Religious Education in the Family Part 7

Perhaps some will say, this is not religious education, it is everyday training. Yes, it is "everyday training," but it is the training of a religious person with the religious purpose of habituating the child to give his life in service to his world. That is precisely what we need--_religion in everyday action_. The atmosphere and habitual att.i.tude and conversation of the family must be depended on to give a really religious meaning to these everyday acts, to make them as religious as going to church, perhaps more so, and so to make them a training for the life that is religious, not in word only, but in deed and in truth.

Whatever we may say to children on the subject of religion, whether directly or in teaching by indirection through songs and wors.h.i.+p, must pa.s.s over somehow into action in order to have meaning and reality. It must be realized in order to be real. The difficulty that appears is that of connecting the daily act with its spiritual significance. Yet that is not as difficult as it seems. If the act has religious significance to us, if we form the habit of really wors.h.i.+ping G.o.d with our work, seeking in it to do his will, the child will know it. We cannot keep that hidden. The spiritual life will never be more real to the child than it is to us, and no amount of moralizing or spiritualizing about our acts or his will give them religious significance.

At least one person will testify that, after being brought up in a really religious home, the most strikingly religious memory of that home is an occasion when he delightedly carried a tray of food to a sick neighbor. It was doing the very thing that he longed to do, realizing the aspiration that had been unable to find words or form before. So the life of action can be steadily trained by acts of kindness. Habits are acts repeated until they pa.s.s from the volitional to the involuntary.

The only process we can follow is steadily to train the children in the willing and doing of the right, the good, and the kindly deed, until it becomes habitual. Let the child prepare the tray of delicacies, pack the flowers we are sending, carry them over if possible, at least have a share in all our ministries.[12]

The modern Sunday school recognizes the importance of activity in forming religious character; therefore it plans and organizes social activities for students to carry out.[13] The parents ought to know what is designed for each child in his respective grade and to plan to co-operate with the school. Where the family unites in the forms of service suggested for the children, these activities lose all perfunctoriness and take on a new reality. Social usefulness becomes a normal part of life.

Do we remember the best times of our childhood? Were they not when we were doing things? And were not the best of these best times when we were doing the best things, those that seemed ideal, that gave us a sense of helping someone or of putting into action the best of our thoughts? That is the chance and the joy our children are longing for, and that joy will be their strength.

-- 4. RELIGION IN SERVICE

The family has excellent opportunities for developing through its own activities and duties the habits of the religious life. Children may acquire through daily acts the habit of thinking of life as just the chance to love and serve. Service may become perfectly normal to life.

Our modern paupers, whether they tramp the highways or ride in private cars, came usually out of homes where the moral standard interpreted life as just the chance of graft, to gain without giving, to have without earning. Parental indulgence educates in pauperism. Let a boy remain the pa.s.sive beneficiary of all the advantages of a home until he is sixteen or eighteen, and it will be exceedingly difficult to convert him from the pauper habit.

The hard task before parents is to save their children from the snare of pa.s.sive luxury. Perhaps, remembering our toilsome youth, we seek to s.h.i.+eld them. It is a serious unkindness. It is a wrong to our world. The religious mind is the one that takes life in terms of service, sees the days as doors to ways of usefulness, girds itself with the towel, and finds honor in bending to do the little things for the least of men.

Vain is all family wors.h.i.+p, all prayer and praise and catechism, unless we train the feet to walk this way so that they may visit the imprisoned, clothe the naked, comfort the sad, and cheer the broken in heart. The family may make this the normal way to live.

If the family would train boys and girls who shall be true followers of the great Servant, it must stand among men as a servant, it must see itself as set in the community to serve, and by habits of service and helpfulness, by its whole social tone, it must quicken in its own people the sense of social obligation and a realization of the delight in self-giving. A home that is selfish in relation to other homes, in relation to its community, can have no other than selfish, antisocial, and therefore irreligious children. The first step in the welfare of a child is to see that the home which const.i.tutes his personal atmosphere is steeped in the spirit of good-will toward men.

The whole att.i.tude of life is determined by the thought-atmosphere of the family. The greedy family makes the grafting citizen. The grasping home makes the pugnacious disturber of the public peace. Greater than the question whether you are a good citizen in your relation to the ballot box is the one whether you are a cultivator of good citizens.h.i.+p in your home. No amount of Sunday-school teaching on the Beat.i.tudes or week-day teaching on civics is going to overcome the down-drag of envious, antisocial thought and feeling and conversation in the home.

Home action and att.i.tude count for more than all besides.

It is equally true that no other influence can offset the salutary power of a truly social home, that the easiest, most natural, and effective method of teaching social duty and unselfishness is to do our whole social duty unselfishly.

-- 5. FAMILY TRAINING FOR SOCIAL LIVING

The supreme test of the religious life here is ability to live among men as brothers and to cause the conditions of the divine family to be realized on earth. If we can realize that the purpose of Jesus was to bring men into the family of G.o.d, that the aim of all religious endeavor is the family character in men and women and the conditions of that family in all society, we must surely appreciate the possibility of the human family as a training school for this larger family of humanity.

The infant approaches social living by the pathway of the society of the family. We all go out into life through widening circles, first the mother's arms, then the family, the neighborhood, the city, the state, the nation, the world-life. Each circle prepares for the next. The family is the child's social order; its life is his training for the larger life of nation and human brotherhood.

Just how men and women will live in society is determined princ.i.p.ally by the bent of their characters in the social order of the family. Their att.i.tude to the world follows the att.i.tude of the family, especially of the parents. They interpret the larger world by the lesser. The home is the great school of citizens.h.i.+p and social living.

All the moral and religious problems of the family find a focus in the purpose of preparing persons for social living. The family justifies its cost to society in the contribution which it makes in trained and motived lives. As a religious family its first duty is to prepare the coming generation to live in a religious society, in one which will steadily move toward the divine ideal of perfect family relations through brotherhood and fatherhood. Its business is not to get children ready for heaven, but to train them to make all life heavenly. Its aim is not alone children who will not tear down the parents' reputation, but men and women who will build up the actual worth and beauty of all lives.

The realization, in the family, of the purpose of training youth to social living and service in the religious spirit depends on two things: a spirit and pa.s.sion in the family for social justice and order, and the direction of the activities of the family toward training in social usefulness.

Only the social spirit can give birth to the social spirit. True lovers of men, who set the values of life and of the spirit first, who give their lives that all men may have freedom and means to find more abundant life, come out of the families where the pa.s.sion of human love burns high. The selfish family, self-centered, caring not at all in any deep sense for the well-being of others, existing to extract the juice of life and let who will be nourished on the rind, becomes effective to make the social highwayman, the oppressor. From such a family comes he who breaks laws for his pocketbook and impedes the enactment of laws lest human rights should prevent his acquisition of wealth; he who hates his brother man--unless that brother has more than he has; the foe of the kingdom of goodness and peace and brotherhood.

And goodness is as contagious as badness. Children catch the spirit of social love and idealism in the family. Where men and women are deeply concerned with all that makes the world better for lives, better for babies and mothers, for workers, and, above all, for the values of the spirit gained through leisure, opportunities, and higher incentives; where the family is more concerned with folks than with furniture; where habitually it thinks of people as Jesus did, as the objects most of all worth seeking, worth investing in, there children receive direction, habituation, and motivation for the life of religion, the life that binds them in glad love to the service of their fellows, and makes them think of all their life as the one great chance to serve, to make a better world, and to bring G.o.d's great family closer together here.

I. References for Study

G.A. Coe, _Education in Religion and Morals_, pp. 142-50. Revell, $1.35.

W.S. Athearn, _The Church School_, pp. 85-102. Pilgrim Press, $1.00.

G. Johnson, _Education by Plays and Games_, Part I. Ginn & Co., $0.90.

II. Further Reading

E.D. Angell, _Play_. Little, Brown & Co., $1.50.

Fisher, Gulick, _et al._, "Ethical Significance of Play,"

_Materials for Religious Education_, pp. 197-215. Religious Education a.s.sociation, $0.50.

Publications of the Play Ground a.s.sociation.

III. Methods and Materials

PLAY

Forbush, _Manual of Play_. Jacobs, $1.00.

A. Newton, _Graded Games_. Barnes, $1.25.

Von Palm, _Rainy Day Pastimes_. Dana Estes, $1.00.

Johnson, _When Mother Lets Us Help_. Moffat, Yard & Co., $0.75.

WORK

Canfield, _What Shall We Do Now?_ Stokes, $1.50.

Beard, _Jack of All Trades_. Scribner, $2.00.

Beard, _Things Worth Doing_. Scribner, $2.00.

Bailey, _Garden Making_. Macmillan, $1.50.

Bailey (ed.), _Something to Do_ (magazine). School Arts Publis.h.i.+ng Co.

IV. Topics for Discussion

1. Is the quiet child an ideal child? How far should we go in restraining activity?

2. The relative advantages of work and leisure for children. What of the value of ch.o.r.es to you; did you do them? Describe any forms of children's service in the home which have come under your observation.

3. What forms of community service can be done by children and by young people?

4. Recall any lessons learned by activity in your early home life.

5. Give in their order, according to your judgment, the potencies for religious character in the home.