creatures of habit

I teach music and movement classes to pre-school children so I spend my week with kids from 6 months to 4 years old. It's been very interesting to see the way the pandemic has affected this agegroup over the past couple of years. For you and I, Covid has disrupted a tiny percentage of our lives, if you are 4 then half of your life has been spent under restrictions, masked, hand-sanitised, distanced. If you are 2 then its been pretty much all you've ever known. So much has changed about the way we have to do things. But one thing has stayed the same....... kids are creatures of habit. You might think that sitting in the same seat in church on a Sunday is a quirk of adulthood. But I can tell you now that your average 18 month old will opt to occupy the same place in the room every week. It's so funny to see them claiming their territory after only a couple of weeks of classes.

Today Im watching Strictly quarter finals, which for so many of us has become a Christmas tradition - along with a whole host of other things. We do like traditions don't we? Christmas brings out so many cultural habits deeply ingrained in us from childhood - things which we rehearse every year and pass on to our children. Some traditions are peculiar to our own families and settings, others are national or even international ones. Across the world we celebrate Christmas with special food, songs, trees and lights. We party at New Year and count down to midnight. When I was growing up we always had a silver sixpence hidden in the christmas pudding. We had enormous stockings as kids, which were always crammed full of presents downstairs in the sitting room. We were not supposed to get up too early to open anything but I distinctly remember one year my brother getting up at 5am and falling down the full flight of stairs in his bid to reach the presents before Mum woke up and stopped him!! Ive passed on some of my family traditions to my kids and I hope they in turn will pass them on to theirs. Yesterday in this blog we were thinking about what makes home home. The tradtions of our families ( not just the Christmas ones but the everyday things that mark out our family as beng ours) play a big part in that sense of ' home'. I wonder what it is about us as human beings that need and want to do the same things in the same ways over and over again?

God must have made us this way because way back at the start of the story He is introducing us to traditions. He institutes them in order to help us remember things that are important. The word tradition is taken from the Latin trado, tradere, meaning "to hand over, to deliver, to bequeath". The way we hand over our faith to the next generation is through the traditions which have been passed down to us from previous generations. We hear and pass on the stories of faith. We receive the traditions of the church in sacrament and liturgy. We remember Jesus through the tradition He instituted at the last supper. I think sometimes in the ' newer' churches we can be tempted to leave some of the ancient tradtions of the past to one side. But I fear that if we do that we lose something precious. Over recent years I have come to re-discover the joy of some of the beautifully crafted words of Anglican liturgy and written prayers. I've always adored old hymns. There is definitely a place for us to keep on doing the things we have always done. Not merely because we have always done them. But because they have been imbued with meaning for generations.

One Good Thing - I was dashing into Tesco yesterday to buy a loaf of bread. On my way in I noticed an elderly lady standing outside with several bags of shopping, clearly waiting for a taxi or a lift. It was freezing. She didnt have a coat. On my way in to the shop I suddenly remembered I was supposed to be doing one good thing. On my way out of the shop the lady was still there. Shivering. Should I offer her a lift? Should I offer her my coat? ( I was wearing my Jo Jingles coat which technically isnt really mine and which I need for work!) I decided to talk to the lady and ask her if she was waiting for a taxi thinking that if she was I could offer to take her home and get her out of the biting cold. She was waiting for her son who she had just phoned but was coming from a wee distance away. She said she hadnt thought about needing a coat when she came out. We chatted for a bit and I offered to wait with her shopping so she could go inside the shop and shelter a bit. But we both realised that wouldnt really work as I didn't know her son and he wouldnt be able to see her when he came into the car park. So I told her I hoped he would come soon and I went back to my car. Where I spotted that I had a big wooly scarf on the back seat. I threw my loaf in and grabbed the scarf and made my way back to the spot she had been standing. But she had gone. So I guess it was half a good thing. Or almost a good thing. Or maybe it was a good thing cos I was willing to do something to help even though I wasnt really able to. The good thing for Sunday will be watching Sam get baptised. If you see this before 11am please pray for him.