My parents are to thank for this photograph, taken in May 1986. I used to stand on the dinning room chair and pretend it was my pulpit. I would make my parents sit in the living room and listen to me preach! I even passed around a bowl asking for a collection, though I padded it with pennies to pretend that money was in there. I thought of everything, down to the grape juice and saltine crackers for the Eucharist.
In Sunday school class at St. Peter's Episcopal Church (Huntington, WV) where I grew up, we made these felt stoles which all the children wore in a grand Palm Sunday procession. We even had a wooden donkey on wheels that some lucky child got to ride! While I don't think that I would do this now, liturgically speaking, it was something to behold as a child.
The lesson, I suppose, is that you never know what can really speak to a child about holy things.
