In our increasingly secularized and individualistic world, often chaotic and divided, there is a deep need for intergenerational spiritual community. This is not a program idea — it is a theological and pastoral conviction. As we wrote to you all in the Heart of Grace letter we sent, “…we have committed to using this season to help create something that will outlast any one staff member: a thriving, intergenerational model of ministry rooted not primarily in programs, but in relationships; not dependent on one staff member, but sustained by the whole congregation. Children, youth, parents, grandparents, and people in every season of life all have a role to play in forming one another in faith.”
Sofia Cavalletti, who founded the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, spent a lifetime observing something the Church too easily forgets: children arrive already capable of an authentic relationship with God. They are not empty vessels waiting for us to fill them with faith: they are, as she put it, already engaged in a profound and personal exchange with their Creator. All of us were children, and can rediscover, at a heart level, the faith of a child. I believe we all long for a relationship with God that is allowed to unfold in wonder, and where the whole community, young and old, can watch and be changed by what we see there. “Unless you become like children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven,” said Jesus (Matthew 18:3). I think he meant it. He wanted us to wonder, and show up with more questions and curiosity than answers and certainty.
Just this morning we lost a great American writer and spiritual thinker, Annie Dillard. She was one of my favorites, and often returned me to the wonder of my child self when I was in my 20s and in my head. Born in Pittsburgh in 1945, her 1974 book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the Pulitzer Prize the following year, and dramatically changed my life when I picked it up in 1989. Her work feels like a companion to our work here at Grace, now — a lifelong attention to wonder, to the world cracked open by close looking, and a willingness to have faith in where you land when you allow for beauty and surprise.
“The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.” – Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
That is not a bad description of what happens in the atrium, for children and adults.
And it is why I am inviting all of us into the atrium as a way to anchor our youth and child centered life together, as a way to reshape our lives as an intentionally gathered community.
On August 30, Maria Phelps and I led our first Back to Church Orientation in the Level 2 atrium. Ten of us gathered — vestry leaders, catechists, parents, and other adults simply curious about this space — and for an hour we set aside our grown-up assumptions. We entered the atrium the way a child does: through a guided meditation and the unhurried experience of an atrium presentation. We talked. Not about curriculum, but about our own spiritual childhoods, and about the faith we are each still exploring, decades later. Our desire to grow our children will be what grows in us too.
Just last Sunday, we built on that Orientation time to train adults as Atrium Guardian Angels. This training gathered everyone willing to serve the atrium on Sunday mornings — to guard it and attend to it, in the fullest sense of both words. With Jennifer Bell, we reviewed the Four Planes of Development and the spiritual questions particular to each stage of childhood, and I shared what it actually looks like, in practice, to “be present and allow” — to give a child a well-supported experience without hovering, directing, or filling the silence ourselves. It is a harder discipline than it sounds, and a holy one.
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.” ― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Not a bad description of what it feels like to become a Guardian of our Atrium, or to participate in the life of our young ones because we want to be the ones who, along with them, “choir the proper praise”.
This is also the work Virginia Theological Seminary’s Roots & Wings, an Episcopal Intergenerational Formation Collaborative, was built to support. Funded by a five-year Lilly Endowment grant, Roots & Wings exists to help congregations practice vibrant intergenerational worship — not as a children’s ministry add-on, but as a recovery of the whole Body of Christ. As the project’s director, Sarah Bentley Allred, writes: “We more fully embody the body of Christ when all bodies, of all ages, are not only present in worship, but actively engaged and equitably valued.” Empowering our youngest members to lead and shape worship, she notes, “turns things upside down in exactly the way Jesus did when he spoke to women, ate with tax collectors, and welcomed children.” Roots & Wings names five hallmarks of this kind of community: Intentionality, Relationality, Dignified Reciprocity, Flexibility, and Empowerment. Read back over our August and September, and you’ll find all five already at work in our own atrium. We want to extend these hallmarks to all areas of our shared life at Grace.
Here is what’s next. We’re offering a second Back to Church Orientation on Sunday, September 20, from 11:30 to 12:45, in the atrium — a repeat of the August session, for anyone who missed it or wants to return. A second Atrium Guardian Angels Training will follow in October, for anyone ready to take up this quiet, essential ministry of presence. And on Sunday, October 4 — the Feast of St. Francis — join us at 9:00 a.m. out on the labyrinth for a child – and animal! – centered liturgy, a chance to worship outdoors, together, across every generation and species God has made.
There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.” ― Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
The next generation of Grace, active in the pews and brave in the world, doesn’t arrive on its own. We build it, together, one atrium, one training, one meal, one Sunday at a time. We have undertaken the heart’s slow learning, and we know where to love, and whom. Let us show up in all places, at all times, with a heart of wonder.
— Sarah
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