May 2005 - Page 3

Easter at Allen’s Neck Meeting

April 2005


Sunrise At Barney’s Joy Beach	Jim flips the pancakes for Brunch	Diane, Mike and Peter help themselves.

Letter from Dawn and Steve

We are so grateful to everyone who helped with the First Day School during January and February while we were gone. We have heard wonderful things about those eight weeks and we are only sorry that Jack did not get the chance to experience it! Special thanks to Debbie and Heather for overseeing the classes and for making sure that everything ran smoothly.

For the past four weeks in First Day School, we have been reviewing the four queries which we have explored with the children over the course of the year. Those queries are;

What is God?
Where is God?
How can I find God?
What does God want me to do?

Each of these will be a section heading in the books the children have been making. They have been designing chapter pages, writing the queries at the top of the page , and then writing their individual answers underneath. We will begin to put their books together next month, to bind them and complete them.

What Steve and I have been struck by is how deeply the children seem to be grasping the queries, and how engaged they are in gathering and voicing their answers. The children clearly understand how ‘silence,’ ‘listening,’ ‘the light within,’ ‘being kind,’ ‘helping others,’ ‘love,’ ‘prayer,’ are all ways of coming to understand God, of approaching God. When we pose a query at the opening of a class, each child seems to have several thoughts, several answers, which they will speak aloud. I notice there are some answers which are common, shared. There are others which are more personal and individualistic.

What is most exciting for me, however, is that I can feel how eager the children are to explore this question, this concept of ‘God.’ in direct terms. As a result, I hope, they will not see "God" as some abstract, remote, hard-to-approach concept, but as an experience of being which is intimately linked to concrete positive actions, including simple kindnesses, in their own lives. The queries I feel are what allows this to happen. Posing the question allows each child to evolve his or her own understanding of what God is, and to explore, in his or her own way, how to be in relationship with that God.