Reverence and Rhythm: "Waldorf Essentials, Part II"
By Esther Leisher
The soul of the child is nurtured by receiving care from someone who is noble-minded, generous hearted, and affectionate. The spirit needs that, too, but to find expression, to become fully, truly human, with all the capacities a human can demonstrate, the spirit needs more.
Reverence is primary, of course, for both soul and spirit. It feeds the soul and creates the foundation for joy and meaning in life. In the openness toward the world and other people that reverence brings, spirit finds a home. Reverence creates the foundation for everything Waldorf. Nothing speaks its meaning to you unless you approach it with reverence.
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To permeate life with reverence means not just at set-aside times, but also reverence for everyday things. This creates a mood in a family. You bow before the holiness of a special place in the woods, or revere the uncommon greatness of an ordinary person.
You can cultivate within yourself a sensitivity to holiness, a focus on what deserves veneration and devotion. This effort in itself creates a quality that passes from you to your children in the very subtle way that people influence one another. Of course you also use words: "What a special place," you murmur. Or "How beautiful!" "What a good person!" You show reverence when lighting a candle, laying a flower or a special rock before the Madonna, or telling the story of some remarkable person. Reverence prepares your children to notice the good in life. What greater gift could you give them?
No one can say too much in parise of reverence, but another quality gave me so much peace, a feeling of harmony and centeredness that stabilizes the life forces. That quality was pattern or rhythm - the recurring activities, each day, each week, each year.
Pattern in the day: Greeting the day with awe and some special words. A bedtime ritual of lighting a candle, reading a story or singing soft songs. A quiet time after lunch. An activity every morning.
In the pattern of the week: A Sunday outing that is rarely missed. The day each week that we bake bread. Or go to the library. Or visit Grandma.
In the year: the family festivals that enliven the year and reconnect us with the cosmos. The birthdays, the celebrations, the seasons themselves. The pattern of the year keeps the pattern of the days and weeks from becoming too static. The year brings celebrations that are prepared for with bursts of decorating and baking, art and song and magical words. And when the wondrous day comes, there are the rituals, the family traditions.
The various rhythms of day, week and year can change as the children change. I changed the going-to-bed experiences as they entered new developmental stages. Or at any time you can add or change something.
When Laurel was about seven, I added for a time a musical moment to the bedtime ritual. I sang a single note, a tone, which she and Paul then sang back to me. "Here is the tone for tonight." Oddly enough they liked it. I never said they had to make it sound like my sound; we just did it. I sang and they sang back. (It seemed to fit who they were. Both of them sang in choruses later in their life.)
When Mark and Craig each passed through the turning point of the ninth year, I made a book of verses and beautiful words for each of them. Every time we found some lovely combination of words, or some meditative verse that particularly appealed to one of them, I put it in their book and read it to them at bedtime. Each book reflected what was meaningful to that particular child. They were beginning to create their inner life through an individualized collection of meaning-filled words. Their books looked like a combination of literature, world religions and spiritual verses and poems -- from the traditional "My soul magnifies the Lord" to "I look into the world of stars. . . . ."
In our week, Sunday was always Daddy's morning to get up with the kids and give them breakfast. Saturday had its distinctive pattern, a relaxed and quiet morning followed by chores. By 12:30 the kids were ready to play with neighborhood children (who began to call once cartoons were over). Then at approximately 3:30 we went to the library and came home replete with books.
If nothing else was going on, I read to them right then. It was like a feast for the children -- a time when your mother would read to you for as long as you wanted, one book after another. If there was some particularly good book among them we would order it for our own. That was the peace of Saturday. It was always a stable point in the week. Something in me still remembers, and I still tend to go to the library on Saturdays.
Yearly celebrations created family traditions that changed only in small ways - there were different art projects and a somewhat different approach to beauty and meaning each year. Stained glass windows one Christmas, clay candle holders another. An emphasis on the Holy Child one year, and the Coming of the Light on another. Every year we decorated Easter eggs differently, but we always did them. One year I made a tissue paper, wall-sized sunrise for Easter. Other Easters we did water color paintings. We also celebrated the seasons, the pattern of the Earth's year, and there was something elemental and satisfying about it.
I didn't think of reverence and rhythm (pattern) as essentials at the time. They were just what people do. I don't remember putting any unusual effort into them. Now in this restless time I think more conscious effort is needed. When thinking about Waldorf fundamentals reverence and rhythm come near the top.
Other Waldorf ideals I found difficult, or impossible at first. But you just have to begin, and not worry about doing it all. Imitation, Imagination, Gratitude were my key words -- being conscious of a young child's tendency to learn through imitation, practicing using picture language, and cultivating gratitude. --Esther Leisher
[To read Part I of "Waldorf Essentials, click here. For Part II on "Imitation, Imagination and Gratitude," click here.]
