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Children have a natural and evolving relationship to God and to the earth. At birth they come to us from another home, their home with God. With us, they hope to find on earth a memory and a reflection of the home from which they have come.
The Christian Community offers several religious activities for children. First there is the Baptism. In this sacrament, the child is received like a seed into a community that promises to carry this child within itself, and to help nourish the child’s relationship with God. Baptism does not make the child a member of the church; for membership will be his or her free choice as an adult.
With their entry into first grade, children step into the wider community as a learners. Now religious instruction begins. It is given mostly in the form of stories, plays, songs and verses that show the divine wisdom in nature, in the Old Testament history, and in the New Testament. For school age children, the practice of religion is now widened to include worshipping together with other children at the Sunday Service for Children. The content emphasizes the importance of learning the great lesson of earthly life: that Christ is love’s teacher in life’s learning and work.
In the Sunday Service for Children, the heart gently awakens the will to worship God. In religious instruction, the heart gently awakens the head to the understanding of the working of God. These two complement and balance one another, developing the child’s religious life from both sides, in a way that will enable him or her later to make a free but informed choice about religion as an adult.
During the summer there are two-week children’s sleep-away camps and in some regions family camps. These constellations provide another level for the healthy weaving of the religious life into a communal life, forming a reservoir of inspiration for the children for the rest of their lives. Confirmation at age fourteen is both a culmination and a new beginning. The seed of the young person’s religious life, which has been surrounded and nourished by the community, is released into life. The young person attends The Act of Consecration of Man as an independent adult, and at Confirmation receives his/her first Communion. After this, their attendance is their choice. Many still attend with their families. Much depends on whether there is a group of people their own age.
They may later want to become counselors in the children’s camps or to attend Youth Conferences or camps. There are also International Youth Conferences where older teens and those in their twenties find their own connections before settling down into the more local communities as young adults. Often it is the arrival and Baptism of their own children which stimulates their re-entry as active participants and creators of the life of The Christian Community.
Human life and its death is a singular thing. Animals live, and then they die, and their life is done. They are simply absorbed back into the great mother soul of which their lives on earth were extensions.
But human life and death is different. Our births on earth are already a death. Part of our spiritual being dies into the world of matter. Our births are occasions of mingled hope and sadness for the angels who watch us drop away into the far country. Our birth on earth is a death in heaven.
But each of us is given a seed to take along with us on the journey. This seed is present from the day we are born, safely embedded in our physical nature. It slowly germinates during the course of our lives. It is a fearsome gift, but nonetheless most precious, for it guarantees that we will be able to find the doorway back into heaven again. It is the seed of death.
The gradual growth of the death seed in us means on the one hand a gradual damping down of the power of life in the body. But it is meant to be accompanied by a corresponding growth in the scope, the depth, the breadth of our our consciousness. As we age on earth our death seed is meant to be growing and ripening fruits of inner awareness for us to bring back to heaven. The fruits of
We meet the young man of Nain at the point of his earthly death. His fruits of past, present and future had fully ripened. He had brought to fruition all of his inwardness. And so his earthly life had come to its end. Seen from the outside this death is cause for weeping. But seen from the world of the angels, his death is cause for rejoicing; for as he was dying on earth, he was being born into the spiritual world;not merely absorbed back, like an animal, but born there again as a discrete entity bringing back ripened fruits from afar. The angels rejoiced at the arrival of this richly laden human soul in their midst.
Christ blesses the young man’s ripeness; and he empathizes with the suffering of those left behind-especially the mother, widowed and destitute, who has no future. Perhaps He recognizes that this particular man’s fruits are needed on the earth. And so the angels and perhaps even the young man himself, are asked to make a sacrifice.
Christ brings the young man’s ripeness back to earth. It is as though the young man is born again on earth, but this time out of the spirit. We can imagine the spiritual power of his words as he begins to speak.
Perhaps he would say, as does the poet:
Death is strange and hard
if it is not our death, but a death
that takes us by storm, when we’ve ripened none within us.*
He might remind us, as do the words of the burial service: that we are beholden to the spiritual world for every thing that we think and say and do.
In the depths of our being we know that the death seed within comes wrapped with this encouragement written in angelic script: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply your gifts of consciousness. And bring us back the fruits.
And we, musing:
We stand in your garden year after year.We are trees for yielding a sweet death.But fearful, we wither before the harvest.*
And, just beyond our ordinary hearing, they reply what angels always say:
“Fear not! Do not be afraid! Have no fear! For Christ, the Wakener of the Dead, is with you always.”
And so we pray:
God, give each of us our own death,
the dying that proceeds
from each of our lives
the way we loved
the meanings we made…*
*Rilke, Book of Hours