easter 2015

One of my new friends from the Catechesis training course wrote to say, "You haven't blogged much recently." No, it's been a busy and chaotic couple of months, and I can't say I see much calm on the horizon either. But as a super-brief follow-up to my last post on geography , here's something that was hanging on the wall in the Leiden atrium. I think it's meant mostly to reinforce, silently, the geography lessons. It could also be a way for children to check their work as they learn the locations of Nazareth (indicated by symbols of the Holy Spirit, the flame and dove), Jerusalem (cross), and Bethlehem (star).

Both Godly Play and Catechesis of the Good Shepherd take geography seriously. map by Geraki I don't remember any Biblical geography in my childhood, except maps at the back of Bibles. The ones in my Bible weren't in Greek, like the one pictured above, but they might as well have been. I looked at them sometimes if I got bored during church. I guess I thought that one day I would "learn" them, whatever that might mean. Maybe really mature Christians memorize the routes of Paul's missionary journeys? Godly Play teaches storytellers to tell the story of Abraham's journey from Ur to the oaks of Mamre with relative geographical accuracy, and the same for the story of the Babylonian captivity. It's not made into a big deal. Children aren't asked to "learn" it; they're simply shown. The storyteller lays blue ribbons onto the sand - Here is the Tigris river, here is the Euphrates. The message is,  This is what I need to get ready in order to tell...