“IF A toddler doesn’t understand that church is a holy space, they shouldn’t be in church.” This — or something near it (my emotions blur the precise words) — was said to me on the door after church on a recent Sunday morning. It was a Sunday when my four-year-old, who comes with a side of neurospicy-ness and a pink hearing aid, had shouted “Mama!” in church for roughly two minutes through the service, as he got here to the altar rails, with about 15 other young children, for a blessing. For the rest of the 65-minute service, he was not in church — and he rarely is.
He loves church, nevertheless it is an amazing space. When he’s in church, he likes to face on the back, moulding Play-Doh or pressed against the organ casing in order that he can feel the vibrations of the sound. He also loves cleansing; so, most Sundays during church, he gives the vestibule, entry areas, lavatory, and kitchen mop — complete with no less than one “Wet Floor” sign. After the service, he waits for people to maneuver to coffee, after which spends the subsequent 45 minutes vacuuming the sacristy, children’s area, and some other place where he spots something on the ground.
But, in line with this person (and it’s not the primary time this has been said to me concerning children in church), if he can’t be silent, he shouldn’t be there, because he doesn’t understand holy space.
Here’s the thing about children — which I say as a parent of 1 who hasn’t slept until sunrise in years, and so my glasses are removed from rose-tinted: what has surprised and humbled me, in greater than 20 years of ordained ministry, is how deeply they understand the sacredness of space and God’s creation. When was the last time you stopped to smell a flower, admire a tree’s shadow, collect leaves of each color, attempt to catch a bird simply to say “Hello”, stomp in a puddle and let the water splash in your face, or say “Wow!” at how briskly the clouds move on a windy day, or the brightness of the moon?
While some in church struggle to worship within the 63 minutes when a toddler just isn’t audibly present, my child spends double that point each Sunday tending the church space: mopping floors, hoovering the sanctuary, righting flowers blown over by the wind within the churchyard, and clearing dirty water from the memorials. (When I say he loves cleansing, it truly is all-consuming.) And, when he comes forward for a blessing, all he wants is to inform me concerning the church’s Hoover, and to light a candle to say “Thank you” to God.
A FEW weeks ago, our beloved Labrador died on the age of 15. As his final days drew near, I started gently talking about death, and heaven, and God watching over us. No questions got here — aside from a small misunderstanding that our dog was going to “Helen’s” relatively than heaven. But, on the idea of several “Christian” children’s books on death, wherein I hadn’t quite noticed the detail that usually shows the person or pet as someway floating off to the side within the air, my son became convinced that our dog would go to heaven on an aeroplane.
After our Labrador’s death, two additional books were really helpful to us: Air Miles, suggested by my son’s teacher, and Dog Heaven, by an expensive clergy colleague. Air Miles tells of an older dog, Miles, who lives with slightly boy and learns to fly a plane. When he gets old, and might not walk well, he flies higher and further than ever before on his final journey. Dog Heaven imagines dogs running free in countless fields, and a God who watches over them, smiles at their joy, and has quite a way of humour in terms of dog biscuits.
For weeks, these have been read over and another time at bedtime, and now my child sees God and heaven in all places. He sees biscuits within the shop and says, “God likes to make biscuits.” He sees clouds, and says “God sits on those and watches over us so we don’t have bad dreams” (at the highest of his Christmas list, alongside a green Hoover, was “a cloud from God”). Just this week, within the park, he shouted from the swing: “Mama, look! Those dogs are running identical to [our dog] did when he first got to heaven.”
All of that is to say: children get holiness, and it’s not confined to silence in a 65-minute service on a Sunday morning. They need to know that God cares for us — all of us. They need to light candles and say thanks. They see God behind trees, in racing clouds, and in dogs running at full speed within the park. And they worry concerning the comfort of those that are suffering or sad.
In Matthew 18, Jesus tells his disciples that “Unless you alter and change into like children, you won’t ever enter the Kingdom of heaven” (18.3), and “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me” (18.5). Becoming like children doesn’t mean becoming silent. Jesus puts no conditions on their welcome, no requirement of understanding, behaviour, or volume. Instead, Jesus simply says, “Become like children.”
HOW, then, might we take a look at our world and see and seek God and all that’s holy? How might we are saying “Thank you” more often, look out for many who are suffering, begin every day in wonder, and expand on our sense of what “holy space” really means?
Perhaps holiness just isn’t present in the silence that we demand, but within the love that we notice: within the small hands that need to make God’s house beautiful; in a toddler’s joy at seeing heaven, and God’s presence in clouds and dogs and biscuits; in every whispered “Thank you” and wide-eyed “Wow!”. Maybe what makes an area holy just isn’t the absence of noise, however the presence of wonder, gratitude, compassion, and love.
When Jesus said, “Unless you alter and change into like children, you won’t ever enter the Kingdom of heaven,” he wasn’t asking his disciples to be quiet: he was asking them to be open, and to see the world as children do — filled with grace, alive with possibility, brimming with God’s presence.
So, the subsequent time we hear a toddler’s voice in church, perhaps we’d pause before calling it a disruption and, as an alternative, hear it as an invite, a holy reminder that heaven just isn’t silent, but alive with sound. Revelation speaks of “the roar of many waters”, rumbling thunder, and harping harpists filling the heavenly space (14.2); of winged, eye-covered creatures who never stop saying “Holy, holy, holy” (4.8). Heaven is stuffed with sound — roaring, singing, cries of praise — and, perhaps, within the voices of our kids, we’re reminded of what Jesus meant when he said that the Kingdom of heaven belongs to corresponding to these.
Canon Jenn Strawbridge is Professor in New Testament and Early Christian Studies at Oxford, and serves on the Faith and Order and Liturgical Commissions.
