Loving Vigil Keeping
Phillippa’s Place, where our religious education program lives, is about as far from this sanctuary as you can get and still be in the church. Two buildings over and a level and a half up. Many of you have never been up there–or haven’t for quite some time. Yet, it is coequal to this room, this cyberspace, as the heart of the church, the home of the congregation.
Sunday after Sunday, as we sing them on their way, our children, along with Megan, go up to Phillippa’s Place to participate in the thoughtfully researched, skillfully planned program Megan just described. She is assisted each Sunday by a volunteer. Meanwhile, our youngest UUs, from age six months to three years, occupy the nursery up a few steps from Phillippa’s Place, along with Jalie and Brandi, our two paid, nursery care providers. We’ve run background checks on all of these people, and anyone else who works with our children. We do that for the same reason that we always have at least two adults working with our kids, and have a well stocked first aid kit and fire extinguisher and smoke detectors in Phillippa’s Place and in the upper hallway between the nursery and teen room–because we have a duty to protect the children of our congregation.
These guardrails of protection are vital, and we take them seriously. So seriously, in fact, that several weeks ago we canceled RE when we couldn’t find two background-checked adults to fill in for Megan. Yet the core, the soul, of the loving vigil we, as a congregation, keep over our children–the ones in our midst today and the ones to come some days and years hence–is the way we embody and live into our Unitarian Universalist values of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence and generosity, with love at the center.
When we make decisions regarding our church budget and programming with these values at the center of our deliberations, we create a safe and nurturing environment in which our children thrive (and we do, too). More than that, when they see us giving time and money to our church and volunteering to serve meals through Family Promise and Celebrating Families, and when they hear us speak our joys and sorrows, they begin to learn that interdependence has many facets–among them giving what we have as we are able, and trusting one another with the deepest, most tender places in our hearts–and that generosity is spiritual practice. When they hear stories in worship or in RE about all kinds of people, with different faiths and abilities and family constellations and genders, they come to know that the world of humanity is vast and magnificently varied, that much of the human experience held in common despite these differences, and that pluralism means, in part, that the lives and stories of all people are to be seen and heard and celebrated. When they walk or ride the trolley in the MLK parade, when they stop by our church’s booth at Pride, they take their first steps into allyship, with its transformative effect on them and the world.
Now, it might sound odd to hear me call these kinds of learning and growing "loving vigil". I get that. But I believe with all my heart that knowing these things, incorporating practices of generosity and interdependence, practices of building justice and pursuing equity, practices of celebrating pluralism and seeking transformation–incorporating these practices into their lives, from a young age, within their family’s faith community, does safeguard our children.
Because here’s the thing: teens and young adults who learned the strength of pluralism and the practice of interdependence as children will more wisely, boldly and joyfully engage in life in a majority-minority society. Teens and young adults who experienced the transformative effects of community with love at its center as children will more readily seek out such community when they move beyond their family homes. Teens and young adults who learn to recognize the nuances and dynamics of equity and inequity, justice and injustice as children will more diligently and passionately vote, organize, and advocate for a more justice and equitable society.
And teens and young adults and adult adults and older adults who do these things will be safer in a world that is, at the moment, becoming more perilous every day. Safer because they have the skills and resources for navigating with the uncertainty and chaos, and safer because they will be equipped and inspired to take up the work of transforming the world of chaos, greed, and hatred into a world of hope, peace, justice, possibility and love.
Megan and Jalie and Brandi and our volunteers keep a loving vigil over our babies and children and youth in Phillippa’s Place and the nursery (and next year in the middle school room, too), week after week. Our children relax into that love and eagerly seek it out. One of our toddlers, hanging out with her family in Rahn Hall during the service auction, told her mom, insistently, “I want to go to my church!” Through our financial support, our volunteer hours, our vocal support of Megan, through our faithful embodiment of our UU values, all of us cast a more vast and powerful loving vigil over these precious members of our congregation–with bounds stretching toward the horizons of time. How blessed are we to be such guardians?
