Back to School

John Dempster in Primary 2 (1959)

It’s the odours I remember most. Wooden pencil case, brand new eraser from Woolworths, a classroom floor freshly sealed over the summer – each had its own distinctive aroma. Back to school in the 1960s.

Round about now, a number of churches are holding ‘back to school Sunday’ services – an opportunity to pray for local schools and everyone who works there and for the children and young people moving up a year. An opportunity to encourage everyone to look out for God as much in the classroom as at home.

My primary school years were relatively happy. There was a lot of Christianity in the mix. We said the Lord’s Prayer. In P2 we learned by heart He who would valiant be. Our P7 teacher read us the poignant tale of the killing of Covenanter John Brown of Priesthill, which moved me more than anything in my primary years.  And I loved the beauty of the syllables in the classic hymns. ‘By cool Siloam’s shady rill.’

These hymns were mostly new to me. I was brought up in the Christian Brethren church, and I had the impression that out of all the churches, only ours was truly on God’s wavelength. The Church of Scotland was deeply suspect to this judgemental 10-year-old, the Roman Catholics beyond the pale.

I was nevertheless relatively happy. ‘Here’s one for you,’ said my friend Leslie’s dad when I believe came on the car radio.

Secondary school was another story. I was a teenager with multiple hang-ups and such a poorly-developed sense of self that I tried forever to fulfil other people’s expectations.

On the one hand, despite desperate attempts to enter into the experience of Christianity, I felt destined to remain on the outside. On the other, taught that Christians should not relate too closely with ‘the world’, I didn’t know how to befriend these people who listened to the Beatles and watched The man from Uncle, or to respond when they sought to befriend me.

I had no sense that God was with me – this was the God, after all, who had been repeatedly silent when I called out to God to save me. I must be a failure, beneath God’s notice.

I was sharing this with an old school-friend recently. Colin said ‘Don’t be hard on yourself. We liked you!’ The problem was, I didn’t like myself.

And so as we encourage our ‘back to school’ kids, I hope they have absorbed from us a healthy understanding of God.  A God who loves passionately, tenderly and indiscriminately, who is closest to us when we feel furthest from God.

A God who is involved in all our lives, whether we call ourselves Christian, or Muslim, or atheist, calling us towards the light fully seen in Jesus. We are all journeying together.

I hope our young people have absorbed from us a healthy attitude to decision-making and choice. They will know Christian-shaped responses to the issues they face. If they choose to be guided by these, we trust they do so because they have personally owned these convictions, not because they have been ‘told to’.

I hope our young people have a growing sense of who they are. One of the biggest challenges of parenthood is to set our kids free to be themselves, rather than seeking to shape them in the image of what we ourselves wish we’d been. God allows us to be fully real, fully ourselves, whatever stage we’re at in life.

I hope our young people have seen in us a conviction that, regardless of our feelings, God is with us in everything, every breath, every challenging moment, every testing decision. We live at once in this material place and time and in another spiritual dimension where we remain secure regardless of what happens to us physically. And so we have courage and confidence as the school gate beckons.

For we are all lifelong learners in God’s school, learning to live out in this life the values of that invisible reality beyond time and space. I have been blessed in that classroom by the Bible, by books and sermons, and above all by the sweetness and grace I see in the lives of fellow learners as we go back term by term. Through the teacher’s gracious instruction, tortured teen has become a much happier, balanced adult. Loving myself, I know myself loved, and so love others.

Of course some young people left school for good in June and look ahead to new prospects and opportunities. One day we’ll find ourselves no longer present in this dimension, but more wholly present in that other dimension where the head teacher puts down the hand-bell he has just rung, wipes the chalk-dust off his hands, and says ‘School’s out!’

(Christian Viewpoint column from the Highland News dated 20th August 2015)