VICAR'S LETTER
17
Sundon Road
Streatley
March, 2007
Dear
All
The traditional themes for Lent are Fasting, Repentance, and Almsgiving. Almsgiving is taken care of in this year's Lent Appeal for Chums and Chicks. Fasting I leave up to you. But what about repentance, the annual spiritual spring-clean - how is that to be conducted? I offer you an idea born of the work we did in Sunday School back in January. Try putting in the Jesus icon.
The idea first emerged in some work we did on Elijah. We looked at the story of Naboth's vineyard. The younger children listened to the stories and did activities based around them. They made mobiles. They baked bread. They played a specially designed version of trump cards. They drew pictures. With the older children, however, we went a stage further. They too produced pictures illustrating the stories, but in the top left hand corner of the sheet on which they did their drawings, we placed a small drawing - an icon - of Elijah. This icon invited them to consider what Elijah was trying to say to people by what he did. They then put what they thought was his message, above the picture - 'Stand up for God,' 'Listen to God,' 'Stand up for justice,' or whatever it was that they thought the story was trying to say. It proved a very useful way of encouraging the children to move on from just hearing the story, to asking what it was actually about.
In the January Family Service, we took the icon idea a stage further. In place of the Elijah icon, we used a Jesus Icon. The children were given a sheet of paper. On one side was a smiling face. On the other was a frowning face. They were then shown matchstick pictures of various situations. There were pictures of bullying and cruelty. There were pictures of kindness and helpfulness. There were pictures of pollution. There were pictures of a beautiful world. There was a picture of people fighting. There was a picture of a person praying. The children were asked to respond to each of these pictures by holding up their Jesus face. If they thought the pictures showed something he would be happy with, they put the smiling face foremost. If they thought it was something he wouldn't like, then the icon was turned to show the frowning face.
A possible third stage in the development of the idea is to use it at a personal monitoring system during Lent. All we need to do is to install in the top left hand corner of our mental computer screens a little revolving icon. Then as we go about our day-to-day business we just keep a little eye on that icon. Is it a smiles icon or a frowning icon? Does what we are doing or what we are planning to do produce a smiling Jesus or a frowning Jesus, or, to add one more element, a saddened Jesus? Schemes for self-examination can often be rather elaborate and cumbersome. This gets away from all that. All we have to do is watch the icon and respond accordingly.
Lent is all about recovering the faith perspective on and in our lives. The icon method provides a simple way of doing that. It encourages us to look at our lives through the eyes of Jesus: and so to bring them back in closer conformity with this.
All best wishes,
Roger.