Part of my job description is to throw parties. No joke. There’s lay ministry for you. As well as myriad other things, I am to provide social activities for our congregation. So, as I mentioned in last week’s post, I threw a party last Saturday in the church hall.
In one corner of the hall, we had a low table, a colourful rug, a box of animals and trucks, and some storybooks. At the other end of the hall, we had a jumble of play cushions and balloons to chase after. Somewhere in the middle, there were craft tables and baking tables and space, too, for chatting parents.
Of course, we called it the Lent Event (hands up all those other congregations playing with the same pun. Yes. I thought so. Ah, Presbyterians. Too clever for our own good.)
I wanted to play with the idea of life abundant before we started to tell the Lenten stories of temptation and sacrifice. With kids, life abundant is noisy, messy, colourful, chaotic, and probably involves pulling something delicious out of the oven. (I say “with kids”, but that’s just the predictable excuse. I think that an adult version of that gospel could be very compelling, too.) But thinking about kids and about celebrating that life abundant, I invited all the kids from the church. I thought about setting some sort of age limit around it, but I was advised to throw open the doors, and so I did. Which turned out to work fantastically well. Blue, of course, got on famously with the 14 year old girls, and Beangirl was in seventh heaven play-acting up on the stage with the big boys. We split into age groups for some activities and games, but for others, we all played together.
Together, we kneaded bread dough, and talked about the gifts of creation that go into our daily bread. Water, flour, eggs, sugar and yeast (those near-miraculous tiny creatures, that they are), salt and sunshine – the gifts of God for the people of God. And we enjoyed the therapeutic flexibility of the dough itself. It proved a wonderful vehicle for our creativity. By the time the trays went into the oven, they were lined with stars and butterflies, hotdogs and racing cars, aliens and snails – all of which baked up deliciously and were devoured with lashings of butter and home-made jam.
We also created some more lasting art. The younger children made brightly painted panels and the older ones made a window-shaped background frame from black Bristol board. Then, we cut out silhouettes of children running and a stylized Celtic cross – also from the black paper – a cross-shape cut out of a black circle and laid on top of the bright paintings so that the colour shone through the hole. The idea was to create a paper stained glass window to hang on a blank wall beside the sanctuary doors, something beautiful for the church.
This past week, my table has been covered with all these bits of paper, as the paint and glue dried, and the poster’s individual pieces fit together. It was my ongoing puzzle of the week. How to put it all together artfully, relying on my trusty glue stick and the weight of hymn books to make it flat. Needless to say, it is not perfect. Kids like to use a lot of paint and the papers rippled as they dried, so there are wrinkles and creases here and there. I had to cover the whole thing in adhesive plastic to hold all the glue and paper in place.
But it looks fantastic. I went into church early on Sunday morning to hang it up before the congregation arrived. The black framing around the edges made the bright paint even more pronounced. It is a non-window, creating light where before there was only plaster. A fantastic effect. Paper, paint, colour and darkness, shadow and created light. And hung in the narthex of the church, it acts as all faithful art should, preparing our childlike souls for prayer.
“God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.”
Ranier Maria Rilke
