The Liturgical Colors (CGS)

A continuing series about my Level I, Part 1, training in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd.

materials for Liturgical Colors

I showed some pictures yesterday of the materials for the Liturgical Colors. I know from a list we've been given that there is a presentation about the Liturgical Calendar. But in CGS younger children (or perhaps any beginner) is shown this very, very simple lesson on the Liturgical Colors. It just names the four colors and assigns them to before the feast, the feast, and after the feast. And then the feast of the Holy Spirit.

That's it. No Advent, no Lent, no commemorations of martyred saints, but one more repetition of the four times, pointing to the four colors of chasuble, and then it's already time to show how to put the work away. Because, as our trainer said, "This is a three-year-old. They're itching to work with these materials themselves!" 

That's another difference between GP and CGS: in GP the majority of materials are presented to all the children at once. The whole session is structured around an expectation that most weeks there will be a group lesson, much as we expect a Scripture lesson and sermon at our weekly church service. In CGS many lessons are presented to a select group, or even an individual, while the other children get on with other work (as can happen during Response Time in GP).

presenting the Liturgical Colors

Our trainer explained that the Liturgical Colors work is very good for children who need to move and expend energy. The child is shown how to carry a single frame with two hands, and immediately asked to help carry the materials from where they are housed. The child may help the catechist put the work away at the end of the presentation and still have energy left to work on their own, taking all the materials back out again.

So the overt goal is to introduce the liturgical colors (and laying groundwork for learning about the calendar), but indirect goals slowing the child down and even teaching skills transferable to ceremonial processions.

album pages vs. scripts

(image source)

Before signing up for this course (on the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd) I knew the name of Sofia Cavalletti, the Hebrew scholar who, upon being asked to instruct a child in the Christian faith, began by reading to him from Genesis and was delighted to find how eager and curious he was - "the beginner's mind". I hadn't understood before, though, that CGS was a team effort. The Montessori element came from Gianna Gobbi, who had trained under Maria Montessori herself.

I have seen references to Montessori albums, but had never really understood what that referred to. And herein lies one important difference between Godly Play and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. In Godly Play we buy scripts written by Jerome W. Berryman, and we stick to them. As I've written before, we're not so slavish as to use notes - not speaking from memory is a sin even greater than deliberately changing the script - bur we are told to use the GP script and live with it before changing wordings. So I asked a very experienced trainer, a big name in the GP community, how long I had to go before I'd be "allowed" to change a phrasing. "You should teach it the way it's written for at least three years first," was the answer. 

Now it's true that some of what Berryman has written is beautifully phrased. Some of it is poetry! But not all of it is. [This paragraph could easily grow to another blog post! Let me turn instead to CGS.]

materials for teaching the Liturgical Colours

It turns out that an album page is the chatechist's (or directress's or guide's) notes for a lesson or presentation. One doesn't buy it or get given it; one writes this out for oneself. We did one in class today, for the Altar I presentation. For this first one we were more or less told just what to write down, but now that we've learned how to do so our homework tonight is to write out, ourselves, an album page for the presentation of the Liturgical Colors.

Crucially, our notes on the Presentation itself are not to be a "monologue", but an outline of the "key moments" of the presentation, with jotted phrases and/or main ideas. And these notes on the Presentation itself are only one section of many on the album page. We also note ourselves what the aims, both direct and indirect, of the work are. We write down the approximate age of child the presentation is for, the liturgical season it relates to, if any, and even the core doctrinal content of the lesson.

Some of this looks a lot like the material Berryman includes in his books, but I do think today that there's a real value in writing those words out myself rather than merely reading (or, let's be honest, sometimes skimming) them. 

materials: four miniature chasubles

CGS training, day 1

Training began with morning mass at a church in central Leiden. I discover that I am the only course participant who is not Roman Catholic.

apologies for a wonky perspective

The plan was to travel to a different church almost every morning. I thought, "I needn't have worked so hard to find a B&B close by our training location." But then we found that one of us on the course is a priest. We are training in a parish center, so it is agreed that from now on we'll start the day with him saying mass for us in a chapel here. My B&B choice is justified after all!

We then had coffee in the atrium, so as to get a quick sense of where it is and what it looks like, and then we were off to a clasroom space for a morning's lecture. Before beginning, though, Linda asked each of us to introduce ourselves. The majority are Dutch, but some of us have traveled from farther afield, including Norway and Japan, and are originally from countries such as India, Argentina, and Brazil (though all those participants now live in Europe).

We are asked to share not just names and origins, but a bit about how we had discovered CGS and why we had chosen to come this week. I am the only person to mention Godly Play; the only spark of recognition I get comes from a recent convert from the Lutheran Church. Oh, and nobody calls it CGS, although Linda writes it that way in her notes. Some say the whole mouthful, some only "Catechesis", and some "The Good Shepherd"!

When I was a child my family belonged to an evangelical Protestant church. I remember missionaries coming to speak about their evangelistic efforts in foreign lands. Some, at least, saw Roman Catholics as being as much in need of salvation as they did the pagan. As our tutor, Linda, talked today about the catechist as "matchmaker" between the child and Jesus, I couldn't help but imagine these foreign missionaries collapsing in a faint. 

Linda continues, "Christianity is about someone", emphasizing that last syllable.

a foray into CGS

Tomorrow I'm off to the Netherlands for an intensive week of training in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd (in English). I had meant to blog about this already back when I registered, but I got stuck when I failed to figure out how to put a pdf of the course leaflet up here. (Now I've copied what the training center have done, which is to link to it from an image - see below.)

Instead I'll just give you a few highlights: "The course will cover the first year program of level 1 of the method." Our trainer will be Linda Kaeil, from Portland, Oregon. She "is a long time experienced catechist and trainer of catechists in the United States, Germany, England, Poland, Australia, Canada and Africa. She trains the Missionaries of Charity (sisters of Mother Theresa) ... and teaches catechesis to children of 3 to 12 years at the Franciscan Montessori Earth School." Wow!

I think of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd as the mother of Godly Play. Certainly, Jerome Berryman drew heavily upon CGS in creating Godly Play. Although I've read a fair bit about CGS (for example, on Leslie's blog), this will be my first experience of it. I've read some comparisons which are so obviously skewed in favor of one or the other that they don't strike me as fair. But it does seem true that "Godly Play is more easily modified for nonliturgical churches" (to quote the book Children Matter), and that the training for Catechesis of the Good Shepherd is much more intense (see this post by Cindy Coe).

I'll let you know how I get on!

back to some basics: respect

In my Facebook feed this week there've been a couple of posts about Montessori basics. David Pritchard has started a series on the Godly Play España blog (written in Spanish) about the foundations of Godly Play, with a post about the Montessori method. He begins, En las escuelas Montessori la libertad es ciertamente muy importante, pero para conquistarla los niños tienen que trabajar de forma independiente y respetuosa.

(Keep reading - my translation comes a bit further down.)

Meanwhile, the National Association of Catechesis of the Good Shepherd USA has a FB thread going about ways to gently redirect a child. They asked, What are some phrases you use instead [of saying "No" or "Don't"]?

Here are some of their answers:

• use positive examples
• Let's do this. instead of Don't do that.
• Remember we walk around the work rugs.
• model the way to do it
• Can I help you with that?
• May I have a turn?
• Let me show you how we work with this material.
• Can I show you a better way?
• OR have another child model it
• gesture "stop" instead of saying No.
• redirect them elsewhere
• Please join me. (e.g. to get them away from a sticky situation) 
• May I show you a material that you may enjoy working with?
• help them remind themselves
• Remember where we are? Who are we trying to hear in this space?
• Is that your [church] voice or your outside voice?
• Remember we walk around the work rugs.
• remember that they have freedom but it's within limits
• Your body isn't ready for that work yet.
• You can choose this work another time, when you're ready.

At the same time, they stressed that it's okay for a child to explore new ideas with materials, as long as the the work is done respectfully.

As David Pritchard wrote above (my translation): In Montessori schools, freedom is certainly very important, but in order to achieve it children must work independently and respectfully. So it boils down to respect. Respect for the materials, respect for the others in the room, and our respect for the children!

"The gospel is a story"

The gospel is known by one person telling another. One person must tell another because the gospel is a story. There is no truth, there is no summary of the story, that can be separated from the story itself.

Stanley Hauerwas (A Cross-Shattered Church, p.47)