Using Godly Play® methods, Jerome Berryman offers families a way of nourishing faith in the home while supporting children’s spiritual growth through the practice of “storying,” our most ancient way of making meaning. This book offers “storying” rituals and techniques from Godly Play for exploring the meaning of Christmas, Easter, Creation, the Parable of the Good Shepherd, Pentecost, and the Trinity to give sustenance to the family’s flow, play, love, and spirituality. Stories of God at Home follows the rhythm of life’s cycles (birth, death, earth, life, God, and depth) in telling biblical stories and shows how parents and caretakers can grasp their role with children using classic children’s literature.
Using Godly Play® methods, Jerome Berryman offers families a way of nourishing faith in the home while supporting children’s spiritual growth through the practice of “storying,” our most ancient way of making meaning. This book offers “storying” rituals and techniques from Godly Play for exploring the meaning of Christmas, Easter, Creation, the Parable of the Good Shepherd, Pentecost, and the Trinity to give sustenance to the family’s flow, play, love, and spirituality. Stories of God at Home follows the rhythm of life’s cycles (birth, death, earth, life, God, and depth) in telling biblical stories and shows how parents and caretakers can grasp their role with children using classic children’s literature.
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Overview
Using Godly Play® methods, Jerome Berryman offers families a way of nourishing faith in the home while supporting children’s spiritual growth through the practice of “storying,” our most ancient way of making meaning. This book offers “storying” rituals and techniques from Godly Play for exploring the meaning of Christmas, Easter, Creation, the Parable of the Good Shepherd, Pentecost, and the Trinity to give sustenance to the family’s flow, play, love, and spirituality. Stories of God at Home follows the rhythm of life’s cycles (birth, death, earth, life, God, and depth) in telling biblical stories and shows how parents and caretakers can grasp their role with children using classic children’s literature.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780898690491 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2018 |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
The Story of God's Creating
The Creation
This book is about a long-term approach to celebrating your family and to prepare for unknown family challenges in the future. It shows how to do this in a deeply playful way by building up layers of family stories woven together with stories of God to fill a reservoir of meaning to draw from when needed.
We will begin by talking about how stories make meaning. We will then discuss the importance of being involved in nature to celebrate God's creation and to acknowledge our own true identity. We will then discuss what to do and say to weave together the celebration of creation with your own stories. We will close by discussing the remarkable ability of children to absorb God from nature and the implications of this for adults.
How Stories Make Meaning
I came from a storytelling family, but I was in my mid-forties before I fully appreciated the value of that gift. I had to actually encounter families that didn't tell stories to discover just how important stories really are.
One of the most significant stories I heard as a child was a bedtime story about being a child in God's creation. This theme included God's creating, the creation as the product of God's creating, the presence of the Creator in God's creation, and our own creating that flows out of being created in God's image. None of this was made explicit at the time, but it was all there, waiting to be discovered in the decades that followed.
My dad sat on my bed in the soft light of evening and told me about playing outdoors when he was a little boy. I knew the places in my grandmother's yard where he had played, so in story and play we bridged three generations to be at home together in the richness of God's creation.
Our bond didn't have anything to do with talking specifically about God or religion, but the experience was very religious because it evoked places, where I, too, felt hints and whispers of God all around me as I played. Knowing God in God's creation was like what I later sensed when I found hints of the poet in the poem, the painter in the painting, the engineer in the machine, the physician in the healing, or the composer in the symphony. This is how I knew that the experience of God was present in my play and that my father and I shared this intuition. I could feel this. It was implied in his stories and his presence. The God-talk came later.
We adults sometimes forget how involved in nature we were as children, even in the city. This is why I would like to introduce you to Alister Hardy and the project he began after he retired as Linacre Professor of Zoology at Oxford. He had wondered all his life about the experiences of God he had felt as a child and wondered if others had also experienced such events. When he retired he invited people to send accounts of such experiences to The Religious Experience Research Unit (RERU), which he set up in 1969 at Manchester College, Oxford.
Edward Robinson, a biologist, was the first director of RERU after Professor Hardy. He noticed that about 15 percent of the first 3,000 accounts they received referred to childhood experiences. He explored this surprising event in his book The Original Vision in 1977.
A Child's Experience of Nature and Its Implications for Adults
One of the beauties of Robinson's book is that he quoted at length from numerous accounts, rather than reducing them to tables of statistics. Important statistics are included in the book, but his quotations allow the reader to appreciate the texture and feeling of the writers' memories to make an informed interpretation of each story. I would like to quote from one of the RERU accounts so you can make up your own mind about the strengths and weaknesses of these memories.
Robinson acknowledged that our memories do not work like tape recorders. We interpret the past, as we remember it, looking back from new contexts in our later lives. This means that the significance of what happened counts as much as getting the details right. The account I would like to quote from involves horn-shaped lavender flowers on tall stalks appearing above "the gently swirling vapour" and a little girl's "black shoes with silver buckles" that disappeared in the mist. The significance of this, however, was the point. The little girl pondered the meaning of this at the time of her experience and then re-worked that meaning for over fifty years.
The most profound experience of my life came to me when I was very young — between four and five years old. I am not mistaken in dating this because I remember so clearly both the place where it occurred and the shoes I was wearing at the time, of which I was rather fond. Both of these facts relate only to this particular period in my life: I have a dated photograph of myself wearing the shoes in question.
My mother and I were walking on a stretch of land in Pangbourne Berks, known locally as "the moors." As the sun declined and the slight chill of evening came on, a pearly mist formed over the ground. My feet, with the favourite black shoes with silver buckles, were gradually hidden from sight until I stood ankle deep in the gently swirling vapour. Here and there just the very tallest harebells appeared above the mist. I had a great love of these exquisitely formed flowers, and stood lost in wonder at the sight.
Suddenly I seemed to see the mist as a shimmering gossamer tissue and the harebells, appearing here and there, seemed to shine with a brilliant fire. Somehow I understood that this was the living tissue of life itself, in which that which we call consciousness was embedded, appearing here and there as a shining focus of energy in the more diffused whole. In that moment I knew that I had my own special place, as had all other things, animate and so-called inanimate, and that we were all part of this universal tissue which was both fragile yet immensely strong, and utterly good and beneficent.
The vision has never left me. It is as clear today as fifty years ago, and with it the same intense feeling of love of the world and the certainty of ultimate good. It gave me then a strong, clear sense of identity which has withstood many vicissitudes, and an affinity with plants, birds, animals, even insects, and people too, which has often been commented on. Moreover, the whole of this experience has ever since formed a kind of reservoir of strength fed from an unseen source, from which quite suddenly in the midst of the very darkest times a bubble of pure joy rises through it all, and I know that whatever the anguish there is some deep centre in my life which cannot be touched by it.
Of course, at the early age of four or five I could not have expressed anything of the experience in the words I have now used, and perhaps the attempt to convey the absorption of myself into the whole, and the intensity of meaning, sounds merely over-coloured to the reader. But the point is that, by whatever mysterious perception, the whole impression and its total meaning were apprehended in a single instant. Years later, reading Traherne and Meister Eckhart and Francis of Assisi, I have cried aloud with surprise and joy, knowing myself to be in the company of others, who had shared the same kind of experience and who had been able to set it down so marvelously. This is not the only experience of the kind that has come to me — indeed they occur relatively often — but it is without doubt the one which has laid the deepest foundations of my life, and for which I feel the profoundest gratitude.
This story is remarkable for many reasons, but I would like to draw your attention to only one aspect of it. The little girl's original vision was not forgotten. It continued to give her life meaning as an adult. She was not only the speaker of her memory. She was also the listener. She listened long and well to her memory over the years and continued to interpret it, giving her life renewed meaning.
When children try to tell us about a numinous experience, like the one on the moors, they risk having their treasured discoveries causally dismissed by adults. If children object to this trivialization by adults and stand up for the reality they have experienced, they risk being put down again or, even worse, being punished or shunned for advocating for it. This teaches children to mistrust adults' interpretations about such experiences and their own childhood experience of them. The result is a double bind that blocks children's spirituality. Their experience of God risks being demeaned if they speak up and they demean their own experience if they don't.
Sometimes children are strong enough to retain a significant memory, like "the living tissue of life itself," which grounds them in the deepest, most creative, part of their identity. They know they are part of God's creation, which gives them a "reservoir of strength fed from an unseen source." As children grow older they begin to realize, like the little girl on the moors did, that others have experienced something like they did and that they "had been able to set it down so marvelously." It is my great hope that this approach to stories of God at home will avoid the double bind and help nourish these treasured memories from childhood so they can develop fully across the decades.
Edward Robinson's study quoted many memories of children who had resisted the double bind and retained their early memories into adulthood. One adult, remembering himself as a little boy, wrote, "This inner knowledge was exciting and absorbingly interesting, but it remained unsaid because, even if I could have expressed it, no one would have understood. Once, when I tried, I was told I was morbid." He was able to retain this significant memory, because, as he said, "I knew what I knew." I hope this sort of confidence in the significance of one's early experience of God will be strengthened by this approach to family storytelling and listening, so our early experiences of God can enrich and renew each decade of our lives.
One wonders how many of the 85 percent of the respondents, who did not mention childhood experiences, had lost access to their stories of God because of the double bind. The family celebrations in this book are designed to support free access to our early experiences of God and to provide the language for their memories to be enriched. The telling and interpreting of such stories, as we said, is a potent source of meaning to sustain family flourishing.
In 1997 Kevin M. Bradt, S.J. published Story as a Way of Knowing. He gathered up many of the themes in the air at the time and gave them his own creative shape as a Jesuit psychotherapist and teacher at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California. Bradt wanted to emphasize how narrative meaning is the co-creation of the teller and the hearer, so he called this relational knowing "storying" to avoid the undue emphasis on the telling of stories by such terms as "storyteller" or "storytelling." This is why our goal here is to show how "to story" the Creation.
"Storying" the Creation
"Storying" God's creation involves the Creator, the creating itself, what is created, how the creation points to its Creator and how God's image is the creative process within us. The point of mentioning this complexity again is to say that when we "story" the creation, we need to be aware that the richness of this experience overflows the narrative, even when aspects of it are not mentioned.
We begin with a box full of materials. They help communicate the many levels and perspectives of creation. These materials also insure that the richness of the narrative is open to all the stages and ages of those gathered. You can literally grasp the story with your hands and other senses to help grasp it with your mind and spirit.
You might keep this box with your camping gear, if that is something your family does, or somewhere in the home where you keep treasured things. Where you put the box of materials matters. It makes a statement of value about this story of God and your family. The box has a yellow circle on it. This represents the original light, which God gave us on the first day of creation. The first six chapters begin with an image of such a box and its contents. They also include a picture of the material as it is presented.
In this presentation and the ones that follow, much will be said about "the family." What I mean by "the family" includes your immediate family but also those that your family has adopted as unofficial members. When you invite "the family" to gather for these presentations, you might include friends, older and younger, who share a special relationship with you.
Inside the box are seven, small wooden plaques and a piece of black cloth that begins all rolled up. The black felt is the "underlay," which is rolled out on the family table or outside on the ground if that is where the story is told and heard. Unroll it from your right to left and lay the plaques on the felt in the same way so they can be "read" from left to right by those gathered to watch, listen, and wonder. This material, like the others described in this book, is available from Godly Play Resources, which is part of the nonprofit, Godly Play Foundation. You can learn more about training and resources from the website www.godlyplayfoundation.org.
The rectangular pieces of wood represent light, water, dry land, day and night, the creatures that fly and swim, the creatures that walk upon the earth, and finally a day to rest and reflect on all the gifts of creation. This material is a smaller version of the Godly Play presentation, "The Creation," which has been adapted for the home and for use outside in nature. If your children are in a Godly Play program, the materials described in this book will be familiar but not too familiar, since they are smaller and the presentations are woven together with family stories.
We will talk more about the leader as this book develops, but for now it is enough to say that the leader needs to be informal and relaxed to invite wonder and yet be clearly in charge so the experience is a safe place where thoughts can be freely expressed. A rich sense of humor helps make this possible.
The leader participates in the story, but also supports the responses at the end of the presentation about the family's experiences of nature and their meaning. Some family members need to be coaxed a little to take part while others need to be toned down so they don't dominate the wondering. When the energy begins to decline in the wondering, the leader closes "the storying" while everyone is still interested. Everything is put back in the box and the "Amen" is said.
Let's now take a look at the specific actions and words that make up the telling and hearing of this story of God. It is always good to remember that what is done and how it is done are as important as what is said. This is why the "movements" are placed first in the script at the left.
The "Amen" brings the presentation to a close.
You have now experienced what it is like to tell a story of God and invite your family to take part in it. We will have more to say about telling and hearing stories in the next chapter. To close this chapter let's talk just a bit more about children and adults experiencing the Creator in nature, since that is what this story of God is about.
Experiencing the Creator in Nature for All Ages
Children and adults experience God in three major ways. God comes to us from beyond as the Creator. God also comes from beside us as Jesus, whom we read about in the Gospels and know by experience, as the apostle Paul did on the road to Damascus in the first century. God also comes from beside us by shining through our fellow creatures. The third way God comes to us is from within as the Holy Spirit. We know God in these three ways all the time, no matter where we are or whether we are paying attention or not. The Holy Trinity is always with us informing us who we truly are.
There is a broad developmental map for knowing the Holy Trinity. Children are especially good at knowing God as the Creator through their absorbing of God's presence in nature. Adolescents and young adults often prefer reading about and debating the meaning of Jesus' life and death. Middle and older adults tend to know God from within, because it often takes a long time for the rich awareness of one's deep identity as a creator in God's image to become conscious in an integrated way. Still, these developmental tendencies do not always hold. All ages and types of people can know God in any or all of these three ways at any time, because the only limit to God is that God is unlimited.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Stories of God at Home"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Jerome W. Berryman.
Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Story of God's Creating: The Creation 1
How Stories Make Meaning
A Child's Experience of Nature and Its Implications for Adults
"Storying" the Creation
What to Do and What to Say
Experiencing the Creator in Nature for All Ages
Conclusion
2 The Story of God with Us: Christmas 21
A Story about the Importance of Stories
"Storying" Christmas
What to Do and What to Say
Conclusion
3 The Story of God's Re-Creative Love: Easter 41
The Questions Easter Asks
"Storying" Easter
What to Do and What to Say
Conclusion
4 The Story of God Creating from Within: Pentecost 63
The Origin and Complexity of Pentecost
"Storying" Pentecost
What to Do and What to Say
Missing the Point about Pentecost
Conclusion
5 The Story of God's Caring and Creative Presence: The Good Shepherd 85
The Strangeness and Relevance of Stories about Sheep and Shepherds
"Storying" the Good Shepherd
What to Do and What to Say
Christianity as Grounded Openness
Conclusion
6 The Story of Our Wholeness with God: The Liturgical Circle of the Church Year 105
The Center and the Circumference
"Storying" Our Circle of Wholeness with God
What to Do and What to Say
Integrating God with God's Image
Conclusion
7 Stories about the Stories of God 121
Home and a Sense of Place (Creation): The Wind in the Willows
The Sense of Wonder (Christmas): Frederick
Re-Creative Love (Easter): Charlotte's Web
Becoming Real (Pentecost): The Velveteen Rabbit
Caring and Generosity (The Good Shepherd): A Christmas Carol
Balance and Wholeness (Circle of the Church Year): The Clown of God
Conclusion
8 What to Do When You Don't Know What To Do: Being Ready for Family Challenges 135
The Story of a Family Challenge
"Speaking Christian," Gifts, and Gratitude
Getting in Touch with the Gift of God's Image
The Great River of God
Conclusion