WHEN I ask myself how, as a baby, I practised faith at home, it’s the seasonal resources that I remember first — perhaps because so lots of them appeared on the table in our Eighties, primary-coloured kitchen.
We brought home from church packs with activities, prayers, and graces for use for every occasion, however it’s the tangible items that stick within the mind: the gradual lighting of the candles on the Advent wreath, or learning to blow the contents of an egg out through a needle-hole, in order that we could paint the delicate shell for the Easter tree. (Our mother kept all of our attempts, from the toddler fingerprints to the Latin and Greek inscriptions that my sister and I produced as university students, and so they still appear on the tree every 12 months.)
Of all seasonal resources, probably the most evocative is the nativity set. We set it up as an empty stable at first of Advent: Mary, Joseph, and the donkey began their journey at the opposite end of the home, moving day by day towards their destination. The magic and wonder of coming down on Christmas morning to search out that Jesus had appeared within the manger (quietly slipped in after the midnight service) rivalled the enjoyment of the bulging stockings, and continues to be a special and holy moment for me, despite the fact that I’m now the one who puts him there.
In repeating the experience with my very own children, I used our elaborate Playmobil nativity that I couldn’t resist adding to each 12 months (we now have eight smart men); and, for her baptism, my daughter was given a phenomenal nativity set with the figures already hidden away in 24 drawers in order that they may very well be progressively added through the season — with Jesus, after all, in drawer 24.
FOR my very own baptism, a godmother gave me a silver candlestick to carry the baptismal candle, and this became a necessary a part of an annual observance: to light the candle on the anniversary of my baptism. In childhood, I remember its being lit in the course of the family meal, and feeling proud to have it by my place setting.
These days I actually have made somewhat personal liturgy around it. The anniversary of my baptism falls on 31 October, but we used to rejoice it on 1 November because, my mother insisted, it was liturgical All Saints’ Day, having taken place on a Sunday.
With apologies to my mother, I now light the candle on the evening of the thirty first, because there’s something vastly appropriate concerning the little flame standing out against the background of Hallowe’en; and I read the words from the baptism service about fighting valiantly against sin, the world, and the devil, and shining as a light-weight on the earth.
I don’t know the way a few years it took for the unique candle to burn down, however the silver candlestick provides the link back to my baptism, and the 12 months when, being unable to recollect where I had put it, I had to make use of a substitute was just not quite the identical.
GODPARENTS were an extension of the immediate family for us, which is why I used to be approaching my teens before I had properly worked out exactly how lots of my uncles and aunts were actually blood relations. In my bedroom, I had a photograph frame — one in all those with many various windows — from which the faces of grandparents and godparents, aunts and uncles, looked cheerfully down on me. I learned to incorporate them in my bedtime prayers, saying “God bless . . .” and naming them as I checked out each picture.
I made sure to do the identical for my daughter when she was born, printing an enormous poster of faces to place above her bed; for her, it became much more vital, as she is autistic and wishes a visible reminder of individuals she doesn’t see day by day. Her relationship together with her godmothers may be very special. The pictures function a superb reminder for us, too, that we have now grown our family by three extra adults per child, and must make an effort to remain in contact with those who now live further away.
WHEN I got here to jot down my very own trilogy of youngsters’s books, I believed back over all of the books that had most affected me. Of course, Narnia featured prominently and fed my budding love of allegory, metaphor, and fantasy; but when I had to decide on one set of books for the expansion of religion, it could be Janet and John Perkins’s Haffertee Hamster series. There is something concerning the ordinariness of the Diamond family (talking soft-toy hamster aside), and the way in which by which they include their Christianity in day-to-day experiences, which was irresistible to six-year-old me; and that also, for me, holds the important thing to faith in children’s books: it’s the facility of recognising in fiction a family like your personal.
Some of Shirley Hughes’s books held the identical experience: Lucy and Tom go to church on Christmas morning and don’t open their gifts until the afternoon, and I didn’t know another children who did that. Finding yourself represented in a book is a foundational experience for a baby — and, after all, the identical is true in the case of representing other faiths and other experiences; but unusual, lived Christianity is rare in children’s books.
With my very own children, I discovered the wonderful Custard Cream Communion Club series by Ruth Whiter, which, sadly, is now quite difficult to trace down, but held the identical quotidian magic. Books by the prolific Eleanor Watkins, reminiscent of the Beech Bank Girls series, follow an analogous pattern for barely older children; and, once I wrote the Gladstone the Gargoyle trilogy, I used the identical recipe of an adventure throughout the ordinariness of biscuits, school, wellies, family, and kitchen tables. Faith thrives throughout the stuff of life.
Amy Scott Robinson is a author, performance storyteller, and ventriloquist. Her books include the Gladstone Tales, published by Kevin Mayhew.
