I painted my dining room last week. It was a week-long endeavor: buying supplies the Friday of Martin Luther King weekend, choosing colors and moving furniture out of the room, repairing the window frame and filling in holes, taping the room floor to ceiling to cover the trim and lighting. I spent quite a bit of time at my local hardware store, asking for advice and loading up on more paint each time a snowday seemed imminent in the forecast.
After the initial "weekend warrior" sensation in my shoulder, from maneuvering paint-filled rollers across the ceiling and moving the stepladder, I settled into a groove. Taping and repair work was done during the daytime--around dinner and carpooling--while the more meditative painting was completed in the late evening hours, after my six-year-old son was asleep. It felt a bit like the old "Elves and the Shoemaker" story; he would go to sleep each night seeing the room appear one way, only to wake the next morning to something entirely different. Who came each night and did this work?
Painting a room in this fashion gives one quite a bit of quiet time for thinking, and I found myself reflecting on our congregation's Religious Education program. In many ways, its yearly cycle parallels the changes that were taking place in my dining room. Plans are drawn up, decisions made about the particular details and then the program is set in motion each September. We seek advice from the professionals when we're unsure of which approach to take in certain situations, but we carry a vision in our minds of what we hope the final outcome will look like. Everyone has their own opinion of what it might (and should!) look like in the end, but we ultimately hope for a room--or RE program--in which everyone feels comfortable. It's a place where life happens and milestones are celebrated, stories are shared and learning takes place . . . the people in our lives are welcomed at the table.
Painting the dining room took more patience than I had imagined. Time was involved in a fashion over which I had no control: time for allowing the paint to dry before I could add a second coat, time for one stage of the process to be completed before I could move on to another. It was surprisingly gratifying in the end, to step back with the furniture in place and the lights on, to know that this was something of my doing; this new dining room is what my children will remember when they tell their stories as adults, their stories of what they learned around our dining room table.
The work we do as religious educators (and we are all religious educators) is equally gratifying, and just as far-reaching.
Denise Pedane, DRE
Mattatuck Unitarian Universalist Society
