Flannel-Graph Religion

Or, Faith as a Child

There was this flannel graph - the felt covered canvas, propped up on an easel - sitting in the corner of the room. And seated beside it, in a blue overall dress, with a white button up shirt underneath, with a clipboard of characters on her lap, was the Sunday School teacher.

We were all sat, cross legged, on little squares of carpet, in a kind of messy semi circle, watching her stick Moses up on the board. And she’s telling us the story of the wanderings in the wilderness, of the grumbling, and the miracles.

“And to lead them by day,” she says, reaching into the stockpile on her lap, “was a pillar of cloud.” And all of us are seated, wide eyed, as she sticks this 4”x2” Divine Smoke in the midst of the Israelites.

“And then, by night” she says, again, reaching down, “a pillar of fire.” And again, we’re mesmerized by this cut out column of flames placed adjacent to Moses.

And then she tells us that these people, after watching God send the frogs and the locusts and the hail, after watching God split the Red Sea, and after closing it up on their enemies, and even after seeing the smoke and the flame, these Israelites complained.

They missed Egypt.

They wanted to go back.

And maybe God knew it was because they were hungry, you know how it is, so He sends them some manna and quail.

“What’s a quail?” I ask, my hand going up, as teacher’s hand drops onto her stash of felt clippings.

And she doesn’t need to answer, because she puts this felt cut out of a little group of birds at the feet of the Israelites, and she says, “God was always providing for them, even in the wilderness.”

And I nodded.

And it made sense then, the provision and the guidance.

I could see it, up on canvas, in bright felt.

It made sense when I was five.

But the wilderness hasn’t made a lot of sense since then.

And provision, well, that doesn’t seem as obvious these days.

You know how it is.

Fridges Were Not Made to be Bare

There’s no flannel graphs for me, these days - and no animal crackers with apple juice to keep me quiet during Bible Story time.

There’s no bible crafts to glue, no pages to colour, nothing to stick up on the fridge to see every morning when I get my eggs and bacon.

And, call me crazy, but those stories, those 4”x2” cut outs on an easel, those crafts, a mess of glue and marker, they were maps. Ways through the wilderness.

I didn’t know it then, but I do now, but there was something that was shaping me in those tales and in my artistic expression of them.

Lewis once said this :

"Since it is so likely that children will meet cruel enemies, let them at least have heard of brave knights and heroic courage. Otherwise you are making their destiny not brighter but darker."

And my fridge has been a testimony to some of that darkness.

My fridge with its to do lists and schedules, with its invitations or business cards - my fridge, bare of stories of smoke and flame, of ships on the sea, and of dry bones blooming back to life.

Life is complex and we think we need complexity to answer it.

But I don’t think so, not anymore.

I think I knew something, when I was five, sat cross-legged, watching the quail slowly peel off the felt board - I knew something that is hard for me to grasp now.

God will provide.

At five, when life hadn’t hammered me, hadn’t taken me out behind the school and beaten me up, well, trust was easy.

But then the pain made trust hard.

The questions made loyalty a bit shaky.

My doubts and confusions made it all a bit…you know, unbelievable.

But if five year old Josh saw me, now, he’d look at me, with a cheek full of animal crackers, and a juice box in his hand, and he’d say what he heard his Sunday school teacher tell him:

“God was always providing for them, even in the wilderness.”

And the thing is, this little kid, he would believe it.

And the thing is, this little, he would be right.

And the thing is, we tell ourselves that life makes it harder to believe, but I don’t know if I buy that anymore.

You see, God made this world, and He called this creation Good.

And God also said that it was Good for Man to be in community.

And when life has come and slapped me around, when it has hunted me down and cornered me, my answer to all that was some systematic separating of self from God’s Goodness.

No wonder I couldn’t trust like I did when I was five.

I was disconnected from all the Good things God had provided for me.

And Goodness, as you know, is the way into the Truth.

So it makes sense why doubt came so easy - I had turned a simple concept into a puzzle, a paradox, and I had lost something so necessary in its place.

A childlike faith.

Those stories are maps.

And when we let the simple tales get in us, way down deep, when we don’t confront them with all kinds of questions, they do a kind of transforming work.

They teach our hearts, not just our heads.

And it’s way easier to face the stormy seas and the badlands of the wilderness with a heart that burns with holy fire than it is to face them with a cloudy mind.

What I am saying is…

Those stories, they taught me to love.

And I need that, now, more than ever.

I need love to be fanned into flame; a kind of love that nods in agreement with the Truth.

I need crafts up on my fridge, I need art up on my walls, I need stories down in my soul.

I need the faith of a child.

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If this topic interests you, chapter 29 of my book, Room for Good Things to Run Wild, goes a lot deeper into building out the new “myths” required for becoming a Saint.