Fifth Sunday of Lent, April 6, 2025
Andi’s birthday
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Birthday
See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?
We have been watching video from 37 years ago, watching Andi in play therapy with her teacher from Illinois State University, learning to trust her body and trust her mind. Later we’ll watch video from 30 years ago, when Andi spent part of her grade school years with her favorite teacher, Mrs. Rainer. After school we often brought our black dog Bear to school so the kids could pet him and play with him. Andi was so proud.
It’s so good to look back on those days and appreciate how much has happened since. Isn’t that what family movies are for?
Andi became a superb student and then an even more excellent teacher. Reading Jacques Maritain’s thoughts about the stages of education, I think of Andi and how so much of what he says sounds just right:
The child’s mentality tends by itself toward magic, and whatever effort the teacher may make, his teaching always runs the risk of being caught and engulfed in a magic ocean.
It is by virtue of the allure of beautiful things and deeds and ideas that the child is to be led and awakened to intellectual and moral life.
The vitality and intuitiveness of the spirit are quick in the young child and sometimes pierce the world of her imaginative thought with the purest and most surprising flashes, as if her spirit, being not yet both strengthened and organized by the exercise of reason, enjoyed a kind of bounding, temperamental, and lucid freedom.
The quality of the mode or style is of much greater moment than the quantity of things taught, it constitutes the very soul of teaching, preserves its unity and makes it alive and buoyant.
Our favorite teachers, led by Mrs. Rainier at Martin Luther King Elementary in Urbana, bring these thoughts to life. When the “magic ocean” engulfs a child, the teacher jumps into the waves as well. Noticing beauty and calling it out, whether in the nature of trees and flowers or the human nature of one child with another, a teacher turns the face of a bored child up to see the sky. And can you imagine, or remember, how great it feels when in your own “bounding freedom” you are joined by an adult companion, who encourages your spirit to ever greater heights?
Reading, writing and arithmetic, together with competence at playing her flute, together with more and more creative and beautiful art, allows Andi to teach the children in her art classes something of what she knows about making things, noticing and naming their beauty, and feeling the pride of a creative spirit.
And of course there have been babies in Andi and Aki’s life. A new baby, Finn, passed his one month birthday on Monday last week. Andi has been showering her Tinybeans account with pictures of two boys loving on the third. Coochie, coochie coo! It won’t be long before Finn is laughing along with Miles and Jasper, and then they will tickle each other and laugh harder yet.
For Andi, there’s so much to do all the time. I think of what Brother David Steindl-Rast said, “Leisure is not the privilege of those who have time, but rather the virtue of those who give to each instant of life the time it deserves.” When we visit and Margaret holds Finn, Andi gets busy with everything else, because all the rest of the time, she carries Finn around in his sling, close to her heart. Close to God’s heart, too.
This is the most peaceful, contemplative time in her life. Ron Rolheiser wrote about her, and all mothers, in a book he called Domestic Monastery: Creating A Spiritual life at Home. “The mother home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. And her constant contact with young children gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild and learn empathy and unselfishness.”
I put water in the desert and rivers in the wasteland for my people to drink, the people who I formed for myself, that they might announce my praise.
(Ezekiel 47, Psalm 46, Psalm 51, John 5)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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