Religious Education in the Family Part 20

This is the period when ideals begin to give direction to the hitherto undirected activity of childhood and youth. Young people are idealists.

They see no height too giddy, no task too hard, no dream too roseate, and no hope unattainable. If the times are out of joint they believe they were "born to set them right." Whatever is wrong or imperfect they would take a hand in setting it right. We know we felt that way, but we are loath to believe our children also cherish their high hopes. And so the tendency of the adult is to treat with cynicism the dreams of youth.

Often we sedulously endeavor to pervert him to our blase view of the world; we would have him believe it is a fated heap of cinders instead of an almost new thing to be formed and made perfect. In the home those ideals must be nourished and guided. See that at hand there are the songs and essays of the idealists. Give them Emerson and forget your Nietzsche. Renew your own youth. Get some of Isaiah's pa.s.sion and let it breathe its fervor on them. Feed by poem, song, story, essay, and conversation the life of ideals.

Stop long enough to see the life that like an engine with steam up is surely going somewhere and help it to find an engineer. We call this the period of sowing wild oats. Wild oats are simply energies invested in the wrong places. The dynamic of youth must go somewhere and do something. Fundamentally it would rather go to the good than the bad. We know that this was true of us at that time; why should we a.s.sume less of others? Hold to your faith in youth. Fathers who with open eyes and active minds--not with sleepy fatalism--believe in their boys, have boys who believe in them.

They wait for leaders.h.i.+p. If you have dropped into the easy slippers of indifference to social reform and other types of ideal service, get back into the fight again beside this new man of yours.

They wait for friends.h.i.+p in this matter of their ideals and their service. At any cost keep open house of the heart.

They wait for a life-task. This is the period of vocational choice. It will make a tremendous difference to this life whether his work shall be merely a matter of making a living or shall be his chance to invest life in accordance with his new ideals. Shall he go out to be merely one of the many wage-earners or salary-winners to whom life is a great orange from which he will get all the juice if he can, regardless of who else goes thirsty? Or shall he see an occupation as his chance to pay back to today and tomorrow that which he owes to yesterday? as his chance to give the world himself? He need not be a minister or a missionary to make his life a ministry; he will find life, he will be a religious person in no other way than as his dominating motive shall be to find the fulness of life in order to have a full life to give to G.o.d's world.

The answer will depend on what life means to you, how you are interpreting it, and how you aid him in thinking of it and making his high choice. You will have abundant opportunity to show what it is to you--as you have been doing all along--by your daily att.i.tude; you will have abundant opportunity to talk it all over, for he will certainly discuss his trade or profession with you. The family must give to the life of the new day makers of families to whom life means a chance to realize the G.o.d-vision of the world.

I. References for Study

H.C. King, _Personal and Ideal Elements in Education_, pp. 105-27.

Macmillan, $1.50.

E.D. Starbuck, _The Psychology of Religion_, chaps., xvi-xxi.

Scribner, $1.50.

II. Further Reading

1. ON YOUTH

C.R. Brown, _The Young Man's Affairs_. Crowell, $1.00.

Wayne, _Building the Young Man_. McClurg, $0.50.

Swift, _Youth and the Race_. Scribner, $1.50.

Wilson, _Making the Most of Ourselves_. McClurg, $1.00.

2. ON RECREATIONS

L.C. Lillie, _The Story of Music and the Musicians_. Harper, $0.60.

Gustav Kobbe, _How to Appreciate Music_. Moffat, $1.50.

P. Chubb, _Festivals and Plays_. Harper, $2.00.

_Dramatics in the Home, Children in the Theater, Problems of Dramatic Plays_, monographs published by the American Inst.i.tute of Child Life. Philadelphia, Pa.

L.H. Gulick, _Popular Recreation and Public Morality_. American Unitarian a.s.sociation. Free.

M. Fowler, _Morality of Social Pleasures_. Longmans, $1.00.

Addams, _The Spirit of Youth and the City Streets_. Macmillan, $1.25.

The moving-picture or cinema presents a problem to parents; see Herbert A. Jump, _The Religious Possibilities of the Motion Picture_ (a pamphlet) and _Vaudeville and Moving Pictures_, a report of an investigation in Portland, Ore. _Reed College Record, No. 16._

III. Topics for Discussion

1. What are the reasons why young people leave home?

2. Where do the young men and young women whom you know spend their evenings? Why is this the case?

3. Mention the special needs of young people in the family.

4. What are the difficulties in maintaining the friends.h.i.+p of our young people?

5. Have you ever seen evidences of the phase mentioned as aversion to parents?

6. What are some common mistakes of treating the subject of courts.h.i.+p?

7. What are the special social needs of young people?

8. What is the religious significance of the period of social awakening?

9. What are the special dangerous tendencies in public amus.e.m.e.nts?

10. How does the social instinct express itself in social service?

11. What of the relation of "wild oats" to directed work?

12. What may be done for vocational direction in the family?

CHAPTER XVII

THE FAMILY AND THE CHURCH

If the family is engaged in the development of religious character through its life and organization, it ought somehow to find very close relations with the other great social inst.i.tution engaged in precisely the same work, the church. Both churches and homes are agencies of religious education. In a state which separates the ecclesiastical and the civil functions, where freedom of conscience is fully maintained, these two are the only religious agencies engaged in education.

As the family is the child's first society, so the local church should be the child's second, larger, wider society. The home const.i.tutes the first social organization for life, the one in which growing lives prepare for the wider social living. Then should come the next forms of social organization, the school and the church, each grouping lives together and preparing them, by actual living, for wider circles of life.

-- 1. RELATIONS OF CHURCH AND HOME

Many of the perplexing problems which arise in the family, as an inst.i.tution, in respect to its relations to the church, and as to the developing relations of children to the church, would be largely solved if we could get an understanding of the fundamental relations of these two inst.i.tutions. The inst.i.tutional difficulties occur because these relations appear to be compet.i.tive. Here is the family with its interests in bread-winning, comforts, recreations, and pleasures, and on the opposite side, making apparently competing claims for money, time, interest, and service, stands the church. That is the picture unconsciously forming in many minds. There is more or less feeling that money given to the church is taken from the family and impoverishes it to that degree, that time given to the church is grudgingly spared from the pleasures of the home, that it is always a moot question which of the two inst.i.tutions shall win in the conflict of interests.

But the family must take for granted the church as its next of kin. The home must not by its att.i.tude and conversation a.s.sume that the problems of the relations.h.i.+p of children to the church arise largely from the opposite concept, as though these were rival inst.i.tutions. We carelessly think of the children as those who, now belonging to us, are to be persuaded to give their allegiance to another inst.i.tution, the interests of which are in a different sphere. We think of the church as an independent thing and therefore feel quite free to discuss its merits or shortcomings and to criticize it if it fails to meet our standards, just as we would criticize the baker for soggy or short-weight bread; to our minds, the church is something set off in society, separate from the homes, as much so as the schools or the library or a fraternal lodge.

This thought of the church as a separate something, having an existence independent of ourselves and our families, leads us farther astray and makes yet more difficult the development of right relations between the church and the children. If the church is a thing apart we can a.n.a.lyze its imperfections as we might stand and ridicule a regiment of raw recruits. It marches by while we stand on the curb. But here, surely, is one of the simplest and most easily forgotten truisms: the church is no more than our own selves a.s.sociated for certain purposes. If the church fails in an adequate ministry for children, shall we condemn it as we would a bridge that failed to carry a reasonable load? We do but condemn ourselves. If my church is not fit to send my children to, then I must help to make it fit. Before falling back on the lazy man's salve of caustic ridicule, before taking the seat of the scornful, before setting in the child's mind an aversion to this inst.i.tution, based on my opinion, let me be sure I have done all that lies in my power to better it. True, I am only one; but surely, where so many family tables are each Sunday devoted to finding fault with the church and its services, I can find many others who will aid in at least stimulating a sense of personal responsibility for any incompleteness in the church.