an outsider, yet belonging

Today was a difficult day to be a non-communicant at Mass. (On this training course for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd I'm the only one who is not Roman Catholic.) 

Our Gospel lesson was, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. And then everyone except me went forward to receive communion.

Toward the end of the day, Linda presented the lesson of the Good Shepherd.

Usually, at the end of a presentation which has included a reading from the Bible she asks, What did you hear? You know what I heard? I heard these words: There are other sheep I have that are not of this fold, and I must lead these too. They too will listen to my voice, and there will be only one flock, one shepherd.  

a flock

He calls his own sheep by name

from John 10:3

Thanks to Pinterest, this morning I came across a blog post written back in 2010 by the Jealous Curator. It's about an art craft by Christien Meindertsma, which speaks to the individuality of sheep.

She created a rug out of large, knitted hexagons. Each hexagon was made from the wool of one, single sheep, and using all the wool from one shearing.

   © designboom 1999-2012, some rights reserved

To emphasise the individuality of each sheep, Meindertsma knitted each hexagon using a different stitch. She's done other projects in the same vein, knitting a sweater from the wool of a single sheep, for example. But this rug didn't just represent each individual. Since she also then put all the hexagons together into a rug it represented the whole flock as well. In fact, that's her name for this project - "flock".

I wonder what the work of your church looks like to Jesus, with each member's output individually recognisable and also connected with the whole.

telling children about the crucifixion

Leslie, at Thoughts from the Sheepfold, recently reposted a very helpful article by Dr. Elizabeth L. Windsor about children and the events of Holy Week. I highly recommend clicking either of those links to read the whole post, but I've summarized her points here.

• Don't diminish the Easter story by skipping the crucifixion. It's better to acknowledge that bad things happen and that God is more powerful than evil. 
• Don't dwell on the gore, but do acknowledge the pain. Try to avoid letting sensitive or visually-oriented children see disturbing images, but answer their questions briefly and honestly. Yes, crucifixion hurt. No, Jesus didn't die alone. His mother and his best friend were there with him (John 19:26). 
• Do always follow references to the crucifixion with the joy of the resurrection. One way that Godly Play does this is quoted in my blog header: He died on the cross. That is very sad, but it is also wonderful, in an Easter kind of way. Now... he is everywhere, and in every time.

Johann Melchior Gutwein 1726 (public domain image)

an extravagance of glitter glue

We're getting through a lot of glitter glue at Junior Church. Peter Privett advises that when stocking art materials, Check that there's material for both boys and girls. There's no hard and fast rule but girls tend to opt for drawing etc. - boys for activities that require manipulation. Too much glitter might send the wrong message. ("Designing and Building a Godly Play Classroom") Well, more than once in our classroom all the boys have chosen to work with glitter glue and all the girls have worked with clay. I'm pleased that our children do not feel trapped by gender stereotypes! 

But the thing that glitter glue has really got me thinking about is generosity and extravagance. I often say that one thing I love about Godly Play is its lavishness. We have all the time we need. I believe in the goal of providing beautiful and good quality materials, the goal that both story materials and art materials should be attractive, perhaps even the best your group can afford. So I'm surprised and unnerved by how anxious I get about our glitter glue expenditure. We seem to be getting through a LOT of glitter glue at Junior Church. 

I thought I understood the ideal of letting children explore for themselves what works and what doesn't work. But when one child started piling glitter-blob upon glitter-blob, and announced, I'm making a castle, I broke down. I said firmly that glitter glue wouldn't work for constructing upwards. If you want to make a castle, you need to use play-dough. If you want to use glitter paint, you need to make a painting. 

I keep re-playing that scene in my mind. I am struggling to find a good balance between freedom and limits, between instructing and letting the child explore. Perhaps I also need to remind myself that sometimes it's appropriate to break open a whole bottle of nard? (Mark 14:3, John 12:3)

Our new room, part 1

Last week was our first time in our "new" building, but we couldn't use our normal room. So today was another first, the first time in "our" room. It's only ours for this one time slot, so I bring everything from home.

The process of setting up helped me focus and felt good. Here's the view from the door. I'll post more pictures later, but maybe you can just about see that I've formed a square out of low benches, which become our shelves. The bench on the right of the photo is our focal shelf. The Sacred Story shelf is sort of hidden behind a pillar, but you can probably just make out a parable box in the lower left of the photo.

That parable box held today's lesson: The Good Shepherd. It draws on imagery from Psalm 23 as well as John 10 and Matthew 18 / Luke 15. At the feast we sang the song, "The Lord is my shepherd / I'll follow him always". Then our pastor came to give us communion and blessings, and we ended with "Go now in peace".