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Rector's Letter November 2006 Dear Friends, Walking over Holme Hill the other day, I espied a conker and then another one. I eagerly picked them up and put them in my pocket, taking great pleasure in the feel of them. It wasn’t until I’d gone a good few paces further that I started to analyse what I was doing. Why was I collecting conkers, for heaven’s sake? I was hardly going to rush home, soak them in vinegar, tie them on strings and challenge all comers to a conker fight. We have an oak tree in the lawn already, grown from an acorn, and likely to be somewhat on the large side not too many years from now, so the last thing we need is a horse chestnut. No, I had no real reason for picking them up, I had, without thinking, merely reverted to childhood. Psychologists go on about ‘the child within’. Maturity is not quite as simple as we think. It doesn’t necessarily come with increasing years. Indeed, we talk of the elderly reverting to childhood – the last stage of man in Shakespeare’s Seven Ages of Man being like the first. Age does not guarantee maturity or wisdom. A child can sometimes be wiser than an adult. Talking to some of our young folk the other week, I was trying to persuade them that the adults in the church were not uninterested in them. They weren’t feeling hard done by, it was maybe just that the adults didn’t particularly want to get to know them. I was trying to explain that many adults were just as shy and diffident as they were – just as subject to childlike anxieties as they were, and found it difficult to initiate conversations with those they didn’t know, especially from a different age group. It all fits in with a book I’m reading that Nerys leant me entitled Post Modern Children’s Ministry. As you might gather from the title, it’s American. I wonder who first thinks up phrases like ‘post modern’? When I was at University, ‘Modern’ history started with the Renaissance. I’m not sure that’s anything to do with it, though. Anyway, the book stresses the need for adults to take an interest in the children as individuals, to get to know them in a similar way to the way they would other adults. The church needs to find ways of bringing the church family together, but not just on the adults’ terms. I dare say our current fear of falling foul of the child abuse legislation doesn’t help much. We need to learn how to keep our children safe without keeping them at arm’s length. Paul speaks about growing into the maturity of Christ. Jesus speaks about becoming like a little child. But Jesus wasn’t speaking of being childish; nor was Paul speaking of becoming old and crabbit. Personally, I think I’ve a lot to learn in both directions. Mind you, I justified my collecting of the conkers – I used them in the classrooms to illustrate something for the children! Janice |