Worshipping with Our Children

by Matushka KATHRYN LOS TEKOSIS

Maybe sundays used to be your favorite day; you attended your local church, perhaps sang in the choir, and got through the Liturgy mostly without distractions. You generally had a good feeling about your spiritual state and considered yourself to be a pious and attentive worshiper. Enter children: After a sleepless night, you're arguing with your kids about their church clothes, trying to get them to stop fighting on the way to church, arriving late, and spending most of the service keeping them in line. People are distracted by your kids' commotion, and you're feeling like being there is pointless because you're not praying anyway. You know you cannot manipulate your kids into wanting to be in church by using threats, bribes, time-outs, or corporal punishment.

It's time to take a step back and begin to change your perspective. Repeat after me:

It's important to remember that in the Orthodox Church, children, even infants, are considered full members. Unlike other religious traditions where children are received at a certain age, or conveniently tucked away at Sunday School during the service, our Orthodox Church teaches that children are equal to adults in their participation in the Sacraments, in their souls’ longing for Christ, and in their potential for holiness. This understanding will help us as parents to simply treat our children as we would any "special needs" worshippers.

We've all had experiences worshipping with adults who have special needs: those who are wheelchair-bound, blind, or deaf; those who can't stand for long or are sensitive to loud sounds or clouds of incense. Our children are not yet fully developed; they have short attention spans, cannot keep the fast, need frequent bathroom breaks, and lack fine motor skills and spatial awareness. Let's extend the same kindness to our children for their developmental "shortcomings" as we do towards any adult in the church.

Furthermore, it’s good to remember that our children are not extensions of ourselves. Each person is unique and precious in the eyes of God. As they grow, they will develop their own relationship with Him, and eventually will choose whether or not to keep the faith. We parents can bring them to church and guide them but we must allow them to experience and grow in the faith separately from us. When our ego is tied up in their behavior and "performance," we cannot be free to really help them on this journey.

Participating in services looks different for parents than it did BC (before children). Our worship is more active physically, and more sacrificial. As in all the other hours of parenting, we learn to grab small opportunities for prayer as they arise; it could be in the car, during a nighttime feed, or while washing dishes. In church it’s harder to quietly participate in the service, but we can strive for a prayerful attitude while we're there. For some this means singing along while holding a squirmy child, while for others it means maintaining inner peace instead of reacting angrily or punitively when our child is challenging. Perhaps it means inwardly saying the Jesus Prayer as we escort our child to the bathroom for what seems like the hundredth time.

Our offering to God and the community is our diligence in attending services and practicing patience and forgiveness. During the intense parenting years, our actions speak louder than our words. We may say we love being in church and demand that our children join us, but if it's a place where they only experience us being angry and mean-spirited, they won’t want to be there. We may preach about the spiritual benefits of fasting, but if we are miserable and complain often during the fasts, this is the association our children will make. We lead by example. If we want to raise kind, generous, compassionate people, we parents need to cultivate these qualities in ourselves. This isn’t contradictory to setting boundaries for behavior in church. Our children look to us for guidance and we can model appropriate behavior as well as peacefully communicate it, in an ageappropriate way.

Before children began enriching our lives, Sunday was the day we could worship in church, socialize at coffee hour, and enjoy a PLN (post-liturgical nap). Nowadays Sunday looks different; as the PLN fades into a sweet, distant memory, it’s time to embrace new family traditions. Let’s renew our excitement about our faith and bring this energy to church as we attend with our children. They gift us the wonderful opportunity of seeing the church through a different lens. Our children’s view is fresh, pure, and full of wonder. They are not fatigued, burdened, and conditioned as we adults sometimes are, and can approach the services with simplicity, soaking up God’s presence with all their senses. Let’s shed the expectations of quiet worship and uninterrupted conversations at coffee hour. Our children are welcome and belong in the church community. We can learn so much from each other; old and young can practice tolerance and forgiveness, and the nuclear family can bask in the warmth of the community it so desperately needs.

Re-adjusting our perspectives and embracing our current circumstances will save us much angst. Accepting our circumstances, and facing them with bravery and humility, will provide our children with a healthy understanding of what it means to lead a Christian life.

Matushka Kathryn Los Tekosis is a doula and the wife of Panayiotis Tekosis, a priest at Holy Theophany Orthodox Church in Colorado Springs, Colorado.