Advent!

Catching up on my goofing off, and could not agree more with this post by Fr. L on Anticipating Advent.

Our preparation: Yesterday took the kids to Target to get them decent black slacks that reach all the way to the tops of shoes, after the, er, interesting things that appeared on our altar last Sunday.  Yikes.   Had to do that fast before the shoppers arrived.

So I’m reading Fr. L and thinking, yes, yes, yes!  And then I thought, “that theme seems vaguely familiar.” Wow I should totally write down what that lady said on Sarah’s blog, gosh I bet she’s so pulled together.  [See: Things That Appeared On Our Altar]

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Advent PSA: If you’re on the fence about darkening the doors of a Catholic Church.

Topic that came up last night:

Let’s say you are a lapsed Catholic or non-Catholic who is looking for a church to attend after a long time away.  Perhaps you have noticed there’s a Catholic parish near you, and you have a vague idea about maybe dropping in sometime.  But you’re nervous.  You’ll stand out.  You can’t remember (or never knew) how the whole Mass thing works.  People are going to laugh at you when you say or do the wrong thing.

Is that you?

Come this Sunday!  Everyone will be just as lost!  We’ll all have our eyes glued to the handy pamphlet in the pews!  We’ll be mumbling!  We’ll say the wrong things!  The new (old) hand motions will feel so weird!  The music will be really good or really bad or just really strange . . . to all of us together!

It’s Leveling The Playing Field Sunday.  Come. 

Theology of the Body For Teens: Middle School Edition

The Catholic Company very kindly sent me a review set of the Theology of the Body for Teens: Middle School Edition bundle. Okay, so I begged for it.  They sent an e-mail out to all the reviewers (they are still accepting new reviewers) asking who wanted it, and I gave it my best me-me-me-meeeeee! and made the cut!  Yay!  And then I told my DRE, who explained how she was busy trying to finagle a copy on loan from another parish.  Because yes, it is that good.

What’s in the packet:

• A student book.  Eight chapters of substantial, readable lessons.  Upbeat format.  Rock solid teaching.  You will need one of these for each student.
• A teacher’s guide.  It’s the student book page-by-page, with helpful teaching notes.  Includes some lesson-planning ideas, answer keys of course, additional information about the Theology of the Body, and supplemental material on difficult topics.  If you are teaching this as a class, you need this book.
• The parent’s guide.  This is a small book (75 pages, pocket-size) that explains what students are learning.  It is more elevated, adult-level content, focused on how to parent middle-schoolers — it is not a re-hash of the student guide at all.
• The DVD collection.  There is a set of videos for each chapter of lesson, plus additional material on difficult topics, and a show-this-to-the-parents chapter that explains what the course is about.  The videos are fun, held the interest of my small test-audience of adults (me) and kids (mine), and add significantly to the content of the course.  You would want these if you were teaching this as a class.

What does the course cover?

Well, the focus is John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, but it comes down to: How do I live?  What will make me happy?  And what do I do with this body I’m growing into?

Most of this is not about sex.  It’s mostly about virtue, identity, and love.  How do I love and respect myself and others?  How do I build good relationships?  How do I know what God wants me to do?  It’s a serious, useful, substantial set of lessons that really teach how to be the kind of person God wants you to be.

–>I read the student workbook first.  I found it helpful for me, personally.  To the point that in my opinion, parishes would do well to offer the course to both teens and their parents.  As in: I myself, a grown-up, NFP-using, CCD-teaching, cave-dwelling bona fide catholic dweeb lady, found this to be a course that pushed me to grow in my Christian life.

What Age Student?

The books are targeted towards middle-schoolers — grades 6th to 8th.  I may be under-estimating his maturity, but I felt that my own 6th grade boy, who lives a fairly sheltered catholic-homeschool life, and is not one bit interested in girls, he was not ready to fully benefit from the program.  I held onto a copy of the student book for us to use at home, and when my parish offers it next year (please God), I will send him then.  But for girls (who mature earlier), and for boys and girls who are more fully immersed in our sex-saturated culture, this is about on target for as young as 6th grade.

Sex-related topics are taught in a wider context.  First students learn how we use our bodies to communicate, how we must make an effort to grow in virtue and purity, and how we should not use others for our own gratification, within the wider context of regular life.  It is only after these essentials are thoroughly explored, many weeks into the course, that students are shown how they apply specifically to sex.

Sexual topics are dealt with directly but modestly.  If you don’t know what porn is, all you’ll find out is that it is “the display of images for the purpose of arousing lust”.  (Lust is “a vice that causes people to view others as objects for sexual use”).   So this is a step more mature than earlier-grades catechesis, where the details of “impurity” are left entirely to the reader’s imagination.  If your student is not yet ready to learn about the existence of pornography, sexting, and fornication, hold off on this course for now.

Difficult topics are not presented directly to teens.  There are some video segments the instructor can choose to present depending on the maturity of the group, as well as supplemental teaching material in the teacher’s manual.  One teaching technique I found very helpful was a script where a teacher reads a scenario (young people gathering in the alley behind a movie theater), but the actual misbehavior is not specified.  The teacher then asks: What do you think was happening there?  It’s an opening for students to share the kinds of things they know are going on in their community, which the instructor can then address as appropriate.

I’m cheap.  Or poor.  Do I need to buy the whole nine yards?

The materials are made to be used together.  For a knowledgeable parent wanting to teach at home for the minimal investment, purchasing just the student book would provide a substantial lesson for the least cash outlay.  Note however: The other items do add to the overall content of the course. This isn’t a case of the videos just repeating what the book says, or the parent book being a miniature version of the student book.  Each element contributes new and useful material.  If I were teaching this in the classroom, I would want the whole collection, no question about it.  As a parent, I would want my children to view the videos.

Is it Protestant-friendly?

It’s a very Catholic program.  (Don’t let the “Pope John Paul II” thing fool you.)  You’ll hear references to saints, to the sacraments, the Catholic faith.  BUT, keep in mind, this is all just normal healthy human life.  Love, virtue, modesty, chastity — these are for the whole human race.  The message is right on target with what any Christian youth program would want to teach.  So if you are comfortable with Catholic-trappings,  you could work with the whole course as-is, and just explain to your audience that it was made by Catholics.  If not, you may want to get the materials for yourself, and use them to train yourself how to teach these topics to your teens.

Summary:  I give it a ‘buy’ recommend, if you are responsible for teaching a young person how to act like a human being.  Thanks again to our sponsor The Catholic Company, who in no way requires that I like the review items they send, but would like me to remind you that they are a fine source for a Catechism of the Catholic Church or a Catholic Bible.

Simmering.

Thank you to Bearing for linking to this free pdf booklet by Fr. Longenecker on St. Benedict for Busy Parents.  I have been so desperate for something to read . . . desperate enough to crack the pages of White Fang, which does not interest me in the least, but it’s on my shelves for certain schoolchildren, and what else was I going to read?  Now I’ve got 25 pages of reprieve from that monster.

–> The library is right out, because I absolutely cannot keep track of one more thing right now, and the library means about twenty more things, all hidden under mattresses and stuck behind dressers by the time the third renewal comes around.  Sometimes, being a person who is simply not interested in television is maybe not all it’s cracked up to be.  Even if actually Eric Sammons is right.  (He is.)

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In other news, if you had were one of the people (contacted privately) praying for the best dog in the world in her recent illness, she is home and looking  a little better.  Looks like a case of thyroid gone AWOL, guess that happens to middle-aged ladies of many species.  Venison and rice and a big bone boiling on the stove for her now, the rest of us I think are having frozen pizza.

Writing today — Good Friday — is nerve-wracking.  It cannot be done well.  It is the day we remember we are small and weak and mostly useless, and that if God Himself were to come and take us by the hand, we’d probably still screw it up.  (And, happily: God knows this, and will come do it anyway.  Lamb slain since the foundation of the world.  It is His nature, to pour himself out for us.)

But anyway I want to point today to the battle in front of us.  Darwin gave us a snippet yesterday, and if you read the combox at either of his blogs, you get the picture.  You already knew about it, of course.  If you are catholic and you can fog a mirror, you know that our church is a giant jumble of bickering and snippiness.

It is a battlefield.  Our Church.

When the Lord of the Rings movies came out, I found it curious to learn that Peter Jackson’s specialty was horror movies.  Then I thought: Yes, of course.  War is always horror.*  

And so, our church is festooned with all the horrors of battle — the injured, the angry, the bitter, the violent, the sadistic.  And all the wonders: self-sacrifice, obedience, heroism, love unto death.  Jesus has promised the gates of Hell shall not prevail against us.  The implication is that those gates shall certainly give it their best in trying.

It is thus not surprising, that having so thoroughly torn apart American families, having so successfully pitted parents against their children, even to the point of murder, having made every virtue the object of social scorn, and every sin the object the great praise, Satan should now set his sights on our Catholic schools.  It is not enough for him, to attack our parish schools where he will.  He must incite us to civil war, pitting catholic families against the schools and, where he is able, catholic schools against families.

This is nonsense.

Refuse.

Refuse.

Do not be the infantry and the cavalry taking shots at one another.  Fight the real enemy.

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I wish you a very good Friday.

And if, like me, you are perhaps not so successful at being good, then may it at least be a very grateful Friday.

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*A similar case:  Mel Gibson and The Passion.  A most violent day.  Who else could render it so clearly, except someone who specialized in bringing violence to the theaters and living rooms of the world?  God can use anyone.  Anyone at all.