please bear with me...

Ever since I started the blog I've been wondering about watermarking photos. I've recently figured out how to do it with the software I have, as I'm sure you've noticed. I am experimenting with different effects - larger/smaller, more and less transparent, different colors...

Please let me know if there's an effect that you find too jarring or irritating. My goal is not to ruin the photos but just to attribute them. Once I settle on something that works, I'll try to go back and replace some of the less successful efforts.

On a related topic, I've begun to regret choosing the user-name "Storyteller". It'd surely be hopeless to try to search for my blog if that's all you remembered about me. Any thoughts on whether I should change my "name" (probably to Easterkind)?

(Rowan) on discovering God

Seethroughfaith linked on Facebook to this article from the Telegraph, and I do think it's lovely: A six-year-old girl writes a letter to God. And the Archbishop of Canterbury answers.

photo by Brian (licensed image)

Nobody invented me [ = God ] – but lots of people discovered me and were quite surprised. They discovered me when they looked round at the world and thought it was really beautiful or really mysterious and wondered where it came from. They discovered me when they were very very quiet on their own and felt a sort of peace and love they hadn’t expected.

I think it sounds very Godly Play! 


[Update: the original article, including scans of the letters, can be read here.]

Faces of Easter (Easter Day)

For our congregation, the last Sunday of the month is "family service" - a communion service abridged for children, with a sermon aimed especially at them (or sometimes a craft in place of a sermon). The goal is that the whole congregation (not just young families) should attend. This year, Easter fell on the last Sunday of the month, and the pastor asked if I'd like to present the sermon to keep continuity with what we'd been doing in Junior Church. Another congregant then suggested I should organize the whole service as a Godly Play session. And that's what I did.

ready to begin (with the Lenten purple under the Holy Family)

I was really grateful to our pastor for being so flexible about this. Not least for carrying on with aplomb when one child finally decided he was ready to examine the Holy Family figures... in the middle of the Eucharistic Prayer! Given that I'd placed all our focal shelf materials on the altar, you can see how some priests might have found this unnerving.

at the end of the service (Easter white)

For Finnish Lutherans, just as important as the liturgical color is the number of candles to be placed on the altar. Easter is a six-candle festival, so I needed to negotiate with the vaktmästare [caretaker] to make sure that those candles looked clearly different from the Christ Candle. I think the result was clear: six candles for Easter plus the Christ Candle for Godly Play.

thank you, Pastor, for this photo

Some things didn't work so well. Seethroughfaith warned me near the beginning that I needed to speak up, but as soon as I began to tell the story I forgot. (After all, my focus was on the materials, not on my audience!) Some of the time I was "competing" with a baby who was at that squeal-y stage of exploring its voice, as well as two tots who just could not stay still and quiet. Perhaps I should have asked if I could have a lapel microphone.

And I regret not cutting the summary of the earlier plaques right down to First we heard about how Jesus was born, and a story from when he was a boy, and then about when he was baptized... Since there were a number of children there completely new to this lesson, I gave slightly longer summaries, and walked around the circle showing everyone the plaques (mine are only 4x6 inches / 10x15 cm). But with Vandriver interpreting into Finnish for me, this meant that this already rather long story became twice as long. Too long.

Yet even those whose focus had been lost were startled back to attention when I suddenly cried out that the story shouldn't stay in a line and re-arranged it, and there was good response at the wondering. Then I handed out Easter cards, blank on the inside, and asked everyone to decide what it was important for them to do - draw a picture inside, write a poem, make it a card for someone else or a card for themselves... And folks of all ages really seemed to enjoy that.

thanks, seethroughfaith, for the Response Time photos

the apron of humility

Put on the apron of humility

Serve your brother: wash his feet

That he may walk in the way of the Lord

Refreshed.

("Footwashing Song" by The Keyhole)

The sermon at our Maundy Thursday service this evening was about finding new meanings in familiar traditions, adapting old rites to new situations (as Jesus did with the Passover meal at the Last Supper). The priest urged us to approach this evening's familiar events (ceremonial foot-washing, communion and vigil) with a willingness to do so in new ways, open to new insights.

I was surprised but pleased to find myself spending the time after communion entertaining the one member of the congregation who was under the age of 30 (she happened to be sitting in the same row as me). I showed her how to sit on a kneeler while we sang the final hymn. She showed me her picture book while the priest read us Psalm 22. I whispered the names of things she pointed to (I hope that only she could hear me) while the priest read the story of the disciples falling asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane.

I'm sure that this was not the sort of thing that this priest had envisaged when he wrote his sermon! But it was a confirmation to me that my calling at church, at least for this season, is to interact with children.

wordless Wednesday

(thanks, seethroughfaith, for all these photos!)

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)