9th March:
Liturgical Season: Lent
Story: St Benedict
Today we sat out on Bec's deck and set up our Lenten garden/ maps stepping stones through to Easter Sunday. We marked out 47 days as we started from today as Ash Wednesday. Our first marker was a lump of coal. Piper, the eldest made her own and Bec and Jas made one for their family and Matari and I for our family. Eloi and Jet were busy burying as many stones as they could in their own dish of sand, happily amused and freeing us up to focus on our creations.
Some us us laid out a spiral into Easter and others a windy journey. We created markers along the way with gemstones that held a resonance for us. Piper choose a mustard brown coloured gem for Mary of Egypt as it was a similar colour to Lentils. (Last year we had learnt her story about living on three lentils). She also noticed the colour change of her stones from grey through to reddish/brown for Mary and remarked, "see, its like gradually going into the desert and i didn't even try to do it!".
Other markers along the way were green stones for St Patrick, stones painted half and half for the autumn equinox, a cross with flowers coming from it for the veneration of the life giving cross, a stone painted with a ladder for John Climacus, Rose and Purple coloured stones for the Annunciation and Archangel Gabriel. a fern frond for Palm Sunday, a cross for Good Friday and a black stone for Holy Saturday. Easter Sunday/Pascha was filled with colours, flowers and stones painted like easter eggs. We also added markers for activities that we will do along the way to prepare for Easter. We included red stones to remember the story of Mary Magdalene and the red egg, which we will be dyeing before Easter, and a mini Easter garden as a foretaste of the garden we will hopefully have growing as an Easter scene for Easter Sunday.
This all went well and despite our little clashes with our children, we got there. It was great to see them articulating points of resonance and creating meaningful art to help them map this Lenten Journey.
Materials we used were:
Tray, Box any kind of containing vessel, Bec used a palm seed case!
Sand to fill in with
Stones (47 each)
Some precious stones for special points along the way- feasts etc
Sticks to make crosses
Flowers
Fern Frond
Paints to decorate stones
Piper and Matari both suggested they would like to have a little person or saint figurine to journey from stone to stone with them each day, this seemed like a good idea and might make some of the children's patron saints.
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