... and a followup

If you are one of the eight people who have already viewed the previous posting, this is for you:

I had second thoughts after I posted "Dust thou art..." I had written that the choir families do not attend the special non-Sunday services. Then I thought of some of our younger choristers and their families sitting in the Great Vigil service last year...

Watching a young family in the front row, it hit me how this service ought to work: their little girl was drifting off to sleep as one Story followed another, one Psalm after another. This is perhaps as it ought to be for a child, awakening later when all of a sudden it is Easter, all is alight, and the organ and congregation are roaring away as loud as they can go. If the child comes back the next year, and the next, these stories will eventually be woven into her soul. She will know in her bones that this is a night like no other.

There were others at that service too, some of the teenagers and their families.

I thought of our Christian Formation director, who has repeatedly lobbied for an earlier service time. And who, for several years, had a choir supper between rehearsal and liturgy to entice families to stay.

And I thought of one parent (not a choir parent) who was there at the service. She always brings her infant child to church, and the little girl may well have been there and I didn't see her.

I realized that I had been awfully hard on these parents. They are amazing people, the most amazing group of choir parents I have encountered, and they are bringing their children up as Christians in a world that is unremittingly hostile to the faith.

I went back just now, over lunch, and revised the previous to try and reflect some of this. Raising children in this time and place is hard, and I have no answers.