The Shekinah Gory:

The Dangers of Worshipping and Other Reasons to Keep Children Close

Contrary to most assumptions, a person can drown in a puddle. You only need a little bit of water to drown the old self and that is why we had a shallow, open baptismal font in the center aisle of our church. It was pretty basic: a glass bowl tucked inside a wooden pedestal. Some churches use a font that remains covered all the time. These fonts are often placed near a back wall, where they safely stand their ground until we bring them front and center as needed. This story is not about that kind of font.
This story is about a font that stood right in the middle of everything, like a birdbath—always open for business of one kind or another. Whenever the congregation processed toward the altar rail to receive communion they peered into it or poked the waters with their fingers. I hadn’t worked for the church long before I saw a four year old dip his hand in and then straighten his eyebrows with the holy water on his fingertips. Parents carrying babies walked carefully around it on their way to sit on the altar steps for children’s word. I once tripped on the shaggy rug underneath, nearly falling right in, face first. There was even an incident involving junior high girls washing their faces in it during an overnight youth event.
This font and its big brothers (one medium and one large horse trough brought out and filled with warmed water for full submersion baptisms) were in constant use. There were lots of babies and even grown ups cycling through preparations to drown in front of God and everyone—Alleluia! The fonts were always there and always ready.
Late in Lent 2010 the pastoral staff realized that despite our best efforts some of the babies just weren’t ready for baptism at the Grand Easter Vigil that year. It would be the first time, in a long time, that we would simply affirm baptisms rather than perform them at this annual celebration. We were saddened a little, but only because we loved seeing the shock on a child’s face before the plunge. We loved watching a grown man rise drenched and happy as we sang and rang in the new member of our family. This year the shallow font would stand stalwart and lovely as ever, not to be used for baptism proper, but as a reminder that we had all been washed—Alleluia just the same!
We continued the usual preparations for a raucous and holy celebration of resurrection. The grown up choirs learned a song in ancient Hebrew and a Spiritual that brought tears to our eyes even during rehearsals. The children’s choirs learned a special dance. During rehearsals the older children partnered with the younger to hold hands, they wound themselves around the edge of the sanctuary and danced up the aisle. They raised their little hands, turned around and around, stepped lightly forward, and then carefully high-fived …the whole lot enjoyed themselves immensely as their beloved director gently corrected any missteps.
During one such rehearsal, just as I ushered the younger children into the sanctuary to join the dance, we heard a loud bang. I instructed the children to halt and we stood as still as we could to asses the damage. It wasn’t an explosion in the kitchen or a falling beam from the ceiling. The roof hadn’t caved in, as we might have thought from the volume of the boom. Instead, we saw the wooden pedestal of the baptismal font lying on its side like a felled tree and all around, sprayed out evenly across the carpet were tiny shards of glass. The bowl that had held the Holy Water had shattered and spread like diamonds thrown at the foot of the processional cross.
During the dancing one of the older girls had bumped the font and accidentally pushed it over. She cried from the scare, wounded only in spirit, not in flesh. The pastor scooped her into his arms as the children and I stood watching him calm her. We listened silently to him explaining that it is really all right, just an accident. Her tears were pouring out as a testimony to her love for the font and respect for the worship space. She sat in the lap of her pastor soaking up the truth that she is wholly forgiven. There were only four adults in the room with upwards of thirty children ranging in age from five to twelve… and thousands of shards of broken glass.
I’m sure it comes as no surprise that I have been warned that the sanctuary is not a good place to bring children to dance. And obviously I was worried for the children to be so close to the dangerous remains of the font. But in this moment the warnings and worrying were all for naught. Our attempts to protect our children from their own frailty, the sharp shards of the truth and the danger of dancing at the water’s edge were muted by the thunder of the falling font in which most of them had already been drowned.
Alan Hirsch writes in The Forgotten Ways Handbook about the rabbinical teaching that explains “a cosmic crash in which God’s glory was scattered into myriad sparks and caught up in all created matter.” He explains that this metaphor urges us to respond to creation in such a way that God’s glory (The Shekinah) will be loosed from it’s locatedness within each created thing, and that The Shekinah might explode all around us. If Hirsch is right, if this is really what the Rabbis taught us, and what God hopes for us, then safety is little more than an illusion anyway. God’s explosive, gory glory has always threatened to engulf each human ever exposed to it… just check the Old Testament for hearts that won’t stop burning and faces that won’t stop glowing.
Since the falling font incident I have begun attending a different church with a font of a seemingly safer kind: covered and stowed—not out of view, just out of the line of fire, so to speak. In this new church children are swept away to a safer more comfortable Sunday School room before the prayer concerns and sermon are spoken. But Hirsch hints that glory finds a way to wreak holy havoc on leaders and followers alike in spite of safety precautions. And that begs the question: if there is no way to protect our children should we attempt to send them somewhere safer while the adults continue with worship? Should they be excused from sitting in oversized pews against which they always bonk their giant heads? Maybe they should be excused so they can avoid a parent’s scornful glances lest they misbehave.
I work with parents of all kinds who want to sit still and undisturbed for a few brief moments during Sunday morning’s liturgy. Sitting through an hour-long service with their children is their worst nightmare. They want their children to be cared for elsewhere while they pray, sing and listen “in peace.” This may not seem like a scandal waiting to happen; perhaps Bonhoeffer’s Ethics doesn’t cover this subject directly, perhaps this dilemma doesn’t involve sexual misconduct or gross negligence but it is a hot topic nonetheless. It is a real problem because it is on every congregant’s mind and every pastor’s list of problems to solve and if its not, it should be.
To the chagrin of many parents I argue that the invitation we extend to all God’s children must be extended to the least of these. Hirsch writes that if we want to call ourselves “Missional” we will serve everyone and share everything as the apostles did and so we must dig deep in the treasure chest of the past. Hirsch reminds us that the churches in ancient Rome were not given over to Youth Groups, or Sunday School classes aligned with Public School grouping methodology. They worshipped together and so must we. When we allow parents to protect their children from the wilds of worship, when we teach parents to protect themselves from their disruptive children we may be allowing them to treat their children and subsequently any encounter with the Shekinah as optional. When we usher our children from the worship space we are passively communicating to parents and children alike that one ought to be comfortable in order to worship.
To exile our children so that worship becomes convenient, restful and well-ordered is to deny that the glory of God is threatening to explode from within each of us. Throughout his text The Practice of Adaptive Leadership, Ronald Heifetz, et al. encouraged leaders like me to do the difficult work of discovering what is most important and this is it. And so, I am compelled by Heifetz’ argument to point out that I am passionate about the presence of children in worship. As a result, I often wonder (silently, to myself) if we are no better that the Babylonians who dashed the heads of the Hebrew children against the rocks because that is what exile can do to the children of the church.
Leadership in the church must make space for rest but we also must make space for worship—messy, dangerous, life-altering worship. We may not be able to make worship safe and comfortable, but since when is worship supposed to be safe or comfortable? Worship is always a sacrifice. The sanctuary is meant to bring us into a worshipful context. It is not meant to protect us from all harm or alarm. A child may never have to consciously confront the threat of Holy Baptism but she will have to confront death and danger. The story of the shattered font demonstrates that leaders in the church can bring entire families into the worship space in a way that prepares even the youngest hearts and minds for just such confrontations. If we do our job, the families in our care will be better prepared to recognize God the next time they come face to face with the overwhelming Shekinah.
Of course I’m not encouraging the church to expose children to unnecessary danger or disruption. I am instead insisting that church is not always safe, convenient or comfortable. Glass shatters, candles burn, wood and stone surround tender bodies. And this is precisely why we must keep our loved ones close to us. We don’t keep our children or exile our children in order to protect them. We do so to encourage them to worship and to see God’s glory in myriad forms—especially when it all seems to be exploding into countless pieces all around us.