Godly Play

by the Revd Hannah Cartwright

It has been a real joy to see the relaunch of the children’s ministry at St Mary’s with the first monthly Godly Play session taking place last Sunday thanks to Laura and the team. Godly play is a great way for children to foster their innate spirituality and curiosity. It starts from a place of recognising that children not only already experience the presence of God, but are eager to explore their sense of God through relationship, community, creativity and story. At the heart of Godly Play is space to wonder; ‘I wonder what part you liked best?’, ‘I wonder what was most important?’.

Children are natural ‘wonderers’ but this is a skill which often gets neglected as we grow older and the pressures of daily life and work, with its drive for measurable output, begin to weigh on us. Some spiritual traditions help us to re-engage with ‘wondering’ in intentional ways. Ignatian spirituality, for example, encourages imaginative contemplation as a way of inhabiting biblical texts; enabling the participant to explore the story and their place in it and to create space for God to speak to them through it. For others, simply taking time out to be among nature, to read, or to create or craft something unique, can allow space to foster and respond to a sense wonder, as well as encourage the act of wondering to take place.

I wonder when you last made space to engage in either some serious or mindless wondering yourself? What helps you to engage your own imagination and to ask questions without any fear of judgement or the need to produce something tangible to demonstrate your productiveness at the end of thought process?

As we approach Advent, we will soon enter into a whole season of wondering at the incarnation and, at Christmas, we will join the shepherds and Magi to wonder around the crib of the Christ-child. How will you choose to inhabit the story this year? And, after the example of the children among us, how could you use your innate spirituality and curiosity to explore your own sense of God through relationship, community, creativity and story too?