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2006 Advent/Christmas
The Twelve Days of Christmas
Preparing Children for the Sundays of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany
Winter Wisdom and Christian Character
Receiving the Prophetic, Priestly and Royal Gift of Children
Music Suggestions: Year C

Mary Catherine Berglund

Saint Athanasius (297–373), the brilliant Alexandrian theologian (and hardnosed ecclesiastical politician), was a youth when he wrote his enthusiastic On the Incarnation of the Word of God. Christians have frequently returned in wonder and joy to the statement of Athanasius that the Word took on our human nature in order that we humans can share in his divine nature. Athanasius, in fact, expressed his thought in a much more striking fashion: the Word became human in order that we humans might become divine (54). Children cannot wholly understand and appreciate the depth of Athanasius’ thought (nor, probably, can we adults), but the insight of the great explicator of our faith leads us straight into the heart of the Advent-Christmas season: the Advent-Christmas liturgy is celebration both of the familiar, stupendous truth that the Word became a human person and also of the awesome reality that by becoming human, the Word enabled human persons to become ever more like God.

The Gospels Point the Way
The Gospels of the season offer a way into this reality. On the First Sunday of Advent, Jesus himself sets the tone of the season, in fact, what should be the tone of our lives: live now as if the kingdom is imminent. Hearing the words of Jesus with the thought of Athanasius in mind, as well as Paul’s words of exhortation to the Thessalonians on this same Sunday, we could not offer a better response than resolution to strive, during the season, to become more like our God in our very flesh. The season’s subsequent Gospel readings give us superb help in our efforts to do this. John the Baptizer, whom we meet on the Second and Third Sundays of Advent, demands us to shape our lives in accord with kingdom values: even if we are not Scrooges or bullies or extortionists, we should still hear the cry of John as incentive to increasing generosity, greater gentleness and scrupulous responsibility. Mary, always our model par excellence, enters the liturgy on the Fourth Sunday of Advent and remains primary in our consciousness for several weeks in her other-oriented pregnancy, in humble childbirth and in offering her child to others, in respectful motherhood. John reappears on the Feast of the Baptism of Christ, at the close of the season and he subordinates his entire ministry to the coming ministry of God’s favored one.

The Call to Be More Like Jesus
Leaders of children’s Liturgy of the Word, as well as liturgy-oriented religion teachers, might present the Advent-Christmas Gospels as a repeated, multi-faceted call to become more and more like Jesus. We encourage the children, as the weeks go by, to follow John’s sensible advice; to be like Mary in her outreach to her aging relative, her welcome of strangers come to worship her child, her acceptance of God’s challenging plans for her life as a mother; to imitate John in seeing his life as gaining meaning only insofar as it points to Jesus. School children might like to create “Advent-Christmas Journals” in which they weekly illustrate the Gospel on one page and themselves living in response to the Gospel on the facing page. Such a project is too time-consuming for children during a Sunday Liturgy of the Word, but the leader might create (for example, with the help of an artistic friend) a set of simple pictures illustrating the Gospels, and then give the pictures week by week as handouts with instructions to the children to create a second picture illustrating their response. The children might collect their pictures in folders which they can decorate with Christmas wrapping paper and ribbon and with gold or silver paint pens or glitter glue. They may even find appropriate Christmas cards to enhance their collections.

Younger children might employ gestures to remember the Gospels: embracing a person in need, cradling a newborn child, showing the child to visitors, wiping away tears of worry and tears of joy. Review the sequence on successive Sundays to support the children in their efforts to become more and more Christ-like. For older children, whom gestures may embarrass or bore, you might plan a series of very simple tableaux to make the connections. For both groups of children, the whole set of gestures or tableaux can be enclosed by John’s gesture of pointing out the coming one.

The leader who would like to read Athanasius’ treatise can find it easily on the Internet. The site www.spurgeon.org begins the text with a wonderful essay by C.S. Lewis on the benefit and the delight of reading ancient texts.

Mary Catherine Berglund has advanced degrees in Scripture and liturgy. She is an experienced teacher and has ministered with children in the Liturgy of the Word in Richmond, Virginia, for many years. She is the author of Gather The Children: Celebrate the Word with Ideas, Activities and Prayer. She is married and has three grown children.