Wrestling with God
By Rev Sandy Brodine
Over the last six months, I have been writing resources to be used for Confirmation with teenagers.
The fun part has been the opportunity to use them with a group of four young people in my local congregation as they prepared to confirm the faith that their parents had affirmed for them at their Baptism.
In terms of content, the series of lessons follows the basic pattern of Confirmation resources everywhere.
Using the Apostles’ Creed as a template, we explored the nature of God: Father, Son and Spirit, talked about how we related to God, and then how the community of faith helped sustain and nurture us in faith. We began with the story of Jacob wrestling the Angel at Peniel: wrestling so violent that Jacob puts his hip out of joint. We wondered if we were being invited to wrestle with our understanding of who God is, like Jacob?
In terms of approach, the resource aims to use a range of different methodology from different disciplines: art, language, drama etc. We explored a different prayer practice each week so that we could find ones that worked for us and would help us to continue to grow in our relationship with Christ. This approach was designed so that young people of all kinds of neurodiversity could engage and explore who God is, and how they interact with God.
Three of the girls were Confirmed with great joy last Sunday.
Each were invited to share something about their experience of God, and how they have come to understand who God is. One produced a piece of art as her response. Rather than interpreting it with words, she invited us to look at it: explaining that each of us would interpret the journey depicted in their own way.
Another, a passionate musician, JoJo Findlay, decided to use her piano keyboard to explain how she understands who God is. In her words:
“On my piano keyboard I have G and F. And in between there is a black key. Is it G flat, or F sharp? Maybe it’s both? Could this be how God the Father and Son fit together? And what about the Holy Spirit? Maybe that’s the thing that makes the noise inside the piano. Think of it this way, you have Jesus, the key you press, the Father as the hammer that hits the string and finally the Holy Spirit that creates the sound? This is a message to everyone in this room: ‘You don’t need to know anything about instruments to love and enjoy music, just as, you don’t need to know anything about God in order for God to love you forever’. So when I say I have faith in the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, I mean, my God is three in one, just like the notes on my piano …”
What an extraordinary thing for a teenager to be able to wrestle God, and come up with an explanation that makes sense to her in terms of her favourite activity,
As I said when I followed her up to the lectern: “I love me a teenage theologian.”
If our aim for our Confirmation classes is to inspire young Christians to continue to wrestle with the living God for the whole of their lives, then I believe God will do the rest.