Back-to-school Sunday

Our country—or the advertising industry—seems to have a special name for every day: Chocolate Chip Cookie Day, Love Your Dog Day, Eat More Vegetables Day, and so on. Churches have special days too, besides holy holidays, like Youth Sunday and Reformation Sunday, but I recognized one today and wondered if churches consciously name the last Sunday before school Back-to-School Sunday. The whole service had a different feel about it, an anticipatory vibrancy.

In my family I’m very aware of what our minister called the energy and buzz that surrounds the opening of school. Jacob heads into his senior year in high school, Morgan begins college at Texas Tech, and the rest continue their educational path without milestones. I am so proud of each of them and so excited to watch their progress this year. But a part of me is a bit frightened, and I pray for my family. The church service this morning brought that home to me.

At our church after summer absences, we had most ministers back and an almost full choir, a sure sign that the new year begins. The service was highlighted by dozens of youngsters, maybe pre-K to third grade, who crowded the chancel steps and the floor in front, most with their backpacks, to be blessed. Perhaps this should be called Backpack Sunday.

There they were, with a few anxious parents hovering about.  Be still my heart! It has been ten or twelve years since Jacob was in that crowd, but it seems like yesterday. And those children looked so young and innocent and vulnerable.

It suddenly hit me about those sweet youngsters—and my grands. They may not only be nervous, which the minister acknowledged, but they may be downright scared. Is this the year a shooter will visit their school? Will they survive the year? Texas has done nothing significant to protect them or control guns since the massacre at Uvalde. You can stil buy an assault rifle at eighteen with no license, no training, and only a cursory background check. Schools will have armed personnel, which may well lead to more deaths, not fewer. I suspect more than a few schools, desperate to conform to the law, are hiring untrained personnel. And more guns just mean more shooting and more chance of accidents.

There has been one special session of the legislature, at Abbott’s call, to deal with taxes, and apparently, he will call another to try once more to push through his pet idea of school vouchers, which will render public education more ineffective than ever. But no special session on guns. Legislators were busy during regular session banning books and outlawing drag queens. The argument, of course, is that we must protect our precious children. But don’t dare come for the parents’ guns! Somehow too many Texans don’t feel their children are threatened by guns, despite the numerous school shootings our state has seen under Abbott’s governance.

Abbott, whose firm hand controls what goes on in this state, is not a man known for his compassion. And he makes no exception for children. In addition to nearly turning a blind eye to school shootings, he is allowing children to be killed at the border by razor wire and by neglect on buses illegally transporting asylum seekers to “safe” cities. He has issued not one word of regret about the child’s body found floating in the Rio Grande nor about the infant that died on a bus to Chicago. He may, however, have gotten too big for his britches: assaulting asylum seekers violates the Geneva Convention, which theoretically could leave him liable for charges from the World Court at The Hague. And now, Texas twin politician brothers, the Castros, are asking President Joe Biden to halt Abbott’s forced bus trips. Abbott’s entire handling of the border violates Federal law and is now in the courts, but for asylum-seeking parents with young children, the courts move way too slowly.

You may think it’s a leap from those earnest little kids on the chancel steps this morning—some did look a bit bored—to immigrant children dying at Texas’ hands, but it’s really not. Those deaths—and pray there are not more—speak to what kind of state we live in, what kind of people we are, because we tolerate them. We elect the men and women who pass harsh laws without a trace of humanitarianism, who tolerate the far-right demands for guns, including assault rifles which no civilian needs. If we want to protect the kids at my church, where my grandson was not too many years ago, we have to protect all children. We have to extend our love.

“Three things remain: faith, hope, and love, and of these love is the greatest.”

And so, another year begins….

It was “Back to Church Sunday” at our church today, and at the end of the service, an invasion of young children poured into the sanctuary, each wearing a backpack. They crowded together on the steps of the chancel for the blessings of the backpacks. A truly wonderful sight. If you feel cynical about our old world, the sight of those bright, hopeful faces would soften your heart.

Jacob, going into eighth grade this week, is of course too old and too sophisticated to get his backpack blessed, but we all went to a Sunday-school hour program to hear about the offerings coming up this year for students from middle school through high school—bell choir, missionary trips, Sunday night snacks, day trips. Someone—children’s minister Jamie Plunkett and his assistants—had worked hard on some complicated programing.

The whole thing took me back to my high school days. I think in part the course of my adult life was determined by my close involvement with a church group. The United Church of Hyde Park, and its neighbor, the Hyde Park YMCA, were the center of my social world. We all went to church together and afterward to hang out at Thomas’ Drugstore across the street—the drugstore owners were not always thrilled but we usually had fries and cokes; sometimes we sang in the choir; we met every Sunday night, though now I’m a little vague about what we did. My first boyfriends and all my close girlfriends came from that group. The group was called something that sounded like “Tuxus”—I never saw it written out and am quite sure I have gotten it wrong. An internet search turns up no such word.

When we weren’t at the church, we were, as a group, at someone’s house. There was usually a chess game going on and lots of pizza ordered. To this day, I avoid pizza with the excuse the I overdosed on it in high school—that includes cold, leftover pizza for breakfast.

This was not my family church. That was in another neighborhood, where I knew no one. A close friend introduced me to the United church when we were young enough to be in a Brownie troop. We graduated not into Girl Scouts (though I was a Scout for a while) but into the high-school church group (there was no middle school in Chicago in those days). My parents, familiar with the opportunities for youngsters to go astray on the South side of Chicago, sanctioned my attending another church, though Dad, son of a Methodist preacher, remained loyal to the Methodist Church. I occasionally went to football games or “hung out’ with kids they deemed inappropriate, and I think they saw the church as a safe haven.

Our dances were at the YMCA— those were the days of the jitterbug, but I was too self-conscious to learn to do it –and my high-school “sorority” was a YMCA group called “Calliope,” probably after the Greek goddess who presides over poetry and eloquence. I’m not sure I can see a connection, but I had the sweatshirt to prove it.

I was in the middle of a group of what today we would call nice young people. They were by no means goody-two-shoes, but they knew where and when to draw the line. And at that age, group acceptance is so important—especially for someone with my shy, wallflower tendencies. I was part of the group, though strangely one of the youngest and shortest, and I was happy. I had no need to look beyond my world for thrills or new experiences.

Jacob has his own group, a bunch of good boys from elementary school. In middle school, he’s branched out a bit in friendship but some of those boys are still the core of his social life. He is not as comfortable with the church kids, because he only knows a few of them, and as I looked at a gaggle of girls and boys today, I realized that I didn’t recognize any of them. A few others, like Jacob, sat quietly with their parents.

I wish for Jacob, and for all my grandchildren, as rich a high school experience as I had. It’s served me in good stead over the years. I’ve been saddened as word came of a death here and there of someone who remained forever young in my mind, and I occasionally wonder the familiar, “Whatever happened to….” But I am still in touch with two of the girls and what they say about old friendships is true—they are gold.

I drove by the church a few years ago when my children and I were in Chicago, and I was surprised at how small it looked. I wonder if the Fellowship Hall still has that wavy floor and the balcony around the edge with Sunday school rooms off it. ah, the memories.