Dear Companion God I have journeyed to this place and here I pause. My life so far has brought me here. My future stretches further than the eye can see. If, thus far, my journey you have shared, accompany me now.

Give wisdom, light and always joy so that in thought, and gift, and love my life shall be to fellow travelers a witness to your Presence in the world.

I am home from pilgrimage. At first, I think I am in Hawarden, Wales to take a class on Celtic Christianity as a part of my Doctor of Ministry studies. But I came to understand that I am on a journey, a pilgrimage.

The difference between a student and a pilgrim is that a pilgrim seeks an experience of God, not just information about God. Though I sit through many lectures in a classroom, it is the visits to Celtic holy places that transform.

Saint Melangell’s church is a place of pilgrimage for over a thousand years. The legend says that Melangell, a king’s daughter, comes from Ireland to Wales to escape a forced marriage and lead a life of solitude. In the year 604, Prince Brochwell Ysgithrog is hunting in Pennant. His hounds pursue a hare into a bramble. In the thicket, the prince discovers a young woman at prayer. The hare has taken refuge under the hem of her garment.

In recognition of her holiness, Brochwell gives Melangell the remote valley beneath the Berwyn Mountains as a place of sanctuary. She establishes a Christian community and lives in friendship with the animals.

Today, Pennant Melangell is a counseling center, retreat house, and place of pilgrimage. Last Thursday, I kneel for communion, receive a blessing and watch as the veil between me and God becomes transparent.

Pilgrims are persons who undertake spiritual journeys. For the Celtic Christian of north Wales, travel is as natural to the human being as it is to swallows or salmon. The journey to a particular thin place, to the shrine of a saint, or to the waters of a holy well, invites reflection on the journey of formation in faith over a lifetime. Just as Welsh pilgrims follow ancient pathways, there are maps that we can consult as we seek a life of thin places, where the veil between us and God is the sheerest.

As spiritual people, we move though different stages of faith as we go through life. They are like successive holy places on a spiral path that goes around a mountain repeatedly as it goes up the mountain. We keep reconsidering some of the same issues over and over, but each time they arise we see them somewhat differently from the ways in which we have seen them previously. Our path keeps leading us into slightly new territory, and we keep getting a wider view.

When we get to new places on the path, we see God in new ways. We may change our ways of speaking to God and experiencing God. We may need new kinds of food and new companions for the journey as well.

James W. Fowler, professor emeritus from Emory University, describes these movements of faith. He describes not what a person believes, but how a person shapes belief. The movements are not about the content of faith. Rather, they describe the process of formation in faith.

The movements are not a scale for measuring someone’s worth. Neither are they educational goals toward which to hurry people. A person can find spiritual wholeness at every stage.

These descriptions can help us to see why different people need different kinds of classes, or worship experiences, or mission opportunities. Movement from one pattern to another is often fueled by crisis. When the answers provided by one way of thinking no longer satisfy, the pilgrim is pushed into new places that offer more complexity, more flexibility, new discoveries.

Over the next five weeks, I want to explore this map for forming faith over a lifetime.

Today, I want to struggle with the theological question, “Does God have a big toe?”

How many of you, as parents, or family members, or care givers, have an infant in your life?

How many of you have a preschooler, a child between the ages of 2 and 6, in your life?

How many of you were ever infants or preschoolers?

CAN I TRUST MY WORLD?

The seeds of trust contend with the sense of threat.

The experience of mutuality with those who care.

The foundation of all formation.

The capacity to trust is the fundamental building-block for faith. We could not become independent persons if it were not possible for us to trust ourselves, others, and the world in which we live.

Most of the time we take the need to trust for granted, like, for example, the need to believe that the people on whom we depend will not desert us.

Little children do not take trust for granted in the same way adults can. Infants are not born with the confidence that they live in a safe and secure world. When a parent leaves, a young child often panics and cries. Relief is apparent when the parent returns. Only a safe environment, symbolized by a protecting and caring mother or father, makes it possible for an infant to develop the kind of trusting attitude that will enable it to face life unafraid.

A parent develops trust in a child by a relationship that combines care of the child’s needs with a sense of a parent’s trust-worthiness. Such trust is certainly not rational. It is more of a felt response. These seeds of trust provide the foundation for all lifetime relationships with family, with partners, with God.

How can a parent convey to a child the feeling that its needs will be provided? A parent can be a source of security for the child only if they are secure.

A parent who cannot trust is unable to call forth trust in a child. Parents therefore gain from others and from their own spiritual journey a fund of assurance that enables them to meet the needs of the next generation. The spiritual journey of parents is as important as the nurture provided for the child’s spiritual formation.

GOD IS LIKE MY MOMMY AND DADDY

Ages 2-6

No distinction between what is real and what is fantasy.

Story is fluid and magical.

Right and wrong is determined by who is BIGGER.

Image of God as Abba-Daddy

Caregivers provide care: no matter how big the enemies are or how undeserving the child might be.

For preschool children, from two to six, God is just like my mommy and daddy. A child will never make this statement, but the way they think about God will be greatly affected by their relationship to their parents – the biggest, most powerful people in the world.

It is the parents who promise protection and nurture, not so much by what they say but by acting as persons in control. Thereby they provide a young child’s first idea of what God may be like.

A young child cannot but be impressed at seeing their mother and father addressing God with respectful devotion. “You mean there’s someone even bigger, and more powerful, and better able to take care of me that Dad or Mom? Wow!”

It’s not easy for a young child to differentiate between parents and God, to say where a parent stops and God begins. That’s why a child’s mental pictures of God are so strikingly similar to the persons with authority in his or her life.

The imagination of preschool children is rich and fanciful. Unrestrained by logical thought, the child’s imagination runs freely and is easily engages by fairy tales, biblical narratives, cartoons – any and all stories that begin to give shape to its experiences of the world. These experiences also include all kinds of terror – lions, monsters, ghosts, and “things that go bump in the night.”

The knowing adult may reassuringly say, “Now, now, don’t be afraid; there really are no such things around.” But there really are such things around in the imagination of the child, a powerful imagination that is quite unimpressed by the adult’s rational explanations.

Preschool children simply do not have the capacity to make the distinctions between what is real and what is fantasy. Furthermore, they take for granted that what they see and imagine is the only way it can be. To ask them to see things from a rational perspective is to ask them to do what they are not capable of doing.

The images of God that a child begins to form at this stage do not fit together in a coherent pattern. This is not surprising when you stop to think that they cannot even follow the story line in a movie. Brief episodes can create powerful impressions, but in the young child’s mind there is no larger framework within which to fit the concrete images coming into the mind.

To put this in another way, a preschooler’s thinking is magical and fluid. Each child puts together fragments of stories and images that fit their needs.

In my thirties, I date Jim who has two children. Josh is six years old. Emily is three. We are going to lunch after church. I ask Emily about Sunday school. She wants to tell me about Jonah and the whale. “Tell me the story”, I invite.

Emily has a brief “deer in the headlights” moment as she struggles to put a story line together. Then, her imagination and a few brief episodes of Jonah’s adventure come together. “Jonah gets eaten by a whale”, she says. “And while, he is inside the fish, he eats lunch.” “What does he eat?” I inquire. “Hot dogs, mostly,” she says knowingly. “And after lunch, they play,” she continues. “Who is with Jonah?” I ask. “God!” she says with some disgust that the minister ought to know this information. “But God doesn’t like hot dogs!” she laughs and throws herself against her brother.

Jim says to me, “You and my daughter are warping the scriptures.” “No,” I grin. “We are doing theology.” The next Sunday, I congratulate Emily’s teacher who is able to impress upon three year olds that God is with you in times of trouble.

The responsiveness of children to images and stories that evoke both fear and trust suggests that parents and teachers ought to be concerned about the kinds of stories and images they provide as food for their children’s fertile imaginations.

This doesn’t mean that all the stories have to be light and cheerful. The scary stories in fairy tales and some biblical narratives can provide media that help the young child externalize inner anxieties. For example, young children identity with dragon slayers and Goliath slayers who are able to do what they feel powerless to do.

But adults need to remember what is a stake for the child whose smallness and powerlessness make him or her very vulnerable to the worst things that big people might do and often do to them. For such children, the issue is survival.

Above all, young children need to be sure of the parents’ promise to provide care, protection, and nurture, no matter what – no matter how big the enemies are “out there” or how bad and undeserving the child might be. This first formation of faith is fertile ground indeed for the beginning of long-lasting images of both God and Satan.

Even if you do not believe in a personification of evil, you can tell me what he looks like. You develop this image before the age of five.

All of us, no matter how mature and rational we become, still have within us images that are born in this period of our lives, especially in periods of crisis. We all have times of powerlessness when only the images of God’s protective power and caring presence enable us to live and grow.

At such times where we need is a God who is Abba, meaning father, a God who is able to be and do what only Abba can do. To such a God we can respond not only with trust but also with love and obedience, willing to follow wherever God may lead, no matter how filled with shadows and terrors that way may be.

So, does God have a big toe? First, resist the need to answer the question. “What do you think?” is usually the best, first response. Your child may simply want relationship and, like Emily, will tell you about God’s toes, and fingers, and curly hair.

If the question persists, answer it simply from your faith perspective. That you have a perspective is what is most important to your child. It is always appropriate to precede your response with “I don’t know for sure, but maybe…! Your “I don’t know for sure” response keeps enough dissonance to allow for new discoveries later.

I think that we gather week after week in order to create a holy place that can become thin. I think that this community is a gateway to pilgrimage, a place of invitation to the spiritual life.

It is our joy to maintain the thinness of this place, to ensure that it is indeed a place where God can be found and experienced by all persons.

Dear Companion God I have journeyed to this place and here I pause. My life so far has brought me here. My future stretches further than the eye can see. If, thus far, my journey you have shared, accompany me now.

Give wisdom, light and always joy so that in thought, and gift, and love my life shall be to fellow travelers a witness to your Presence in the world

BENEDICTION:

Pilgrims, go from this holy place.

May your life be to fellow travelers a witness to God’s presence in the world.