finnish Taizé chant

In the (church) news this week in Finland is the singing of a Finnish song by the Taizé community at Evening Prayer on Saturday. Many Taizé chants have been translated into Finnish, and sung by Finnish speakers at Taizé, but this is the first time they have used a chant which was composed in Finnish from the start.

The words of the song are from Psalm 119:105: Sanasi on lamppu, valo askeleillani. The literal translation into English is "Your word is a lamp, a light to my feet". Yep, English takes twice as many words to say this as Finnish does. 

Taizé evening prayers are broadcast weekly by the Cathedral in Cologne / Köln (scroll down the left sidebar and click on the service for the date 14/07 - or I think this link might take you straight there). The song comes about six minutes into the broadcast (06.25, if you want to jump straight to it). 

photo of Taizé prayers by "sasa1976"

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If you'd like to take this opportunity to learn a verse of Finnish then the double letters should be pronounced as longer than single letters, and every word has first-syllable stress. (That's when speaking; it's usually less clear - at least to me - in songs.) So that's SA-na-si (neither s should sound like a z) on LAMP-pu (hold your lips shut for a silent microsecond in between lamp and pu); VA-lo ASK-el-eil-la-ni. Again, you ought to hold that double-l for a beat before ending the word with ani. I believe that that little syncopation in the second repetition of the song would sound more Finnish if the sound the international Taizé worshipers lengthened were not the vowel "ei" but the "ll".

Who's left holding the baby?

It was about a year ago that Sheila commented to say she enjoyed hearing about local church customs which "outsiders" might not know about or even necessarily notice - like the significance in Finland of the number of candles on the altar.

Today, seeing Emily's beautiful photograph of her son being baptized in the Cathedral of St. Andrew, reminded me of another Finnish practice. Here it is not the priest, nor a parent, but one of the godparents who holds the baby.

Anglican and Lutheran priests alike accept this practice here. I've mentioned some features which distinguish our Lutheran priests' baptismal practices from the Anglican ones in another post.

The photograph below was taken the first time any of the children chose to work with our baptism materials, only a few weeks ago. An older girl chose to work with them alone first, but she finished before our Response Time was over and so this other girl was also able to use them. I didn't intend the photo to be quite so blurry, but it does a good job of obscuring her face!

the wrong kind of seat

An anecdote: On Sunday I used my learner-Finnish to ask the chapel caretaker for some prayer benches, in case any other adults wanted to use them to come down closer to the children's level.

I wanted something like this:  

(the picture source is a page with instructions for making your own)

Instead I got something like this:

photo by Hanna-Maarit (used by permission)

I worked out pretty quickly that I had used the word for "food" instead of the word for "prayer". Looking at the two words now...

"food": ruoka

"prayer": rukous

... I'm sure native speakers of Finnish would say that they're very clearly different, but for a moment there I was really baffled. I'm pretty sure the caretaker was baffled, too! I tried to correct my mistake and only muddied the waters further. Whatever it was she understood the second time, her response was: We don't have any of those. 

I said, But they were here on Easter Sunday! 

Oh! she said, You mean the prayer benches. 

Faces of Easter (Easter Day)

For our congregation, the last Sunday of the month is "family service" - a communion service abridged for children, with a sermon aimed especially at them (or sometimes a craft in place of a sermon). The goal is that the whole congregation (not just young families) should attend. This year, Easter fell on the last Sunday of the month, and the pastor asked if I'd like to present the sermon to keep continuity with what we'd been doing in Junior Church. Another congregant then suggested I should organize the whole service as a Godly Play session. And that's what I did.

ready to begin (with the Lenten purple under the Holy Family)

I was really grateful to our pastor for being so flexible about this. Not least for carrying on with aplomb when one child finally decided he was ready to examine the Holy Family figures... in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer! Given that I'd placed all our focal shelf materials on the altar, you can see how some priests might have found this unnerving.

at the end of the service (Easter white)

For Finnish Lutherans, just as important as the liturgical color is the number of candles to be placed on the altar. Easter is a six-candle festival, so I needed to negotiate with the vaktmästare [caretaker] to make sure that those candles looked clearly different from the Christ Candle. I think the result was clear: six candles for Easter plus the Christ Candle for Godly Play.

thank you, Pastor, for this photo

Some things didn't work so well. Seethroughfaith warned me near the beginning that I needed to speak up, but as soon as I began to tell the story I forgot. (After all, my focus was on the materials, not on my audience!) Some of the time I was "competing" with a baby who was at that squeal-y stage of exploring its voice, as well as two tots who just could not stay still and quiet. Perhaps I should have asked if I could have a lapel microphone.

And I regret not cutting the summary of the earlier plaques right down to First we heard about how Jesus was born, and a story from when he was a boy, and then about when he was baptized... Since there were a number of children there completely new to this lesson, I gave slightly longer summaries, and walked around the circle showing everyone the plaques (mine are only 4x6 inches / 10x15 cm). But with Vandriver interpreting into Finnish for me, this meant that this already rather long story became twice as long. Too long.

Yet even those whose focus had been lost were startled back to attention when I suddenly cried out that the story shouldn't stay in a line and re-arranged it, and there was good response at the wondering. Then I handed out Easter cards, blank on the inside, and asked everyone to decide what it was important for them to do - draw a picture inside, write a poem, make it a card for someone else or a card for themselves... And folks of all ages really seemed to enjoy that.

thanks, seethroughfaith, for the Response Time photos

My baptism doll

The Baptism lesson was the lesson I presented during my Godly Play training course. It’s also the lesson that seems easiest to furnish from a flea market or charity shop! So one of the first items I bought for Godly Play was a baby doll.

Finnish flea markets are like big supermarkets. The sellers are not present: all the stuff for sale is just labeled with a price and a stall number. The customer pays for their goods at a cash register by the exit, and the market itself keeps track of what was bought from whose stall. The disadvantage, I suppose, is that you cannot haggle – the price on the tag is the price you have to pay. But a big advantage to my mind is the lack of hassle! You can pick up an item and carry it around with you until you find a better one (or a cheaper one) in somebody else’s stall. And then you can put the first one back.

I started browsing for dolls. Funnily enough, it hadn’t occurred to me how many dolls have hair. I wanted a smooth head that would be easy to dry off. Soon, though, I found a nice bald doll wearing a little track suit. Then I started hunting through the stalls of baby clothes, trying to find a white dress or shirt that might work as a christening gown. Nothing seemed right – they were all too big for the doll, not fancy enough, and otherwise unsuitable. Imagine my delight then when I came across a stall selling doll clothes (brand new – this seemed to be a stall rented out by a seamstress)… including a range of christening gowns!

I stripped off the track suit to make sure the gown would fit and – Oh. It’s an anatomically correct doll. Ok, I’ll take one pair of bloomers as well, thank you!

(It’s not just a matter of propriety. It’s that I would like the children to be able to imagine the doll as whatever they want it to be, boy or girl. At least until the first time a child takes its bloomers off.)

Ah, Finland. A land where so many babies are baptized that there’s a good market for dolls’ christening gowns, and where the dolls are likely to have, um, all their parts. :)

 

To read about my other Baptism materials, click here. In July 2012 I bought another doll for our church to use, and mused on a couple of downsides to this doll. You can read that here.