Written by Sarah Mast
For the second week in a row, we gather around the computer, my two sons, a stuffed panda bear, and I, ready to soak up whatever we can of St. James’ and of God’s Word. As a sometime Godly Play teacher, I have grown familiar with the rhythm of the class, modeled after the rhythm of the Liturgy of the Word. We greet each other; we give thanks; we tell a story from the Bible; we reflect on the story; we pray; we feast.
As Ms. Aimee reminds us in the video, church time is not like regular time. Church time, she says, goes in a circle, the cycle of the liturgical year. The days passing at home, each one so similar to the one before, seem to move in a time we’ve not seen before, or not to move at all. Now, here in front of the computer, we are grounded in the reminder that it is the 5th Sunday of Lent, in our home, and in everyone else’s home. We are connected to all the 5th Sundays of Lent in the past and those in the future. God is bigger than this.
The boys are wiggly. We light candles. We are happy to see Ms. Aimee’s face, and all the familiar items that Godly Play uses to teach us about God. We adjust the volume, a reprimand – “Hush! Listen!” Like in the Godly Play class at church, the children weave back and forth between rapt and sacred attention to the Word and silly jokes, floor-rolling, and brother-poking. We hear about Jesus and how he bewildered everyone in the week before his death, how he reminded his disciples that Upper Room night that “whenever you eat this bread together, I will be there.”
Ms. Aimee asks us to pause the video to do our Work – the reflection on the story. We bring the candles over to the table and get out the play-dough. Peter makes a cross that turns into a lantern, and Benji makes a heart and uses a Christmas tree cookie cutter to make the palms to greet Jesus as he rides into Jerusalem. I worry that this feels too normal, we are just making a mess and griping at each other at the kitchen table like we always do, and we are mulling these stories over and trying to get our hands and heads around them. We return to the video and, as in the class in the church building, we are invited to pray together during our feast. Benji is dismayed that we don’t have at our house the normal communion fare of goldfish and apple juice; Peter improvises and grabs his favorite cookies. We pass the panda and each say a prayer, mine out loud, and the boys’ each in brief silence with only an “Amen” at the end. Just as in the Godly Play room at church, I wonder what a prayer sounds like inside the minds of my children. There are cookie crumbs on the rug. And we have managed to pray with the world and the church and each other, and to hear the ancient stories, and we used playdough and a laptop to do it.
