Teaching Godly Play: How to Mentor the Spiritual Development of Children
160
Teaching Godly Play: How to Mentor the Spiritual Development of Children
160Paperback(Revised)
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Overview
This revised and expanded version has been redesigned to complement the eight volumes in The Complete Guide to Godly Play series. Illustrations have also been updated, and the text now better reflects the playful spirit of Godly Play. Up-to-date research in childhood development and instruction has also been incorporated in this comprehensive volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781606740484 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Church Publishing, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2009 |
| Edition description: | Revised |
| Pages: | 160 |
| Sales rank: | 873,341 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Jerome W. Berryman is the founder of Godly Play and has a wide experience working with children ages 2-18. Priest, writer, lecturer, and workshop leader, Berryman is Senior Fellow of the Center for the Theology of Childhood. He is the author of The Complete Guide to Godly Play, Teaching Godly Play, Children and the Theologians, The Spiritual Guidance of Children, and Stories of God at Home. He lives in Greenwood Village, Colorado.
Read an Excerpt
Teaching Godly Play
How to Mentor the Spiritual Development of Children
By Jerome W. Berryman, Brian C. Dumm, Leslie Dunlap
Church Publishing
Copyright © 2009 Morehouse Education ResourcesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60674-048-4
CHAPTER 1
WHY PLAY?
This book invites you to come and play. Why? Well for one thing, it's fun! The pleasure of play is one of the big reasons we mammals have continued to play over the millennia. This self-reinforcing quality is only one of play's mystifying and delightful characteristics. We also play for the experience of play itself rather than any product the action might produce. During play there is also deep concentration. Sometimes the action appears to speed up so time passes quickly. Other times it slows down so movements appear to be in slow motion when compared to ordinary time. It is also voluntary. You can't make people play. Play contributes to creativity, the learning of languages and preparing for social roles. It seems to be everywhere because it can't be confined to one kind of activity. Anything that can be done—even one's work—can be done in a playful way.
Everyone knows what play is when they do it, but no one knows exactly how to put what they do into words. Perhaps the biggest reason for this is that play is signaled nonverbally. When people say, "Let's play," they may not mean it, but the signal—a twinkle in the eye, a shrug of the shoulders, a grin or some other action—shows what is intended and can't be faked. What follows after the "play signal" becomes set aside in a different framework than the everyday world and therefore has a kind of "as-if" quality to it. For example when dogs are play fighting they know not to bite all the way down and that the "fight" can be broken off at any time with both parties wagging their tails. In this sense play is considered by some to not be real. On the other hand, there is something about play that is more real than ordinary experience. It helps us work out new solutions to old problems and become re-created—which is very real.
Books about play are seldom playful. When I re-read the first edition of this book after about thirteen years I was surprised how dry it was. What I remembered was not what had been written, but the fifteen years of fun it was based on. The classes with children and the workshops with adults were full of laughter and playful give-and-take. Only a little of that got transferred to the written page. Still, this book is intended to be as light-hearted as it is serious. The way it all began still makes me laugh out loud after almost fifty years!
HOW THIS BOOK BEGAN
In 1960 I was in my middle year at Princeton Theological Seminary. Something was missing in my theological training. What was it? Slowly I began to realize that children played no part in our theological studies. Hadn't Jesus said that we need to welcome children to know God and that we need to become like them to enter the Kingdom? My own childhood had included experiences of God's presence, which set me on the path to Princeton. How could children be left out after I got there?
This vague sense of something missing snapped sharply into focus when it was time to take the required religious education class. At last, children were mentioned! Alas, they were still a side issue. Adult education and educational theory took center stage. Children were treated like empty vessels that needed entertaining and filling up. The emphasis was on getting the doctrine right and then convincing children to believe it. No one seemed to think children might already know God and that what they needed was an appropriate language to construct their own personal meaning about that reality.
At the time I could only intuit this and could neither articulate nor advocate for it. All I could do was disrupt the class with my frustration and apparently I did that very well. Finally, I was ordered by the Dean to take a tutorial with the professor rather than continuing to ruin the class. The professor who made this creative suggestion to the Dean was D. Campbell Wyckoff. I wrote a paper for him about what I thought religious education ought to be like and that was the beginning of Godly Play, even though I had no idea then. It was still decades away from having a name.
My personal experience as I was growing up suggested that children's knowledge of God was undifferentiated and mostly nonverbal. That is what most adult mystics have said across the centuries when they tried to explain their own mature experience of God. If this is true, then what children need is not to be filled with facts or to be entertained but to learn the art of how to use the best language possible to identify their experience of God. Intuitively, play seemed to me to be the way to help children learn and practice this language and to name and express what they already know.
When children learn the language of mathematics they have already experienced adding and subtracting as they pile things up or take things away in their play. The language of mathematics helps them become more conscious of what they are doing and it gives them the power to be more flexible and orderly about such actions. Why wouldn't religious language work in the same way?
The problem is that religious language is so different from the language of science, which is the language most emphasized in schools today. Instead of the functions of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, the Christian language system has the functions of identity making (sacred story), stimulating exploration of Christian meaning (parable), making redemption available to the community (liturgical action) and opening the way to experience the presence of the mystery of God directly (contemplative silence).
My question in 1960 was "How can one teach such a strange language?" It took a decade of working in churches and schools before a method was discovered. The Montessori method was chosen as the best way to connect the child's intuition of God with the language of the church. Children could be encouraged to construct their own meaning about God by the playful interaction of their experience with Christian language, I thought.
Our family moved to Italy for a year, 1971-1972, so I could study Maria Montessori's educational approach at the Center for Advanced Montessori Studies in Bergamo. As I gained experience with Montessori education in the years that followed, I also realized that Montessori was way ahead of me. She and her followers, especially Sofia Cavalletti in Rome, had already developed a kind of Montessori religious education. That made my task easier—in theory—but it still took another twenty years of experience before the first edition of Teaching Godly Play was published. It took another fifteen years after that for this second edition to be ready.
I work slowly, quietly and carefully, but surprises come hopping like little rabbits into view all the time. One of the biggest surprises about this book is that almost nothing fundamental has changed since the first edition. The last fifteen years have confirmed what the first twenty years discovered.
This invitation to come and play is based on what Jesus said about welcoming children and becoming like them. This is a way to know God and to enter God's Kingdom. One of the most interesting things about accepting this invitation is that the memories of your own childhood will become more available to you as you work with children. This will provide a deeper foundation for Jesus' words in your own experience as well as help you gain insight into the community of children you work with.
This invitation and its consequences is why I would like to tell some stories about how the bridge was built during my childhood between the personal and undifferentiated experience of God's presence and the language of the church.
GOD AND THE "CHURCH GOD"
I grew up in a small town on the prairie of Southwestern Kansas. I could see the Presbyterian Church from my bedroom window. It was just a block away, across the street from my grandmother's house. Of course, many memories of childhood get reinterpreted as the years go by, but there are also some events that are so significant that they require continuing interpretation. I would like to tell you about four such moments in my life from about age 5 through age 10.
When I was about five years old I was staying with my grandmother. My grandfather was away so when it came time to go to sleep I climbed up onto his bed and snuggled in. My grandmother was in her bed only a few feet away. She turned out the light. I could hear the clock ticking. Suddenly the dark crowded in on me and I cried out, "I don't want to die!" I don't remember what my grandmother said, but I do remember her presence in the dark as she helped me get in touch with a larger presence, a Power without a name that I could feel. The safety of this overarching Power helped me relax. I stretched, yawned and went to sleep.
My earliest memory of church was about the same time. I know I was not very big because going up and down the stairs to the basement education rooms in our church was very difficult. I really had to stretch my legs up and down and hang on to someone's hand to manage the steps. They made a hollow, booming sound, which troubled me at first, as I clomped up and down.
In the basement there was an enormous room. Grown-ups talked and children tried to be quiet, sitting on little wooden chairs in a row. High on the wall to my left was a blue, shiny ribbon with baby cradles pinned to it. When we went to a smaller room there was a low table. We sat on one side and a grown-up sat on the other side. I don't remember how we got there or found our way back to the big room, but there were only a few children in the smaller room. I remember touching the table and watching the grown-up on the other side. She talked. I don't remember what she said, but I must have been listening because one Sunday I proudly announced to my parents, "He eats carrots for me." The laughter associated the memory with a mild sense of shame. I had said something wrong, but I still thought I was right.
My parents explained that I should have said, "He careth for me." That was the "memory verse" for the day. The meaning I had constructed about carrots, however, fit much better with the rest of what the teacher had said about Jesus. This is because one of the hardest things I had to do at meals was to eat carrots, which I hated. If Jesus would eat carrots for me I was grateful, but I had no way to explain or defend my theology of redemption at that time. Still, I was proud of the meaning I had created. It was mine and it made sense to me. After this, however, I began to lose interest in what was said in church, but I still enjoyed going there with my family. There was something special about getting dressed up, the singing, the beautiful windows, the wooden arches and all the people—including my grandparents and cousins.
One Easter, when I was about six, I remember standing in the family garden behind my grandmother's house out by the barn after church. My parents, grandmother, aunts, uncles, cousins, and perhaps others were all gathered there happily talking and looking at the little rows of green sprouts coming up through the warming Kansas soil. I can still smell the earth, sense the stirring of the warm spring winds, and feel the new growth in the air. An intuition nudged me, barely able to be worked out in words. So this is what all the "Easter" fuss is about! A fragile connection began to form between the God of Power I cried out to in the dark and the social experience of going to church. I never mentioned what I had discovered about Easter, however. It was too complicated and I wasn't sure anyone would be interested. I also didn't want to look ridiculous again.
When I was about ten years old something happened that completed the tentative bridge between the God of Power and the Church God. Two friends and I had been very disruptive in the choir during church. The choirmaster brought us all back into the choir loft after church and sat us down. He stood right in front of me and my two friends and said something like, "You boys don't have any right to destroy church for me or anyone else. I come here to find God in the scriptures and in the singing. (It was only years later that I realized he had not mentioned the preaching!) Your chatter and disrespect destroyed my worship this morning. You owe me an apology."
I may not have remembered the words exactly, but what I am sure about was that there were the traces of tears on his cheeks. I had never realized until then that what went on in church actually mattered that much. I thought it was only something that one did. I liked being there and having my Dad unwrap a mint and slip it to me without anyone seeing, but church was basically a kind of performance one dressed up for. The connection between the God of Power and the Church God now was more conscious, but it was still perplexing. The larger questions it raised probably played a large part in bringing me to Princeton to study theology and then to work out the theory and practice of Godly Play.
In 1977, some 30 years after the confrontation in the choir loft, I read Edward Robinson's Original Vision. It was based on a large study of children's experiences of God, as described by adults looking back on their childhoods. One of the chapters in his book was called "Church God." That gave me the language to better understand the gap between the God of Power and the Church God that I had experienced. Robinson and I began to correspond. One of the things we talked about was the double meaning he claimed for the word "self-authenticating."
One meaning for "self-authenticating" refers to an experience that presents itself in a significant way that "brings with it an assurance of its own reality." The other meaning for "self-authentication" was, as he wrote, "the selfhood of the person to whom the experience comes." Both the presenting and confirming aspects of a significant experience are mysterious, elusive and important. But, what Robinson was adamant about was that religion "may support this emergent self-awareness: it cannot dictate to it. No Church God can ultimately be acknowledged unless ... acceptable to this inner authority." Somehow the God of Power and the social Church God both needed self-authentication to be integrated. Play, it seemed to me, was the key to helping this get done.
THE CHURCH GOD AND PLAY
Every Godly Play class seems contained in its own environment, but that is not true. The children bring their experience of the world through the door when they enter and the spirit of play expands much farther beyond the class than might be suspected. Christians value work and responsibility, so the theme of play in theology has not been a major one. There has been, however, a strong undercurrent of respect for play and this should not be too surprising because play is so fundamental to what it means to be human. To acknowledge the strength of this undercurrent we need to spend a few moments describing it.
Play was formally identified as a fundamental human quality by the distinguished Dutch historian, Johan Huizinga. He called our species Homo Ludens (playing creatures) to contrast with the views much debated at the time, that we are fundamentally Homo Sapiens (thinking creatures) or, perhaps, Homo Faber (tool makers). His book, Homo Ludens, originally published in Dutch in 1938, not only argued that play is a basic activity for human beings, but that culture is play. In the 1955 English translation he wrote, "it was not my object to define the place of play among all the other manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bears the character of play." If play is fundamental to our nature and culture, as Huizinga thought, then it is no surprise that the community of children in Godly Play, which prefigures by analogy the community of the church, needs to be a playing culture to be authentic.
The idea of God being at play in the community of children should also be no surprise. The idea that God is at play flowed into Christianity from both Jewish and Greek sources and is associated with the creativity of God and God's creatures. The Torah begins with the idea that we are created in the image of the Creator and that this is good (Genesis 1: 26). When Wisdom, herself, is interpreted as being a child playing delightfully before God (Proverbs 8: 30) then our creative nature and our playful wisdom are bound together. When the prophet Zechariah (8: 5) tells us that when God dwells in Jerusalem old men and women shall again sit in the streets taking their ease and that the "city shall be full of boys and girls playing in its streets" then we know that play is part of the ideal community.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Teaching Godly Play by Jerome W. Berryman, Brian C. Dumm, Leslie Dunlap. Copyright © 2009 Morehouse Education Resources. Excerpted by permission of Church Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Dedication: Celebrating Thea (1941 - 2009)
Chapter 1: Why Play?
Chapter 2: Thresholds
Chapter 3: The Circle
Chapter 4: Responses
Chapter 5: The Feast
Chapter 6: Leaving
Chapter 7: How do You Know Godly Play When You See it?
Chapter 8: How to Grow as a Godly Play Teacher: Staying Close to Children
Appendix
A Brief History of Godly Play's foundational research.
The Creative Process and the Personality Preferences that Can Block Its
Flow
A Glossary of Godly Play "Jargon"
References
What People are Saying About This
"Jerome Berryman's work helps children internalize the Christian tradition, and then offers them the opportunity to use that tradition in their daily living."
— Rev. Jim Carr, Methodist Minister, San Antonio