Not long ago, I found myself in one of those stretches where the deeper questions press in. You know, the ones about meaning and purpose and whether the work we do matters.
Then the phone rang. It was Ann Loomis. You may know her! She is a member of our church and the Program Director for The Aden Program at St. Charles Avenue Presbyterian Church.
The ancient stories reach down past the fog and find solid ground.
She called to invite me to come share a Godly Play story with the participants of The Aden Program, which serves adults living with dementia, memory loss, and the particular loneliness of aging at home.
Godly Play stories are always shared in a circle, and being in a circle of people whom our world often makes invisible (by a culture that prizes productivity, by the fog of memory loss, by days that blur together without enough wonder in them) was life-giving.
My new friends at The Aden Program leaned in. They wondered aloud. They remembered.
Short-term memory is the first to go, but the memories that hold on the longest are the ones rooted deepest: in childhood, in formative experiences, in the bedrock of who we have always been. The ancient stories, the ones we have been telling in this tradition for thousands of years, reach down past the fog and find solid ground. The stories help us find ourselves again.
This is the gift of Godly Play that most people don’t know about. It is not only for children. It lives in hospitals and hospice rooms, in behavioral health units, in places like The Aden Program.
Wherever human beings need to remember who they are in God’s story, Godly Play belongs.
“Tell me the Old, Old Story of unseen things above, of Jesus and His glory, of Jesus and His love. Tell me the story simply, as to a little child, for I am weak and weary, and helpless and defiled.”
—A. Katherine Hankey, 1866
