Thank you! Wow!

Thank you! Wow!

We were completely blown away by the overwhelming expressions of support and enthusiasm for Godly Play this past week. Since reopening Godly Play Resources on April 28 the phones have been ringing off the hook and the kind words on the other end have been so encouraging and much appreciated. We received more orders in a week than we used to get in two or three months. Teresa and Connie are scurrying to get things packed up and shipped out just as quickly as humanly possible.

Thanks again for your loyal support of Godly Play Resources.

We are here to serve you.

Give us a call anytime at 620-635-4018.

Blessings, Tim Alderson
Executive Director, Godly Play Foundation
President, Godly Play Resources, Inc.

Spring

It has been a very long winter at the Godly Play Foundation but Spring has come. I am coming out of hibernation and hope to keep this site active again. Here's the latest news from the Foundation:

Godly Play Materials Available Again

Thank you for your patience. After several difficult months for all of us in the Godly Play community I am very pleased to let you know that Godly Play materials are finally available for purchase again. Starting today, you can get them directly from Godly Play Resources in Ashland, Kansas where they have been made with love and care for twenty years. Call Teresa at 620-635-4018 to place your order and she will get your materials on their way to you right away. Inquire about the current special they are offering as a thank-you gift for patient and supportive customers.

Please check out our new website godlyplayfoundation.org and check back often for ongoing development. Materials can also be ordered through this site by clicking on the materials link.

Thank you for the work you do with children. Thank you for your loyal support of Godly Play. We at the Godly Play Foundation and Godly Play Resources are committed to supporting you in this work in every way that we can. Please feel free to contact me directly anytime at Tim.Alderson@godlyplayfoundation.org to let me know how we can improve our service to you and the children you serve.

Blessings,

Tim Alderson
Executive Director, Godly Play Foundation
President, Godly Play Resources, Inc.

Stages...

In preparation for giving the Great Family story recently I was re-reading the Genesis chapters where the story comes from (always a good idea!). I noticed again a repeated phrase that has caught my attention before about Abram and Sarai's journey:

And Abram journeyed on by stages...(12:9 and 13:2) In The Message it's translated: Abram kept moving, steadily making his way...

The word "stages" has been helpful for me recently. The organization of Godly Play is steadily making its way as an organization - and we are going through different "stages".

I was reminded of a piece by Teilhard de Chardin that one of our trainers passed on to me some time ago and I often use during a core training:

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability...
and that it may take a very long time.

The whole piece by Chardin is at the end of this post. It always speaks deeply to me. I commend it to you.

I'm not sure exactly what stage we are in but I am convinced that we are steadily making our way - We're certainly not there yet (are we ever?) but we continue to journey steadily!

Organizational Update


We recently did some work with a wonderful consultant who has worked with us before. She works with non-profit organizations and helps them recognize and maneuver through the different stages of development. She helped us recognize this "formative organizational" stage we are in where we are moving from a founder based organization to a more organizational structure. She reminded us that its a bumpy ride. One of the characteristics of this stage is trying things and seeing what works and what doesn't - all the while a lot of activity is going on. It's a fairly chaotic but energetic time.

There has been a recent revisiting of some key organizational decisions. Some of the main questions we have asked are: Where is the best location to "do business"? What jobs are actually needed to do our work? How can we best spend the limited amount of money we have on these jobs? The bottom line of all of this is that the
Foundation board felt it would be best for the Foundation offices to move back to San Gabriel where they were before the move to Seattle. It is where Tim Alderson, our Executive Director lives. The Foundation offices are now back at The Church of Our Savior in San Gabriel. The Rector of the church, Michael Battle, is on the Godly Play Foundation board and the Bishop of that diocese is an ardent supporter of Godly Play so we are in good hands.

New contact information:

Godly Play Foundation
535 W. Roses Road
San Gabriel, CA 91775

toll free 877-569-8656

San Gabriel office phones:
626-872-6330 main
626-872-6331 alternate
626-872-6332 fax


We ask for your prayers as we work to facilitate Godly Play's growth and expansion and work to protect the integrity and spirit of this great gift.

As Chardin reminds us: "give our Lord the benefit of believeing that God's hand is leading us and accept the anxiety of feeling in suspense and incomplete."

We will keep moving steadily - making our way....

With you on the journey - in stages!

Caryl



Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.
And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through some stages of instability...
and that it may take a very long time.

And so I think it is with you.
Your ideas mature gradually...let them grow.
Let them shape themselves, without undue haste.
Don't try to force them on, as thought you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will)
will make you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit, gradually forming within you will be.
Give our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.

Teilhard de Chardin, S.J.
1881 - 1955

Kanuga - summer camp

I'm headed to Kanuga for the week. Candy tells me its a wonderful experience and a great place at the Episcopal Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina. I'm looking forward to being there and playing with Godly Play along with Mary Gardner. Here's the brief description of what we'll be doing.


Understanding Godly Play’s Spiral Curriculum

Becoming fluent in Godly Play is a process similar to any spiritual practice.

It involves time and experience with the core practice; learning the core stories and working (playing) with them together with children.

The enrichment curriculum* is then best added (a minimum of several years later) as an extension and deepening of the core curriculum, using it within the context of the experience and practice of the core.

This spiral journey takes not only the children to a deeper experience but the adults as well who are privileged to journey together with the children in this way. Godly Play can also become a practice for adults to make meaning in their own lives as well.

We are offering working on offering training to better reflect this process. This week at Kanuga will be a unique opportunity to experience and reflect on Godly Play on three different levels. We will be taking one core lesson and using it in these three different but connected venues. We will use one of the core stories to introduce Godly Play for those who are new to this curriculum which will also serve as a refresher to those already familiar with it. (It is always valuable to regularly ground ourselves in this core practice.) We will use the same story and extend the experience by exploring ways to deepen and enrich this practice. Using the same story once again we will invite participants in a retreat model to reflect on how to use the language of this story to name, wrestle with and make meaning of their own story

As always, Godly Play will be an experiential workshop that will invite you to go beyond theory (which you will get) and enter the experience which promises to be deeply meaningful and playful for the novice as well as the experienced Godly Play practitioner.

I'm on my way with expectancy and enthusiasm!

*this would include vols 6 and 7 of The Complete Guide to Godly Play

It's all holy ground

It's been good to be home this week after visiting Chicago, Indianapolis, New York and Philadelphia. Sleeping in my own bed and weeding my flower beds has felt quite delightful after being on the road for almost three weeks.

The Godly Play teacher training at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center in Philadelphia, was a deeply satisfying and enriching experience. Quakers from 15 different states built a circle and engaged and experienced Godly Play, substituting their unique and particular "liturgy" lessons that reflect their practices of worship and experiencing of God.

We joined the staff and visitors every morning in silent worship, sitting for a half hour in silence together. During the silence of Sunday morning worship, a woman stood and sung a simple and beautiful refrain: "This is holy ground."

Later in the day as we built a circle for the last time and got ready to say our goodbyes, we were reminded of the parable we had just worked with earlier that was also about ground - about soil.

"There once was a person who did amazing things and who said such wonderful things that people followed him and asked him about this 'kingdom' he was always talking about...and one time he answered them by talking about ground - about soil: hard, packed soil, soil with rocks, thorny soil, and good soil that was ready. And as we stood together in a circle thinking about the soil of our journey, personally, with Godly Play, and in our journey of that weekend we made the connection with morning worship: IT'S ALL HOLY GROUND - ALL OF IT!

Godly Play working groups

I am in Philadelphia after doing a core training at a wonderful hospitable church in Chicago last weekend with Susan Mallison.

I am starting a training this evening at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat center here in Philadelphia. I love the name of the workshop - "Playing in the Light - Godly Play for Quakers".

A group of Friends began a working group four years ago, meeting once a quarter to develop Liturgical (worship) stories for the Quaker tradition and practice. I joined them on Wednesday for their quarterly gathering. They have been working on a story on the Quaker testimonies (SPICE - Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality). It was an invigorating and hearty conversation. I came away envious and desirous to be in such a community that regularly and intentionally engages Godly Play practice, storytelling, reflection and listening in the circle.

I was talking to Amy Crawford, trainer in Canada, about the experience and she wisely reflected that some of the newer developing Godly Play circles - i.e. Germany, Finland, where they have had to translate and engage the stories results in a dynamic freshness and authentic wonder about this work. Amy talked about developing local storytelling guilds and learning communities. The Foundation is wanting to be more intentional about helping form continuing education resources for people who are doing Godly Play.

It has been a good reminder that I bring to the circle my own wonder and openness and comfort with the mystery of this journey.

Query: How are you, in your own spiritual practice, engaging and reflecting in ways that keep Godly Play alive and dynamic and full of wonder for you personally?

From Godly Play, An Imaginative Approach to Religous Education by Jerome Berryman (note: I think everyone who does Godly Play should re-read this book annually!)

"The key to the spoken lesson is the teacher as the storyteller. The goal of the story telling is to engage wonder, the creative process, and the awareness of our existential limits as human beings in both the speaker and the listener. This is a cooperative venture between the children and the adult teachers.
When the teacher is truly wondering, the children sense wonder in the air. It manifests itself in the playfulness present in the room. Permission and reinforcement are present to encourage it. When the teacher enters religious language with wonder, he or she shows the children by example how to open the creative process.
...The teacher’s attitude toward existential issues is also important. Experiences such as death, the threat of freedom, the need for meaning, or the unavoidable aloneness that marks us as human beings often raise the defenses of both adults and children. Awareness and permission work together to counteract such avoidance. If we are repressing the awareness of existential limits in our own lives, we will communicate that to the children. Awareness of such limits and permission to deal with them enable the children to be deeply realistic about who they are."
pp. 63 and 64

Quaker Godly Play resources:

http://www.fgcquaker.org/faithandplay/
www.quakerbooks.org (look for Faith and Play)

Spirituality of Children

I have been to Kentucky and back working on a Godly Play enrichment weekend for people who have been doing Godly Play for a long time and just want a weekend of going deep in the stories for themselves and their spiritual practice. It was so good! I have beautiful images in my mind of the verdant green horse farms and beautiful spring hills in that beautiful part of the country. I will post more about this "going deeper" in days ahead.


I have recently been putting together some resources on children's spirituality. I am aware of my own long journey in even beginning to really, really be present to children - convinced of their innate and deep spirituality.

Here are a couple of stories that have been helpful for me.

Do you have a similar story of your own? It was when I heard Madeline L'Engle's story below that I connected with an experience of my own - climbing a tree when I was five years old.

We talk about children's spirituality but it still so often is within the context of "adult measures". I wonder if someday we will look back at children in the church the same way we look back now at women in the church 100 years ago and realize how far we have come (hopefully!)

Madeleine L’Engle, From: Glimpses of Grace, p 2

One time when I was little more than a baby, I was taken to visit my grandmother, who was living in a cottage on a nearly uninhabited stretch of beach in northern Florida. All I remember of this visit is being picked up from my crib in what seemed the middle of the night and carried from my bedroom and out of doors, where I had my first look at the stars.

It must have been an unusually clear and beautiful night for someone to have said, “Let’s wake the baby and show her the stars.” The night sky, the constant rolling of breakers against the shore, the stupendous light of the stars, all made an indelible impression on me. I was intuitively aware not only of a beauty I had never seen before but also that the world was far greater than the protected limits of the small child’s world which was all that I had know thus far. I had a total, if not very conscious, moment of revelation; I saw creation bursting the bounds of daily restriction, and stretching out from dimension to dimension, beyond any human comprehension.

I had been taught to say my prayers at night: Our Father, and a long string of God-blesses, and it ws that first showing of the galaxies which gave me an awareness that the God I spoke to at bedtime was extraordinary and not just a bigger and better combination of the grownup powers of my mother and father.

And here's one more story:

From: To Leave Before Dawn by Julien Green

quoted in The Religious Potential of the Child by Sofia Cavaletti

In the course of these dim years, I can remember a minute of intense delight, such as I have never experienced since. Should such things be told, or should they be kept secret? There came a moment in a certain room when, looking up at the windowpane, I saw the dark shy and a few stars shining in it. What words can express what is beyond speech? That minute was perhaps the most important one of my life and I do not know what to say about it. I was alone in the unlighted room and, my eyes raised toward the sky, I had what I can only call an outburst of love. I have loved on this earth, but never as I did during that short time, and I did not know whom I loved. Yet I know that someone was there and that, seeing me, loved me too. How did the thought dawn on me? I do not know. I was certain that someone was there and talked to me without words. Having said this, I have said everything. Why must I write that no human speech have ever given me what I felt than for a moment just long enough to count up to ten, at a time when I was incapable of putting together a few intelligible words and did not even realize that I existed? Why must I now write that I forgot this minute for years, that the stream of days and nights all but wiped it out of my consciousness? If only I had preserved it in times of trial! Why is it given back to me now? What does it mean?