Children, Justice & Prayer: Practical Tips for the Home with Bird Treacy
Episode 121, Published 03/15/2025, Listen Here
Gain confidence with the scriptures through our weekly Bible Study - this conversation discusses the Bible Readings for the week of 03/16. Find the prayer services and upcoming reading list here.
This week on Bedtime Chapel, we welcome back Bird Treacy for another rich conversation about integrating faith into family life. Bird, a licensed Godly Play trainer, children's ministry leader and self-proclaimed "church lady," shares practical tips for helping children develop prayer habits, from creating home altars to using creative prayer methods. We also dive into ways to help kids engage with scripture, understand fairness and justice, and approach the language of fatherhood and sonship in the Gospel of John. You can read a complete transcript of this episode below.
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00:00:00 Natalie Thomas
Hello and welcome to Bedtime Chapel's weekly Bible study. I'm Natalie Thomas.
00:00:04 James Thomas
And I'm James Thomas. We are deacons in the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts.
00:00:08 Natalie Thomas
And Bedtime Chapel grew out of a shared desire of ours to support families trying to center Jesus in a post Christian world.
00:00:15 James Thomas
We offer a nightly prayer service that includes a short gospel reading. In this episode, we will be covering the readings for Lent 2.
00:00:23 Natalie Thomas
And we are back again today with Bird Tracy, who we know from our shared ministry in Massachusetts. And you've introduced yourself and shared a great deal about your experience of ministering with children in the church. If y'all haven't listened to her first two episodes, go back and check those out. But as a way of an introduction in this episode, we'd love to hear from you practical tips that you have for families.
You said you were a nanny before, maybe things you tried when you were doing childcare for integrating prayer or spirituality into their lives at home.
00:00:59 Bird Treacy
Yeah. So I have the great benefit of getting to come to this topic. As someone who so often we hear stories about the way our childhood faith backgrounds did some variety of harm or were really complicated. And I have a kind of like, neutral to really positive experience of what faith looked like at home for myself growing up.
And I've spoken about it in other contexts as being a kind of background noise. And that means creating an environment in which the adults are modeling a life of prayer and communication with God and then sort of creating these supportive structures that can accompany children in finding ways to pray that works for them.
So I think a lot about the creation of little home altars. I have a dear colleague in the godly play space who has an Instagram called Sacred Spots at home. And she build little home altars with her family. And they're always an underlay in the color of the liturgical season. And they usually have a candle and some piece of natural material.
But after that, you know, Transformers might wind up on the altar or My Little Pony. And if that is what feels important to the small humans in your home or to the big humans, then those things belong there. I also think that having access to simple prayer books, things that don't feel like they're going to be really complicated.
So like Tracy Smith's faithful families, books that have a lot of really easy to access early reader prayers, can be very beneficial. Modeling those simple sort of Amla Mot help. Thanks. Wow. Prayers really staying open to prayer, looking like a lot of different things. So art practices can be part of prayer. Prayer doesn't have to have words.
I think a lot of us have leaned into some kind of broader meditative practices. And there are a lot of beautiful breath prayers that are lovely to use with children. And a lot of these take some of that charge of the right words or the right formality and make prayer and communication with God a lot more open.
00:04:00 James Thomas
Thank you. All great tips we do have. I will, I will say, and I will credit Natalie for this. Natalie has had an altar that has traveled with you quite some distance. Right.
00:04:10 Natalie Thomas
Three or four homes.
00:04:12 James Thomas
Three or four homes. A beautiful little altar that it's always my custom to try to get something to adorn it for the holidays and the birthdays. And it's a part of our tradition as well.
00:04:24 Natalie Thomas
It's also a play toy for Steven. It's a play toy for our two small humans who have turned the Nativity set into a farm.
00:04:36 James Thomas
None of the animals could have attended Jesus because none of them have legs. But.
00:04:43 Natalie Thomas
But they're well loved.
00:04:45 James Thomas
They're well loved.
00:04:46 Bird Treacy
No, I absolutely recall some member of the Star wars world making it into the church Nativity at the parish I attended in Atlanta years ago. Yeah, anybody can show up. It's fine.
00:04:59 Natalie Thomas
There's worse theology than that.
00:05:00 James Thomas
There is. There is. You know, and I'll credit another.
00:05:02 Bird Treacy
There really is.
00:05:03 James Thomas
I'll credit the recently deceased Reverend John McGinn, who was a very important individually in my life, the parish priest of my childhood. And he was, he was big on that. And Father John passed away a few months ago. But, you know, that was a big part of his thing. People would put anything they wanted in that Nativity.
And he, you know, that was just, again, it was a theology of. It was expansive. It was expansive. So appreciative of that. Turning gears a little bit. This week we begin with some challenging readings. We pick up the week with John 5 and the Monday and Tuesday readings. This week in particular, John 5 about the authority of the Son, the witness of Jesus may be a little challenging with younger children a bit longer.
They're not written in a narrative format like much of the other gospel material. How might we prepare kids? Or how might parents help prepare or other caregivers help prepare younger folks to encounter John 5?
00:06:01 Bird Treacy
Yeah, these are some hefty readings that we get this week. They're long and a little complicated. A lot complicated. And I will say, obviously in a daily prayer format, you will simply encounter the vast majority of scripture. But there's a reason, from a formation perspective, I'm not a lectionary based, curriculum kind of person.
Because it tends to feel like we get a little concerned about attention to minutia when children are still really navigating the big messages. And so with really young children, I think passages like this, it's okay for this just to be an exercise in the patience of. It will be done soon. That by the time children are in early elementary school, you can start providing a lot more meaningful anchors in a text like this.
So you might have pre read the passage and given them particular images like, oh, they are going to be by some water in this story, or they are going to, you know, be in this field. Can you listen for the place they are and draw a picture as sort of the scene unfolds?
We have a really long conversational passage in the first part of John chapter five this week also. And that's another one where if you've got two people at hand, you might want to read it with two people as those separate voices. So that that entanglement in the text of here is Jesus speaking and here is the man who is going to be healed become separate figures rather than being deeply tangled in that text.
Because there's a lot of sort of conversational back and forth between the two of them. I also think that you can turn to some of those different sort of prayer tools. So I'm a big fan of praying in color. And one of the pieces of text that we have Here in John 5 describes the idea of Jesus as Jesus is an oil lamp.
And so if you've got perhaps an outline of an oil lamp, okay, we're going to pick colors that reflect the way this story makes us feel as we go through it to, like, color this image in. And so it's less about these narrative elements and the fact that this isn't told in such a narrative style, and more about finding points of connection, the emotional connection, a sort of visual scheme.
Coming up with, you know, some pre Googled images of this is how different artists have depicted this piece of the story. Things that can provide a physical point of access for children while you're making your way through these fairly long readings.
00:09:39 Natalie Thomas
This is so great. And as you're talking, I'm thinking, how could we incorporate some of these ideas even with our kids? And we will use this as an opportunity just to remind people that Bedtime Chapel is a resource that really is supposed to work for your family. So if it makes more sense to pause when James and I are reading the readings and for y'all to act them out or read them together or to do some artwork to take a pause at that point and discuss it.
We know some of our friends who listen have a question and answer period right after the reading to do whatever your home setting, the people in your home setting need to make this a time of joy and connection. The last thing we want is for it to be stress or frustration on the part of our younger listeners.
Now, moving on from that passage, another theme that we get in the readings of John this week and next is Jesus healing. Not just individual pain, but really systemic issues as well that keep people unwell. The healing is out of reach for a person who needs it. Authorities are upset that a person accessed healing because of a certain day of the week.
This shows up with the Samaritan woman that we read last week and will show up next week in John 9. From your experience, at what age do children begin to sense this idea that there is systemic unfairness or that systems aren't set up fairly? And how do we, as companions, meaning parents, caregivers, the church on a wider level model challenging these unjust systems for children?
00:11:29 Bird Treacy
I had a lot of fun thinking about the distinctions between how we have historically thought about fairness and equality versus equity as adults and how that impacts whether or not children are able to see sort of the systemic differences. Because children, to be clear, are very concerned about fairness. Anyone who has spent any amount of time with children has heard the exclamations of but it's not fair about, you know, any number of generally fairly trivial things like the size of cake slices.
And I think that, you know, is it becomes age 4 or 5, we're really concerned with that kind of fairness. And there's this interesting kind of line of research of late that suggests that children actually have some really innate understandings of fairness really, really early in life. And I also like to think of those videos of where parents take their twins and give one of them a cookie and the other one some carrots and they are like trying to figure out how to even out this situation always makes me think of that very early, like 18 month olds trying to figure out, but no, we're going to have the same thing and what did mom just do there?
What is this about? But in order for children to start to understand sort of systems as fair or unfair or set up in ways that have a particular kind of bias, I think a lot of that has to do with the ways in which we address some of those objections around things being fair or not fair and the difference between having your needs met and not having your needs met.
There's this model that I've seen used with elementary schoolers, and I talk about this a lot in some of my consulting work with churches when they're talking about accessibility and in their church school programs. Well, we have this problem using fidget tools, for example, that like when everyone has them and everyone is just distracted.
Well, that's because we are using an equality lens on what should be an equity problem. We need to be meeting individual need and not trying to give everyone the same thing. And the more we talk about these sort of differences, where when we say it's not fair, the question is actually about whether or not an individual's needs are met makes a big difference because children are much more likely to then look at systems in a way that recognizes that if we give them the right tools to do that, and for a long time, we as adults just simply didn't really have those tools in terms of the conversations we knew how to have.
You know, just looking at saying, you know, when are offices that provide resources open and who can get to them? Where do the bus lines run that help you get to different locations, who can get on the bus? What happens if something breaks down? What happens if the elevator doesn't work? Like systems and structures become real to children when we help name and contextualize them.
So I think it's less that there is a particular age when children start to understand system inequalities and more emphasis on a willingness of the adults around them to identify. Oh, do you see, see how that particular structure worked? That that man couldn't be healed because he would take too long to get down the stairs?
Or like when people were carrying him down the stairs, other people would cut ahead because he couldn't walk.
00:15:43 Natalie Thomas
I noticed the way that the church sometimes can avoid talking about those systemic issues. And when we, even when we pray for the poor as a collective, which I don't think that there's a negative or malice behind that prayer. But one of the things with Phoebe recently we've been praying and one of our prayers during winter has been to pray for people who have cold houses, because that makes it very known to her, what are we talking about here?
And then even to say, yeah, well, some people have cold houses because their jobs aren't paying them enough just to really break it down so that our kids can see the systems and then just say, I bet Jesus is really sad that these people aren't getting enough, you know, getting enough money to have cold houses.
Right? So in very real lived ways to bring the prayers that we're praying not just for this sort of abstract idea of the poor or poorness, whatever poverty, but to bring it into the lived experience and then help children to understand that lived experience.
00:16:53 James Thomas
And lastly, last question for this week. In this week's readings and really throughout the entire Gospel of John, there's a lot of use of the language of sonship. And Additionally, on Wednesday, March 19, we'll have the Feast of St. Joseph. And this question of this language of sonship and fathership can be complicated in a lot of places and for a lot of families and communities.
So how do we navigate celebrating sonship of Jesus and the Fathership of St. Joseph the Worker while having an expansive view of and an inclusive view of gender roles as they exist in the world around us today?
00:17:34 Bird Treacy
I found myself talking about St. Joseph and these roles recently because there is a St. Joseph Smith School near my current parish and a couple of my preschool age children attend it. And we were so we were talking about Joseph the Worker and how, what is his role as this father figure in the Gospels?
Like what, what do we remember him for in the sense of being a saint? And there's a real way in which Joseph fills a role as a really healthy model of masculinity in a world that is really heavily lacking those. And that he does so from a really complicated and risky place that to be the father in this household in which his son, the Messiah actually is, you know, the result of an angel coming and saying, you know, oh, the Holy Spirit has impregnated your wife, who is not yet your wife.
And this is really a risky social position to exist in. Like he could have walked away from all of that. And that would have been very much sort of the expression directed response. And so to model this presence and love and stability is really a remarkable thing. And I remember talking about the father Joseph in a godly play lesson once, and I was talking to an adult about a particular lesson.
I said, I've never heard anyone actually talk about him as the father. Like Mary is the mother, but Joseph's just kind of this guy. But in fact he is a father who is not like other fathers in a way that parallels Jesus being a son who's not like other sons. And so it's really interesting to have those existing together and then to have the concept of Jesus's sonship which, you know, he has a son who is co eternal with his other father.
And like we're existing in this kind of complicated intercosmic familial milieu that makes normal gendered patriarchal concepts of fatherhood and sonhood or sonship obsolete, really, and instead are models of what love and continuity and presence look like on the father's side, and what both obedience and the being loved and belonging in a really kind of strange milieu on the sun side.
Like, those are the really radical models for both of them.
00:21:04 Natalie Thomas
Thank you so much for that. Again, just very grateful for you, Bird, for the wisdom that you're bringing and the way that you have come through the various influences in your life to see God and to understand Jesus. It's a blessing to us and to anyone who's listening. A gift if you want to stay in touch with Bird, you can find her@abirdinchurch.com she has a substack called Wiggles and Wonder and her Instagram handle is a birdinchurch.
We will link all of those in the show notes. And if you don't know where to find the show notes, just scroll down whatever you're listening to on the podcast and you'll find them there. If you want to stay in touch with Bedtime Chapel between now and the next time you hear us, you can find us on Instagram or Facebook on Bedtime Chapel.
We also have a website, bedtimechapel.com and you can email us@bedtimechapelmail.com and we are so grateful to be praying with all of you. And until next time, we will be praying with you!
