This is not a confession, but I do want to say: I have a bad habit. Maybe more than one, but the one to which I’m alluding is my habit of collecting. I think it’s a habit, maybe it’s an illness.

At any rate, one thing I collect is songbooks. (Among various other kinds of books, although I’m trying to cut back.) And not long ago, I acquired a hymnal entitled We Sing of Life, published by the Unitarian publishing house, Beacon Press, in 1955. The foreword is by Sophia Lyon Fahs.

Perhaps you’ve noticed by now: a common sermon format among Unitarian Universalist speakers is that of biographical exploration: we love to point out and honor (or in some cases reassess and perhaps even subsequently vilify) historical figures from within our liberal religious traditions. To pass UU 101 you must at least be able to say the names of William Ellery Channing, Theodore Parker, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (ever notice how Berkeley street names are heavily Unitarian?). And to that list, I’d like for everyone to add another esteemed figure: Sophia Fahs.

In her foreword to We Sing of Life, Fahs writes:

“All the songs in WE SING OF LIFE are religious, using the word in a broad sense to include feelings of wonder and awe and the sensing of the intangible at the heart of all things. Some express an outreaching of sympathy and understanding to embrace a growing fellowship that binds the past to the present and the far to the near, while others express personal longings. Some of the songs symbolize by the use of the word “God” the great and all-inclusive reality that binds humanity in one family and that somehow expresses the source of all things and stands for a foretaste of possible values yet to be achieved.”

What a beautifully-stated summary of that which is “religious.” And I love it that she is writing about music. She continues:

WE SING OF LIFE expresses, more adequately than any other collection of religious songs I know of, the philosophy of religious development embodied in the New Beacon Series in Religious Education. None will find here everything he desires; but all will find beautiful song-poems, both old and new…which both children and young people will cherish and wish to remember. These are songs that alert and thoughtful children will be able to sing with honesty and enthusiasm, with all their minds as well as with all their hearts.

Minds and hearts, singing. Singing minds!

It’s an amazing hymnal. Not at all what you might expect in a children’s hymnal. I found, glancing through it, a wide variety of hymns, none of which would seem too simple or un-profound to sing in an adult worship service. It includes a reading entitled “A Pagan’s Prayer,” which we have to do as a responsive reading sometime. It includes the amazing hymn, “Once To Every Soul and Nation,” which we could sing every week as far as I’m concerned, especially in these days of warfare on the part of our nation.

Who was Sophia Fahs? She was, in brief, the pre-eminent Unitarian religious educator of the 20th century. Edith Hunter’s brief biography of Fahs on the Harvard Square Library  website gives good background. She was born in 1876, and died in 1978. During her more than a century, her journey led her from her birth in China as the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries, to studies at the University of Chicago and at Columbia, to marriage and the arrival of five children, to a re-evaluation, even while she was teaching Sunday school as a Christian teacher, of the entire foundation of religious education, which had been, until then, the teaching of Bible stories. Hunter writes:

As she hammered out her increasingly liberal theology and its implications for religious education, she found herself drawing less exclusively on the Judeo-Christian tradition and more on the natural sciences, on the religion of primitive people, and on other world religions. She had discovered that primitive people developed their religious ideas as they reacted to the natural world around them. What if today's children were allowed to express freely their reactions to the same primary phenomena -- birth and death, sun and moon and stars, dreams, shadows, wind and rain? Should not children's inescapable confrontations with and reflection on these realities be the beginning of their religious education rather than Bible stories about people of long ago and far away?

Not only did she suggest delaying children's exposure to the Bible until they were ready for history generally, but she was even suggesting that children not be introduced to other people's idea of God until they had an opportunity to begin to develop their own.

Her work came to the attention of Unitarian minister Edwin Farley, who recruited her to lead a conference on religious education for Unitarians. She taught two major points: that “we cannot give our children a growing and creative religious life--a fine religion is a personal achievement," and, secondly, that the building blocks of such a religion are a sense of wonder and a questioning mind.

She was hired, not long thereafter, to direct the Unitarian Department of Religious Education, in 1935. She set about writing a series of books to be used by religious educators. Here are two of them (which I found in an amazing stash of Unitarian books in the basement of Vintage Antiques in Petaluma): Beginnings of Earth and Sky, and Beginnings of Life and Death. These books collect stories, which Fahs retells, from world traditions, in which wonder and mystery are explored, and which do not answer, but point to, the great questions. Where do we come from? Why are we here? What happens when we die?

Again, to quote from Ms. Hunter:

In 1952, Sophia Fahs took the time from her editorial duties to write the book that presented the underlying philosophy of The New Beacon Series, Today's Children and Yesterday's Heritage, A Philosophy of Creative Religious Development. In 1965, Worshipping Together with Questioning Minds was published, summarizing her experience in "leading children in worship" (which had been the title of a booklet published in 1943, an early offering of the New Beacon Series).

Individual congregations at first greeted the new curriculum with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Many old line Unitarian churches ignored it and used the materials of other liberal, less radical denominations. But following World War II, many young parents were seeking a progressive religious education for their children and, discovering the new materials, embraced them wholeheartedly. Membership in the Unitarian churches, which had been shrinking for years, began to grow by leaps and bounds and new congregations and fellowships sprang up all around the country.

Fahs was giving shape to a dream long held by Unitarian thinkers, that religious education should, in the (1839) words of William Ellery Channing, has as it “great end” “not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own”—and hey, why don’t we just read from the hymnal, number 652: The Great End in Religious Instruction:

The great end in religious instruction is not to stamp our minds upon the young, but to stir up their own;

Not to make them see with our eyes, but to look inquiringly and steadily with their own;

Not to give them a definite amount of knowledge, but to inspire a fervent love of truth;

Not to form an outward regularity, but to touch inward springs;

Not to bind them by ineradicable prejudices to our particular sect or peculiar notions,

but to prepare them for impartial, conscientious judging of whatever subjects may be offered to their decision;

Not to burden the memory, but to quicken and strengthen the power of thought;

Not to impose religion upon them in the form of arbitrary rules, but to awaken the conscience, the moral discernment.

In a word, the great end is to awaken the soul; to bring understanding, conscience, and heart into earnest, vigorous action on religious and moral truth, to excite and cherish spiritual life.

When Fahs was 82, in 1959, she was ordained into the Unitarian ministry. In her ordination address she made it clear that she was in no way content to rest upon her laurels. She had visions and dreams as yet unrealized: she envisioned that Unitarian seminaries would educate our ministers-to-be in psychology and education; that church school would expand to three hours of art, music, dance, and conversations focusing on spiritual growth.

I find her ideas and the example of her life’s journey to be challenging. And yet, in the spirit of reassessment, I would like to speak of one “opposing viewpoint” I discovered while researching this sermon. Apparently, one of her reforms was to schedule Religious Education at the same time as the “adult” worship service, because of the developmental inappropriateness of the content of those services. I am wondering, now, if that quite holds true any longer. We certainly don’t harp on the Bible much.

True, it’s hard to imagine Alex, my 5-year-old son, sitting still to listen to Dad talk for quite this long. And yet, there is something in the back of my mind that reminds me of my own childhood experience of church, in the Lutheran church I grew up with. I attended regular services, as did all the kids, and our Sunday school took place between the two services. Sure, I remember the sermons being boring (not to mention scary: Pastor Haak was quite capable of vividly describing the suffering of Jesus on the cross). But I also remember, as I grew up, learning how to listen, so that I could take part in the dissection of the sermon that was a Sunday sport on our family’s drive home. I also carry with me to this day the incredibly beautiful sung liturgy of my childhood faith, and, if anything was ever to draw me back to that faith, it would be that music. Though I understand they don’t use it anymore. (“Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen the salvation that was prepared before the face of all people. A light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”) It’s locked in. My sister and I sang it to my mom as she lay dying three years ago.

Perhaps we need to give that gift of boredom and deep meaning to our children, along with a religious education that is developmentally appropriate. Perhaps we need to find ways to allow our children into our worship space on our terms, while still giving them the space to create their own terms. I don’t know. It’s a conversation we can have if we want to. At the very least, when we have kids (as we do) turning 12, I think they should have the opportunity to have a youth group away from service time, and be invited to worship with us if they wish. Something to consider, and I don’t think Sophia would disapprove.