Something actually churchy to vary the current diet.
Hornington Junior School, unlike Swanvale Halt Infants, is
not a Church school and so our links with it are much more tenuous. I never
assume that I have a right, as such, even to go into the Infants School, and
there is always the possibility that the head teacher might eventually decide I
am an idiot and not want me around. So my sense of being granted a privilege is
even stronger on the rare occasions that I’m invited into Hornington Junior: lots
of our Swanvale Halt children progress there when they leave the infants, and
it’s good to be able to meet them again.
Year 3 were asking ‘What do Christians think God is like?’
in their RE class, and as their class teacher is an agnostic she decided to ask
us whether we might come in and talk to the children. I put together a little
presentation about how the ancient peoples knew what their gods looked like
because they made statues of them (the children had recently been studying
ancient Egypt so they gleefully recognised Anubis and Horus), but the
Israelites believed there was only one god and that he didn’t look like anything
at all, that he was everywhere all the time. We talked about the difference
between answering the question ‘what is X like?’ by referring to appearance or to character (not in such terms, for 7/8-year-olds), Moses and the
burning bush, the Psalms, and how meeting Jesus had changed people’s minds
about what God was ‘like’. I showed them pictures showing how people had tried
to imagine the Holy Trinity and said that if they were a bit confused by that
idea they weren’t the only ones.
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