Teaching Forgiveness With Grades 2-3 →

Moral Tales is another Tapestry of Faith program, built around stories, developing character and ethics with the children in grades 2-3. This particular session also works now, in the month of Elul, and offers a wonderful wisdom tale that also can be adapted for worship. Inscribing the good we experience in stone and the bad we experience in sand moves us into a conversation on attitude and attention, but also about justice. Are there difficult experiences that should not be written in sand? Where are the heartening experiences among the difficult? Given how challenged so many of us — across the life span - around forgiveness, making amends, and merciful justice, these are stories and questions for all of us.

5 Smooth Stones of Liberal Religion (for children)

I appreciate James Luther Adams’ complex and rewarding essay on the five smooth stones of liberal religion. I translated it into a simplified form for use in adult programming, but then that still didn’t pass the five-year-old-test.

I’d like us to be able to use the five smooth stones in our classrooms and at home, as part of living this Unitarian Universalist faith. Adams was thinking about the tradition of five stones David needed to slay Goliath - mythologically, bringing down our own towering monsters of (1) ignorance, (2) individualism, (3) selfishness, (4) apathy and (5) cynicism.

1. We’re always learning.

2. Being together matters.

3. How we are together matters.

4. We have to do good to be good.

5. We always hope.

With these stones we build cities of refuge, houses of love, and gardens of peace.