laura.fo

I was mentioning to someone yesterday how much time I spent in church as a kid. I think he was startled: first by the sheer number of hours I logged there, and second because I know so little about Christian history. You'd think there would be a contradiction there, no?

So now I'm trying to remember just what we did all that time in church. I know we sang, a lot, the same children's songs over and over again. We said the Lord's prayer. We put on a play about Noah's Ark once in third grade, and did nativity scenes every Christmas. We visited the nursing home every couple months, and wrote letters to members of the church who were in the hospital. We decorated the church for holidays. We colored pictures of Jesus. We gave out Christmas trees to "poor" families ("poor" in quotes, because it was a small working-class town without much wealth disparity, so the "privilege" we're talking about was there by a pretty slim margin). We collected canned goods. We took turns handing out communion wine and lighting the candles on the altar. We learned little stories — Noah's ark, Moses, Adam and Eve, Jesus's birth — but never discussed them except in the most obvious terms: love is better than hate, being good is better than being bad, freedom is better than slavery. We said prayers for sick people. We made crafty items for our parents out of glue and yarn.

In short, it was a service agency. Not a religious education. I'm not sure I have a problem with this — I'm just calling it what it is.

By junior high it became a sort of extended guidance counseling session. We talked about our friends and the tyranny of popularity and our relationship with our parents, what we wanted to be when we grew up, and all the Big Issues of '80s like suicide and AIDS. That sounds nice, doesn't it? I remember it as excruciating. Being forced to discuss matters this private with a community I had not chosen was hell on earth.

And again, not a religious education.

The mosques in this area have an entirely different view toward children. There's no singing, period; a lot less art and a lot more rote memorization of Qur'anic verses and the Arabic alphabet. I don't like this approach, either. The Arabic I like in theory, but in practice it favors the kids who speak it at home and ends up alienating those for whom it's a second or third language. And memorizing the Qur'an in Arabic without learning the translation and without discussing the meaning is something I've never understood. What's the point? I know it's beautiful to listen to a child say a surah, but to them it's just the babbling of nonsense words until they sort out the meaning and the context.

I don't have any better ideas. Just something I'm thinking about today.