Fr Antony Homer
If I put myself into context that will probably make some sort of sense both for me and for you.
Before being ordained I was a teacher for five years in a very ordinary but very large secondary comprehensive and the day that the children/young people/students were told that I was leaving to become a priest ‘we didn’t know you were a Christian’. I had failed miserably. It was a large school of 1600 students and as well as teaching RE and history I also was in charge of student councils and the mentoring of student teachers so I would be that awful person who would sit at the back of the room saying whether or not a teacher had passed.
I now work at Christchurch St Leonard’s which is down in the Hastings area, very different from Hove and Brighton and we have a Church School of 580 students. I am responsible for worship and I am also responsible for the RE curriculum. Although the Diocese gives us instruction it is up to each school to develop that curriculum so we have just re-vamped it and it is now being used as a model into other schools which is very nice.
580 children, pre-school, reception through to year 6. All of them come to Mass, all of them celebrate Eucharist themselves with a priest. So my first question to you is ‘What are ‘givens’? What is that when we go to altar with young people that we have do as a priest? What are you not prepared to negotiate on? – so what do you have to do. Eucharistic Prayer, anything else? Gospel. Absolution.
I just wanted to find out what you wouldn’t negotiate on. I never proclaim the Gospel. The only thing that I would make sure I have to do is to give absolution and to say the magic words, the Consecration. Everything else is done by students from reception through to Year 6. They write the opening prayer, they sing the penitential rite, I sing the Absolution.
They sometimes do a dramatic presentation, sometimes it is about work they have been doing in School. Sometimes there is nothing and there is a gap and we sit and listen to a piece of music. Then we get to the offertory. They bring up the usual elements. They sing back at me all the way through it, that is one way of guaranteeing that they are going to stay awake and they won’t daydream while it is going on. But before all of this has happened I would have gone into that classroom and have spent some time thinking about the theme of that liturgy. The last one that I have just done was Harvest Thanksgiving and the Blessing of the Sea. So I went in and what is harvest? Why are we celebrating that in an urban parish with a seaside? How many fields do we see? Sainsburys, Tesco Asda. So we thought about those shops. We then thought about the gifts that we have and how you can make all sorts of words out of the word harvest. So the children then came forward with H A R V E S T and we arranged those and somebody else talked about what that was. That became the homily, that was the teaching element of the Mass.
But they wrote the Eucharistic Prayer. There are certain givens - we say thank you, we celebrate a meal to make Jesus present, and we have the magic words that Father says listing bits about saying well done, isn’t that lovely. The Lord’s Prayer - they really like the Millennium Lord’s Prayer by Cliff Richard. They all hold hands and then kiss each other and then sit down.
When I first arrived I inherited something that had been going in our school for the last ninety years and it is finely tuned; the children know what to expect. The staff don’t always know what to expect, so at the beginning of each term we have a refresher about what school Mass is. We don’t celebrate it that often - half a term is about right and each class takes its turn throughout the year. I will go into each classroom and go through with them what Eucharist is. A child that hits Year 4 automatically if they so desire is prepared for first communion. We have given up with the idea of confirmation, partly because we have an evangelical Bishop locally who is very good but doesn’t really cope with our sort of liturgy, and secondly trying to get a Bishop to come and confirm is not always as easy when you have got 60 kids. So they have a period of training within school and they are then presented to the congregation on Sunday morning and we use the scrutinies from that magic book that comes from some other place, slightly adapted. The Year 5 children who have been through that process before, act as sponsors to Year 4. So they will sign each of the candidates and they will promise to pray for that candidate until they are received into the church. That is all quite dramatic and there is a school Mass when they are received and they make their first communion and again to the congregation on Sunday morning.
Now it sounds as if there are two distinct Eucharistic communities and that is quite deliberate. We have the school community and we have our church community. The Mass is the same in both places, slightly adapted, but in order for the children to feel that they own the liturgy it is important to do it with them in school so they know really what is going on before you drag them down to Church. When I was a little boy going to Mass meant kneeling down, shutting up, looking in a certain direction and Father was miles up there in a lovely chasuble which seduced me - I wanted to be a priest because of the chasuble - and because there was incense and there was flowers it was all magical and it was other-worldly. We didn’t have a telly when I was really little - that was it that was mystic it was great. Doesn’t wash much now. We have got computer games where you are interactive and there are all sorts of claims upon our young people so we can’t just expect them to sit there passively and do nothing and so to engage with them and to keep them engaged we have to meet with them regularly and they need to own their liturgy. Does that make sense?
Some of our staff are Christians and some are not, but they are really supportive and we do have a catholic head teacher which is crucial to us. It maintains that integrity. We have a permanent chapel in school. Next to the altar is a prayer board and they can leave their intercessions and when it is worship on a Monday morning which I am responsible for, we use those as part of our worship.
I hope when you go into school you don’t use that hideous thing of ‘Good morning everyone’ and they all chant it back. I hate it. Diocesan advisors will also tell you that they hate it. Ofsted inspectors will just stare at you and wish you hadn’t done it. So a bit like we have heard this morning about beginning a sermon with ‘In the name of the Father..’ always begin with something to do with God. So as we go through school I say ‘In the name of the Father’ or ‘The grace of Our Lord Jesus Christ’ or if it’s really tiny people there is a candle placed in the middle of the hall and we sing Jesus You Are the Light and then that focuses our attention. There is lots of silence in our worship and when you have got 500 plus children that can be quite interesting to sustain but not impossible. If your Head is with you that helps as well, and if your music co-ordinator is with you that helps enormously. We have a wonderful music co-ordinator who can just tell if they are getting restless - she will suddenly start playing something and it calms it all down. As I say, I am in the privileged position in that I have access to those youngsters whenever I want them and I could say Mass every week but it would disturb the liturgical seasons. They come to church for the Harvest and the Blessing of the Sea, they have an open invitation to come for Christmass and they always do a Nativity Play which is non-Eucharistic, we have a Mothering Sunday Mass where they usually do the drama bit and they come for Easter because they get a cream egg and Pentecost Sunday when we think about our gifts and talents. Otherwise Mass happens in school and we had a Jewish themed Mass where we have had a local person from the Synagogue come in and teach Yiddish dancing and they danced round the Altar - that was quite interesting. We had some German exchange students over and looked at green issues.
I said at the beginning I was also responsible for worship, worship in its broadest sense and we have just re-visited what we do in our classroom worship as well as what we do as a whole school. I wasn’t completely convinced and neither was the RE co-ordinator that worship was happening in the classrooms on a Tuesday morning when a priest or the head teacher or the key stage tutors weren’t around. Worship in the classroom means having a holy space, having somewhere that they refer to as their altar, somewhere where God dwells in their classroom. Pupils have to be responsible for that, either bringing things in to put into their holy space or keeping it tidy, bringing it out of the cupboard, whatever it is they do.
We thought about what we do and why worship is important because it is at the very heart of what a school is or should be. We decided that the need for prayer, the need for music, the need for stillness - not necessarily silence but stillness - was really important and how do if you are a Muslim member of staff which we have two, how do you if you are a non-believer of anything, how do you enable that to happen in a Christian school? So we had a day looking at what worship is and how we can nurture that in our young people. Most of that is about being true to yourself, what it is that turns you on as a human being, turns you on to God, whether listening to a piece of music, looking at a painting sitting in front of a work of art and having that explained or not having it explained and allowing that freedom for that youngster to look at it and tell you about it. That is an awareness of the luminous. That is worship. It doesn’t have to be ‘hands together eyes closed lets say the Lord’s Prayer like parrots’; if we can get them to pick up those familiar prayers that is wonderful, but I want them to have a taste of God first an understanding of the numinous first otherwise those words are meaningless. My parish is the sort of parish where most of them go to the other parent on a Sunday, so I probably get on average 15-16 children to Mass; most of them go to the other parent, I never see them on a Sunday which is really why again the two distinct communities is great for the Mass rota because if you have suddenly got 42 communicants mid-week that is wonderful. I can’t always guarantee that for the three Sundays when they definitely come to the altar on a Sunday I can have 200/300/400 people in the building on that Sunday, when it is a children’s Mass. Some of my oldies keep away and go to the 8 o’clock but most of them, particularly if the child is doing something, they bring grannie and cousin and dad, dad’s new partner and their other children come too. So you can suddenly have in front of you a whole group of people that don’t normally come.
I try to identify with them what it is they find beautiful about being a human being. It sounds as if they are just doing a humanist assembly but you have got to start somewhere and the implicit and intrinsic value of a child of God is to encourage that engagement with God because the community of the church comes to welcome them into school but they also bring the school community to church.
The building was new. 15 years ago the school moved from next door to the church to a brand new building further up the hill so I have got my triangular parish and then this offshoot, this little satellite which would be great for modern church planting. In a sense they feel isolated but the bringing of people back and forth helps.
We have a youth club that also celebrates Mass and there are 36 children in our youth club and it is a great benefit having a church school, because they all get press ganged into coming along. One of the best things that has ever happened is the Walsingham Children’s Weekend and the Youth Pilgrimage. I was on the team for the Youth Pilgrimage 3/4 years ago, it was a marvellous experience and to be in a large crowd of like-minded young people - I am just thinking of a couple events that we as adults have been to where we feel safe and loved and nurtured and not vulnerable because we are catholic, if you can imagine those feelings timed 1000 in a child then you have cracked it you have got it right and the Walsingham Youth Pilgrimage, Walsingham Weekend has done that our kids go away and say ‘can we do that again?’. They pay for a child to go as well as pay for the transport to get us there.
What I want to ask you is how many of you work with young people and children and what are your fears and what are your desires, your hopes, your dreams. We start with your dreams first.
Two things. Firstly to be enthusiastic but also not be frightened when it all goes horribly wrong. The very first time I went into a classroom I was presented with the most ferocious and revolting and vulgar Year 11 boys I had ever met in my life and our Head of Department said ‘Oh it will be fine, go in and see what they like’. So I stood there, they stood up as I entered the room, they were taking the mick really and I did not know that. I started giving this very erudite lecture about abortion and something else I think it was, half way through I thought this is rubbish, ripped the script up and threw it over my shoulder. ‘You can’t do that that belongs to School’. ‘Actually you will find I belong to the School that was a piece of paper and what we need to do is to have a conversation’. It is about being open, acceptable and getting on with it. It is scary because most of us want to hide behind this thing or hide behind here and not actually engage. I always use an altar to say Mass for children, I can’t bear the idea of sitting on the floor round a coffee table if that works for you great, it doesn’t work for me - there is no dignity for me and when they come to church I am not round a coffee table I am at the altar of God, so it has to be recognisable imagery.
I am no different in church than I am in school so I smile and look friendly because most of the time we look as if we’ve got a hot poker shoved somewhere when we go to the altar so particularly in my tradition which is terribly sort of fit and proper. It has got to be relaxed as well when youngsters are happening.
Being able to do assemblies is wonderful but it can be very sterile. You go in, you prance to the front, the Head welcomes you and you stand there and you do your bit, you have got no connection. What I would suggest or ask is for you to stay for the morning and go out in the playground and talk. Climb on the climbing frame, kick a ball because then they get to know you.
There is a huge benefit for you to be about within the classroom when the staff are having their coffee. They see you are actually quite a nice bloke and they are interested. They start telling you all sorts of things about their lives.
The other thing to say as well if you don’t feel comfortable or confident or you don’t have any desire to work with youngsters don’t do it - find somebody who does.