As a general rule, children like attending Church,
and this instinctive attraction to and interest in Church services is the foundation
on which we must build our religious education. When parents worry that children
will get tired because services are long and are sorry for them, they usually
subconsciously express their concern not for their children but for themselves.
Children penetrate more easily than do adults into the world of ritual, of liturgical
symbolism. They feel and appreciate the atmosphere of our Church services. The
experience of Holiness, the sense of encounter with Someone Who is beyond daily
life, that mysterium tremendum that is at the root of all religion and
is the core of our services is more accessible to our children than it is to
us.
"Except ye become as little children," these words apply to the
receptivity, the open-mindedness, the naturalness, which we lose when we grow
out of childhood. How many men have devoted their lives to the service of God
and consecrated themselves to the Church because from childhood they have kept
their love for the house of worship and the joy of liturgical experience! Therefore,
the first duty of parents and educators is to "suffer little children and
forbid them not" (Matt. 19:14) to attend Church. It is in Church before
every place else that children must hear the word of God. In a classroom the
word is difficult to understand, it remains abstract, but in church it is in
its own element. In childhood we have the capacity to understand, not
intellectually, but with our whole being, that there is no greater joy on earth
than to be in Church, to participate in Church services, to breathe the
fragrance of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is "the joy and peace
of the Holy Spirit."
Church attendance should be complemented from
the earliest days of childhood by the home atmosphere, which precedes and prolongs
the mood of the Church. Let us take Sunday morning. How can a child sense the
holiness of that morning and of that which he will see in Church if the home
is full of the blare of radio and TV, the parents are smoking and reading the
papers, and there reigns a generally profane atmosphere? Church attendance should
be preceded by a sense of being gathered in, a quiet, a certain
solemnity. The lighting of vigil lights before the icons, the reading of the
Scripture lessons, clean and fresh clothes, the festively tidied-up rooms –
so frequently parents do not realize how all these things shape the religious
consciousness of the child, make an imprint which no later tribulations will
ever efface. On the eve and on the day of Sundays and Church feasts, during
Lent, on the days when we prepare ourselves for Confession and Communion, the
home must reflect the Church, must be illuminated by the light that we bring
back from worship.
And now let us speak of the school. It seems
self-evident to me that to organize so-called "Sunday School" lessons
during Divine Liturgy is in deep contradiction with the spirit of Orthodoxy.
The Sunday Liturgy is a joyful gathering of the Church community, and the child
must know and experience this long before he is able to understand the deep
meaning of this gathering. It seems to me that the choice of Sunday for church
school is not a very good one. Sunday is primarily a liturgical day; therefore,
it should be Church-centered and Liturgy-centered. It would be far better to
have church school on Saturdays before the Vigil or Vespers service. The argument
that parents cannot and will not bring children to church twice a week is merely
admitting indolence and sinful negligence of what is important to our children.
Saturdayevening is the beginning of Sunday and should be liturgically sanctified
just as much as Sunday morning. Why, in all Orthodox churches the world over
Vespers or the Vigil is served on the eve of Feasts and Sundays. There is no
reason why we too cannot arrange our church life according to principle: School—Vespers—Liturgy,
where School would be for children the essential preparation and introduction
to the Day of the Lord, His resurrection.
Source- schmemann.org
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