Holy Week is coming, and we are getting ready to walk with Jesus towards the cross. The following creative project is one I found here. It is designed for kids, but I am using it this week as a meditative practice. Each step provides an opportunity to pause and contemplate the events of the Easter journey and allow God to speak us afresh through the story.
Supplies:
- Cardboard (cut 6 ½” x 9”)
- Pencil or marker.
- Yarn
- White glue
- Tinfoil
- Scissors
- Paint brush
- Water
- Tape
- Colored permanentmarkers
- Black Sharpie
Directions:
- With the pencil, draw a Good Friday scene on the cardboard as suggested here:. Be sure your spaces aren’t too small. Starting with the cross, run a bead of white glue over the pencil marks. Then cut and glue pieces of yarn over the glue. Glue and place yarn over all the lines in the picture. Now read through one of the gospel accounts of the crucifixion. Contemplate your unfinished picture in the light of the story. What is God saying to you?
- Cut a piece of aluminium foil that is about two inches wider and two inches longer than your picture. On the dull side of the tinfoil, run lines of white glue around the edges and through the center of the tinfoil. With the paint brush that has been dipped in water, spread the glue completely over the back of the foil.Now center the picture, yarn side down, over the aluminium foil and fold the edges of the tinfoil to the back of the picture and tape the corners. With your finger, press over the front of the foil-covered picture, sliding your thumb close to the yarn. Read through the story again, perhaps from a different gospel. What stands out for you as you contemplate your unfinished picture?
- With the colored permanent markers, fill the spaces in with color. I found that it works best to outline the space with the chosen color and then using the marker, sort of on its side, to fill in the area. Run over the raised area (yarn) with the black marker. Read through the third gospel account of the crucifixion. Contemplate your completed picture. What is God saying to you
This page is out of date. Please see our updated Good Friday Resources.
Over this last week, I have been posting prayers, liturgies and worship resources for Holy week. I have already posted resources for Stations of the Cross but here are some additional resources for Good Friday that I thought you might enjoy. I have interspersed them with images of the crucifixion from different cultures as I find reflecting on these remind me that Christ died for all cultures and all nations.
Posts and Resources
- This post from Lilly Lewin: Freerange Friday: A Good Friday TakeAway has some great ideas for Good Friday.
- Also, consider downloading her Experiential Stations of the Cross.
- Scott Erickson Art shares resources for Good Friday services including Stations of the Cross.
- Take time this week to go through the sessions in the Lenten retreat: Women of the Passion at Sacred Space. “A retreat offers a chance to take a step back from the pressure of daily life, to reflect prayerfully on the current state of your relationships: with God, with the people around you, and with the world.” Very powerful!
- And if you don’t know what Good Friday is about check this.
- Crosswalk.com also provides a great history and readings for Good Friday.
- If you want to get creative: Make a Tiffany Style Cross.
- Lent and Beyond has just updated their Good Friday quotes, poems, prayers and hymns and other resources including music and devotionals for Good Friday.
- Textweek.com is always alive with wonderful resources for the season
- And from Bosco Peters in N.Z. a Good Friday liturgy
- Gone is the Light is a powerful reflective song by Steve Bell.
- Many Godspace contributors love to write prayers for each of the significant days during Easter week. Here are some that we have written in the past.
- What’s So Good About Friday – Rowan Wyatt
- This is my 2015 Good Friday Prayer:
This is the first Good Friday prayer I wrote and still one of the most popular.
The following is part of a liturgy I wrote that I often return to:
Jesus you took bread and broke it,
You shared it with your friends.
As you were broken to feed us with the bread of life.
Jesus you took wine and poured it out,
Grapes crushed and drained of life.
As you were crushed and drained of your life blood.
Crucifixion Art by He Qi
Here is part of a longer liturgy designed for church or small group use:
Today we walk with Christ in the dark shadow of the cross,
Knowing we have weighed him down,
Our burdens crushed his shoulders,
His suffering is for us,
For us he willingly endured death.
Let us trust in God alone,
And walk the way of the cross together,
Let us move forward without fear into God’s eternal purposes.
Then we will never know disgrace,
And we will learn to praise our God who never abandons us.
Please check out our complete list of Godspace resources for Lent through Holy Week.
The following prayer may seem like an unusual one to publish as a Lenten prayer but Lent is meant to be about re-evaluating our life focus and more than that about reconciling ourselves to the love of God as I mentioned in the post United by Love Not Doctrine.
Recognizing the depth of God’s love as it is expressed in the story of Jesus walk towards the Cross, falling in love with this God whose love has not limits, really does change everything in a way that is totally transformative of our lives.
The prayer is attributed to Father Pedro Arrupe (1903- 1991) from the Basque region of Spain who became the 28th Superior General of the Society of Jesus. I was first given this prayer on a card several years ago but have recently also come across it on Ignatian Spirituality.com
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is,
than falling in love in a quite absolute final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination,
will affect everything.
It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekend,
what you read, who you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in love,
stay in love,
and it will decide everything.
This page is out of date. Please see our updated Maundy Thursday Resource here.
Today, I am focusing on resources for Maundy Thursday, the day before Good Friday, which commemorates Jesus’ last Supper with the disciples and the institution of the Eucharist. Its name of “Maundy” comes from the Latin word mandatum, meaning “command.” This stems from Christ’s words in John 13:34, “A new commandment I give unto you. Love one another as I have loved you”. Many of us associate it with foot washing:
A rite performed by Christ upon his disciples to prepare them for the priesthood and the marriage banquet they will offer, and which is rooted in the Old Testament practice of foot-washing in preparation for the marital embrace (II Kings 11:8-11, Canticles 5:3) and in the ritual ablutions performed by the High Priest of the Old Covenant (contrast Leviticus 16:23-24 with John 13:3-5). The priest girds himself with a cloth and washes the feet of 12 men he’s chosen to represent the Apostles for the ceremony. Read more
It is the oldest of the observances peculiar to Holy Week but seems to have attracted the least attention and I must confess creative suggestions were hard to come by.
Free Maundy Thursday Resource
Our own church, Saint Andrews Episcopal Church in Seattle, hosts an Agape feast and foot washing, one of the most beautiful celebrations I have been to. We re-enact the Last Supper with a wonderful lamb feast, beautiful litany that intertwines scripture and prayer, have the opportunity to wash each other’s feet and then process upstairs to the sanctuary to strip the altar for Good Friday. They have kindly made the liturgy for this celebration available for FREE DOWNLOAD from the Godspace resource centre.
Foot Washing
Foot washing has also taken on new significance for me in recent years as I reread two posts that have been contributed to my blog. Some of you might like to revisit these too.
- The Dirty Job of Special Needs Parenting by Barbara Dittrich
- Living Into the banquet Feast of God
- I also love this post Replacing Holy Week – Towards a Public + Local Liturgy by Brandon Rhodes. and suggest that you also watch this video Brandon put together that spells our some of what they have done since then the concretize their practices.
- Parish Practices: “Re-Placing Holy Week,” with Brandon Rhodes from Parish Collective on Vimeo.
- One form of service you might like to consider for either Maundy Thursday or Good Friday is a Tenebrae service. I like this resource from the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship that helps explain this.
- And an “alternative service from UMC that has some creative ideas here.
- Another creative suggestion is what this Christian school in England did – not just washing feet but cleaning the neighbourhood.
- Or check out the Maundy Thursday resources at re:Worship and those at Textweek.com
Other Customs
I have adapted other customs of Maundy Thursday here that you may like to consider for your own observances:
- Consider a Passover meal like the liturgy available for free above.
- In Germany, Maundy Thursday is known as “Green Thursday” (Grundonnerstag), and the traditional foods are green vegetables and green salad, especially a spinach salad. Consider planning a vegetarian Last Supper banquet for your celebrations and highlight the environmental issues you are concerned about.
- Visit a local homeless camp or home for the elderly (make sure you get permission first) and do foot washing and pedicures for the inhabitants.
- This is the traditional night for an all night vigil of prayer and meditation. Give yours a new twist by holding an all night reading of Dante’s Inferno as St Philips in the Hills Episcopal Church has done for the last 5 years.
- This is a day to reach out and help someone in a special way: consider looking after a child so that the mother could have a free evening, undertaking some mending or darning, humble, unostentatious things like that.
- Visit 3 or 7 local churches or other places of worship after (or before) your own service.
- In Mark Pierson’s Lenten devotional for 2013, he comments: Jesus, a king who acted like a slave. Perhaps on Maundy Thursday, you would like to consider a special way to reach out to those who are still in slavery.
- One symbol of Easter I grew up with that is not so common in the U.S. is hot cross buns which some think originated from a 12th-century English monk who placed the sign of the cross on the buns in honor of Good Friday. So if you want to have your hot crossed buns ready for Good Friday make them on Maundy Thursday, together with your family or community. Here is the recipe I use.
Celebrate with Kids!
- For those celebrating with kids, I rather liked this Fill Your Seder Plate game.
- Ideas for Worship at Home by Assoc. of Presbyterian Church Educators
So consider including this day in your Holy Week celebrations and if you do something creative let me know.
This is part of this series on Resources for Holy Week. Here are all the posts:
What kind of God do I believe in? This is the question that has revolved in my mind since I read Richard Rohr’s Eager to Love: The Alternative Way of Francis of Assisi. He claims that Francis had a a strong maternal concept of God.
Like many of us, I grew up with very patriarchal images of God and I must confess that Rohr’s claims are very liberating for me. Becoming reconciled to an image of a God who is loving and compassionate rather than judging and condemning is another part of my Lenten journey this year.
First Rohr quotes Eric From
In the matriarchal aspect of religion, I love God as an all embracing mother. I have faith in her love, that no matter whether i am poor and powerless, no matter whether I have sinned, she will love me, she will not prefer any other of her children to me whatever happens to me, she will rescue me, will save me, will forgive me. (133)
He goes on to say:
It seems that when God is also allowed to be Mother, then all the children line up as equals, their value based not on performance, but on having been born from the same womb , just as God loves all of “her” creatures equally and unconditionally.
We know that in the presence of both a true God and a good mother, each of us believes ourselves to be, in fact, the favourite, which is exactly what the Jewish people concluded from Yahweh’s maternal way of relating to them. The Jews knew that they were uniquely “chosen” protected and loved. (136)
What so impacted me here is Rohr’s belief that just as a mother sees each of her offspring as special, her favourite, her chosen one, so does God. We are all favourites with God. We are all special and we are all embraced into the community of God’s love and care.
This is part of the story of God that we enter into as we walk with Christ toward the Cross. God’s love is like that of a mother who will do everything possible to protect her loved ones and show them that they are special favourites.
What do you think?
This page is out of date. Please see our updated Celebrating Holy Week with Kids.
Easter Sunday is the central celebration of our faith yet, I struggle more and more because it seems to me that what begins with triumphant shouts of Christ is Risen Alleluiah, and a beautiful flowering of the cross ends with an easter egg hunt.
“It’s great to see the kids so enthusiastic,” people tell me, but is it really? Is an enthusiastic sugar high really a substitute for celebrating the resurrection of Christ? Have we bought into the secular culture so much that we can no longer tell the difference?
Others struggle too. The values emphasized in the easter egg hunt are counter to kingdom values – greed, individualism and competitiveness drive kids to find more candy not to share, but for themselves. And what about the symbolism?
The Easter Bunny is a rabbit-spirit. Long ago, he was called the “Easter Hare”, hares and rabbits have frequent multiple births so they became a symbol of fertility. The custom of an Easter egg hunt began because children believed that hares laid eggs in the grass. The Romans believed that “All life comes from an egg.” Christians too, consider eggs to be “the seed of life” and so they are symbolic of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Why we colour and decorate eggs is not certain but in ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome and Persia eggs were dyed for spring festivals as a sign of fertility.
Now I am all for taking the symbols of the culture and transforming them into the symbols of our faith, but I wonder have we transformed this symbol or has it transformed us? Are our values and our joy in the resurrection of Christ subverted by the secular culture that is all into greed, consumption and competitiveness? Do we miss out on the life that the season is meant to renew in us because we are caught up in another world view?
Having said all that, I think that Holy Week and Easter Sunday in particular should be a wonderful celebration of life and faith for adults and kids. Here are some resources you might like to check out.
I add new resources to my Pinterest boards Lent and Easter with Kids and Prayer Stations with Kids on a regular basis so you might also like to check this out.
Most of the ideas below are easy to do at home, great for celebrating in 20201!
Looking for Crafts?
- This LEGO resurrection garden is a creative approach to the Easter story.
- This article has some great ideas on how to create Prayer stations for Kids.
- One of the most creative ideas for Easter week is what South Wilford Church of England Primary School in Nottingham did for Maundy Thursday.
- And from youthpastor.com, a great suggestion for Holy week stations based on The Lord’s Prayer.
- And here is another set of Stations of the Cross for Kids that is worth looking at.
This tin foil cross craft is also a creative project that I think would appeal to kids and adults alike.
- Faith at home has some good suggestions on activities to participate in with children.
- Christian Montessori has a very good collection of cross related activities – great for storytelling and meditation.
- I also like the originality of this Holy Week in Handprints from Catholic Icing. She also includes the Ultimate Guide for Celebrating with Kids!
- And The Catholic Kid has a variety of colouring pages available for children of all ages.
- Catholic Mom has helpful books and Stations of the Cross for Kids.
- Great ideas for at home celebrating from The Purposeful Mom.
- And a Messianic Passover Seder for Families with Children.
- And here are simple directions for making palm crosses.
- Check out these Seven Ideas for Holy Week at Home by Christine V. Hides.
- Resurrection Day Mini Puzzle Unit is a free download of 10 pages for pre-K to 5th grade kids.
- Or, you might like to consider making Resurrection eggs – to me a better idea than Easter eggs. You could decorate them too.
- In France, the bells, not the Easter bunny, bring the eggs: French Easter Bell craft because the bells stop ringing on Maundy Thursday and don’t ring again until the joyous sound of Easter Sunday.
Want to do some Easter Gardening?
- Make this Easter grace garden with your kids.
- Or this simpler Easter Resurrection Garden
- Or perhaps this mini resurrection garden – which I love because it is a growing garden.
Looking for Recipes?
- Think of making Crown of Thorn bread.
- Or, try the traditional English treat for Good Friday, Hot cross buns, which I grew up with and still like to make every year.
- And I love these creative Easter story cookies inviting kids into a sensual experience of cooking.
Looking for Videos?
Share this with your kids.
Or if your kids are LEGO enthusiasts, this is the video for you;
Or this one:
This is part of this series on Resources for Holy Week. Here are all the posts:
- Resources for Palm Sunday
- Resources for Maundy Thursday
- Resources for Good Friday
- Stations of the Cross
- Resources for Celebrating Holy Week With Kids:
- Resources for Easter Sunday
Please check out our complete list of Godspace resources for Lent through Holy Week
by Christine Sine,
A couple of days ago, with the help of a couple of friends, I planted the early vegetable garden with cauliflowers, cabbages, broccoli, lettuce, Chinese greens, and carrots. I use the square foot method – lots of diversity close together for maximal yield and minimal pest control. I start with well composted soil and try to balance those crops that need lots of fertilizer and drain the soil with those that need little fertilizer and are a net gain to the soil. Then I throw a row cover over them.
Most prolific in the existing garden however and requiring no care at all, are the dandelions. They are probably the most nutritious plants in the garden. The roots can be used for tea, the leaves for salad and the flowers for jelly. It helps to hold the soil together and to bring nutrients up to the surface from deeper down within the soil.
In the garden variety is the spice of life and weeds are an important part of that variety. I think that it is meant to be the same in the body of Christ. We need variety of belief, doctrine and understanding of the truths of God, to build up the soil and reduce the pests so that we can get the best harvest. We need the death of our old understandings to create the most precious nutrient for our soil – compost. And often some of the most important plants (read people here) are those at the margins, the ones that we want to yank out and get rid of, the ones that disrupt our doctrinal certainty and make us uncomfortable – like the mentally ill, the gay and lesbians, the doubters, people of other religions and even the atheists in our midst.
It is no wonder Christ emphasized the need for love not doctrine to hold the body of Christ together. Part of my journey this Lent has been reconciling myself the rich variety of beliefs, attitudes and values that are acceptable to God without judging or condemning those who think and act differently.
Jesus knew that we were not all meant to think alike or look alike. Variety of doctrines are not only acceptable to God but necessary for God’s family to be healthy. The more alike we all look, the more we insist that there is only one Christian worldview that is acceptable, the less adaptable, the less health and the less productive the body of Christ becomes. The more alike we look, the more “fertilizer” we need and the more “pests” attack us. As Samir Selmanovic says in his fascinating book It’s Really All About God, we need atheist to ask the questions we are afraid to ask ourselves, and we need people of other Christian world views and of other faiths to broaden our understanding of God. We need those at the margins to pull us our of our self righteousness and remind us that we are all sinners, only acceptable because of the grace of God. Christ came to the unacceptable and those at the margins – the Samaritans, prostitutes and lepers – and did unacceptable things in the spirit of love and asks us to too.
Unbind us Lord that we might live,
Unbind us from our sins,
From our prejudices
And our lack of love.
Unbind us Lord that we might live,
Live in unity,
and in peace,
and in love.
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