My 5-year-old daughter most emphatically does NOT believe in “a season for everything.”
At bedtime, she gets to pick two songs for us to sing together before we say goodnight. Every night, it’s the same two songs: Jingle Bells and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.
Every night for the last two years.
If we didn’t put the Christmas movies away, along with the rest of the holiday decorations (after Epiphany, of course!), she’d probably watch them year-round. As it is, she manages to find the Christmas specials on Netflix and watch those… in July.
We’re trying to invite our kids to experience the church calendar as an alternate lived reality, as a way of moving and ordering our lives differently from the world around us. To be fair, as parents we’re only just discovering this alternate reality for ourselves, since neither my wife or I grew up in a liturgical tradition. We didn’t grow up celebrating all 12 days of Christmas; the tree was down by New Year’s Eve in my house. I never received the imposition of ashes until I was almost 30 years old.
It’s probably fairer to say that we’re inviting our kids to go on this journey of discovery with us. Which sounds great… until we come to Lent.
I don’t quite know what to do with Lent for my kids.
Advent is a relatively easy season for us to walk through as a family. There are candles to light (and, if you’re my one-year-old son, to immediately blow out).
There’s a Jesse Tree to decorate with ornaments representing the Bible stories we read each night as a family. There’s an Advent calendar to open, usually with a chocolate or miniature candy cane behind the window, waiting to be consumed.
But Lent begins with Ash Wednesday, a sobering reminder of our inevitable death.
The sight of ashes on my daughter’s unwrinkled forehead—the thought of telling her, in word and through ritual, that she is destined for the grave—it seems almost cruel.
I know… it is more cruel to pretend all is well with the world when all is most certainly not. But try locking eyes with an ebullient five-year-old and telling her “to dust you shall return.”
Surely an observance as solemn as Lent isn’t the way to keep our kids in the church. It runs counter to almost everything people say churches must do to attract and retain youth. Keep it fun! Keep them entertained! Keep it relevant!
But maybe the conventional wisdom isn’t so wise after all. A few years ago, the Fuller Youth Institute shared the findings of a six-year study on what makes faith “stick” as children transition to adulthood. Two findings in particular jumped out at me:
1. Churches and families overestimate how prepared their young people are to face the struggles that come with adulthood.
Maybe it’s because we haven’t invited them to walk through the darker valleys with us. Maybe our fear of talking with our kids about the hard things of our faith—death, denial, sacrifice—is misplaced. Maybe that’s what they really need us to share with them.
2. More than anything else, the durability of faith is determined by the degree to which young people are made to feel an integral part of an intergenerational community.
It’s not the youth group. It’s not the programming. All that stuff is great, but it’s not what makes faith stick. What makes it durable is inviting a child to share the journey with you.
To walk through the church calendar together.
To experience all the seasons of faith—Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter—together.
To talk about the hard things together.
To discover what it means to deny ourselves, to lay down our lives for one another—together.
Even to face our inevitable death, together.
This Lent, we’ll talk about the hard things as a family. We’ll consider our mortality, our frailty, our vulnerability. We will lean into the darkness rather than run from it.
Because the painful yet glorious truth that Jesus demonstrated for us is this: the only path to resurrection runs through the grave.
Lent is a time to introduce our kids to the reality of redemption: “Not yet… but.” Like Advent, it’s a time for us to linger over the brokenness of our world and ourselves, so that we might fully experience together how the rest of the story—the triumph of Jesus—really does change everything.
How do you talk with kids about the hard stuff in Lent?
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Glad you are going on this journey with your kids. We try to be honest with our kids – or oldest daughter is 4 1/2 – so I’m right there with you!
We talk about death openly with her: pets, animals we see, family members (thankfully those have been few). Two things stick it as I read your great post: she constantly tasks about her grandparents dog Ruthie who is “in the red dirt,” (her gravesite in rural Georgia where we live) and our teaching her that we are all “stardust.” Mostly, kids know about death. It’s about us being brave enough to talk about it with them.
This is great. Thank you Ben, for your words!
I have been developing resources, for our families at church, to bring home and practice together for each season for the past year and a half and it is for these exact reasons!
In my own home, my husband and I bring our girls along with us to every important thing we do, as Christians, as Priests, as Parents. We talk about it around the dinner table and at bedtime tuck-ins. It happens while we play games and at restaurants. Our faith is something we not only practice on Sundays, but in the daily moments where questions are met with our honest and wholehearted selves.
This is how we build trust within our families and with our children. Trust, so that they know we are a safe place for them to explore, question, wonder, and struggle with their faith.
I’m excited to see what else comes through this!
I agree Carol. When my kids were young ( they are now 30 and 34 years old) I worked as a Bereavement Counselor for Hospice. I, too became so aware of the need to help kids talk about the reality of death and dying and to participate in those conversations with adults. So we, too, talked about loved ones who were sick and dying, remembered their life and what they meant to us. And when they died I invited them ( their choice) to visit the funeral home with me after their death. But before we went together I always explained to them what they would see at the funeral home, whether it be a casket or urn, what other people might be doing there, etc. I remembered how scared I was of dying and death when I was growing up because my parents never talked about death with me, nor did we do a lot of sharing of stories and memories of our loved ones. It was a taboo subject. When my beloved Aunt Della was diagnosed with cancer, I realized that these open discussions about death and dying had truly made a home in my youngest son who was 8 years old at the time. At our church we used the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd for our children’s program and one of the activities they could do during their personal “work time” was to make a prayer card on which they could write a Bible verse which they liked from a lesson or had found on their own. The Sunday after my aunt’s diagnosis and during his “work time”, my son looked through the Psalms and found a verse about dying from Psalm 38:9-10 and then wrote these words to my Aunt on his prayer card, ” O Lord, you know all my desires, and my sighing is not hidden from you. My heart is pounding, my strength has failed me, and the brightness of my eyes is gone from me”. On the back he wrote: To Aunt Della. I love you. From, Josh. My eyes filled with tears when I read his words of comfort. His inspiration would become one of the scriptures we read at her funeral.
Mary, we also always talked about people we knew who had died, particularly in the pasty year in connection with All Hallows Eve (Halloween). I think it really helps to have “set” times so the conversation really does happen. Death pas part of life is included in “Table Talks on the Gifts of God” now online through the generosity of Augsburg/Fortress, http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/table-talks/. It offers 31 conversation starters with bold graphics in three sections: 1) God’s gifts through nature and senses, 2) Good News of worship and the church year, and 3) the life cycle with sacraments. A useful, easy-to-use resource.
It is so important to talk with children about death and to help them understand that no matter what happens we are never apart from God’s love. A dearly beloved niece of ours died when my second son was about 7 years old. I remember sitting on his bed, having to tell him that Kristen, who had been the focus of our prayers for such a long time, had died, and needing to explain cremation. His response, “That’s okay, Mom, we are dust and to dust we will return.” I knew that came only from what our family had done every year on Ash Wednesdays. Read more about our family’s Lenten practices here: http://www.stnicholascenter.org/pages/lent/
Thank you so much for commenting and for the link Carol! That story leaves me speechless.
Grow Christians readers, you will love the St. Nicholas Center – check it out!