CREEDE HINSHAW: Sanctuary works wonder on young grandson

Our 20-month-old grandchild never sits still. Except for one place.

When he accompanies his parents into the sanctuary of historic Mulberry Street United Methodist Church in Macon, he falls silent and still. The squirminess will undoubtedly come later, but for now he is awestruck by the largest room he’s ever seen. This sanctuary, with its balcony, vaulted ceiling, wooden arches and inspiring stained glass, must feel like the very gate to heaven.

Tracing back my own spiritual history, the sanctuary in my home church would have been, as it is for our grandson, the largest room I had ever seen and my Sunday visit would have enfolded me into the largest group of big people I had ever seen.

Coming from our tiny house with 8-foot ceilings and very small bedrooms, I never would have seen or experienced anything remotely akin to that holy space. With one or two exceptions that sanctuary would have been the largest room (except for our high school gymnasium) I’d ever seen for the first 20 years of my life.

So, on this just-passed Day of Resurrection, I watched the sanctuary work its weekly wonder on our grandson. Easter-clad and bowtied, this toddler — swallowed up by an ancient wooden pew, chubby legs thrust straight out, unable to see anything in front of his face except a book rack holding hymnals, a Bible and offering envelopes — sat like one frozen.

It was not, however, the stillness of Lot’s wife; rather it was a silence of awe and curiosity. In his motionless tiny body, only his eyes darted, taking in people, ceiling, stained glass, his parents and grandparents. When the choir sang and the organ played, his head swayed in response to the sacred music.

As he watches his parents remove a hymnal (some congregations still — gasp! — sing out of books) and join their voices with hundreds of others to sing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today,” he is learning that there are places where people gather to glorify God with heart and voice.

He will one day know that people can worship God anywhere and everywhere, but now – without being told – he is grasping that church is the place where all generations for all ages gather to glorify God as a living body. He observes his parents close their eyes and bow their heads until he and they hear from the pulpit the very same final word – “Amen” – that he hears his parents bless him with at the close of every evening.

Faith is seeping into a child’s heart and soul. He is being shaped by the mysterious movement of the Holy Spirit. For every adult who grouses that “my parents made me go to church,” thousands of adults gathered last Sunday to sing resurrection songs because they once – and maybe still – happily sat with parents or grandparents in a church, and begin to grasp the immeasurable height and depth, width and breadth of the God who first knit their tiny bones together in a mother’s womb.

Creede Hinshaw, of Macon, is a retired Methodist minister.