Summer is the perfect time for adventure! The perfect time to get out and explore! To experience the world and your relationships anew!
In this season, I am reminded of Sophia Lyons Fahs (August 2, 1876 – April 14, 1978), the “great grandmother” of liberal religious education. She was a revolutionary thinker who began the shift of religious education from catechism and class, to an experiential workshop model. Her thinking was that to talk about the sacred one must first have an immediate experience of the sacred.
Here is a great bit of wisdom from Sophia, “We are resolved to protect individual freedom of belief. This freedom must include the child as well as the parent. The freedom for which we stand is not freedom of belief as we please,… not freedom to evade responsibility, …but freedom to be honest in speech and action, freedom to respect one’s own integrity of thought and feeling, freedom to question, to investigate, to try, to understand life and the universe in which life abounds, freedom to search anywhere and everywhere to find the meaning of Being, freedom to experiment with new ways of living that seem better than the old.” – Sophia Lyons Fahs
In your summer adventures, remember to use your religious freedom to seek out experiences of the sacred, and to search “anywhere and everywhere to find the meaning of Being.”
Enjoy!
~Michelle