Lesson Plan: Pysanky-inspired Easter Eggs

Before we completely abandon the Easter theme--

Last week in our World Religion class, we made eggs inspired by the Ukrainian technique of decorating eggs called Pysanky.  The traditional art of Pysanky is kind of like batik on eggs; that is, the artists uses wax to over up the parts of the egg they want to keep the existing color, then dip the eggs into increasingly dark dyes.  So, for example, they first cover up what they want to remain white, then dip the egg into yellow dye.  Next they apply more wax to the areas they want to keep yellow (without removing the wax on the white areas), and then dip the egg in the next darkest color (usually orange or light pink).  This continues until the eggs have been dyed their darkest colors, usually dark blue, purple, or black.  After they have dried completely, the artist uses heat to remove the wax, revealing the multi-colored designs the wax have protected over multiple dying cycles.  They can end up being really fabulous.

Obviously, this is a long and involved process that doesn't fit well into a limited class time.  So we kind of faked our way through it by using masking tape instead of wax.  We couldn't get the fine lines of true Pysanky, and with the number of people we had and our time constraints, the students couldn't dip them in too many colors.  But it did give them the idea of how it worked so they could explore it more at home.

But more than simply a craft activity, we also discussed things related to Easter as we dyed our eggs.  For example, I asked them what the life and/or death of Jesus had to do with eggs.  They came up with lots of creative ideas, but then I let them know the answer--nothing, really.  Dying Easter eggs, such as Pysanky, is a hold-over tradition from pagan times.  In the case of the Ukranians, for example, eggs became sacred symbols and talismans because the ancient people worshiped birds because they could fly up to speak with the Sun God, which was their highest diety.  So decorating eggs became part of their spring solstice celebration known in English as Ostara (which is where the word Easter came from).  Because in these celebrations, the eggs were used as a symbol for spring and the rebirth of the Earth, when the Christians came along, they allowed the pagans to continue their old traditions, but just tried to convince them that the rebirth was not of the Earth, but of Jesus.   It was techniques like these--assimilating pre-existing rituals rather than trying to eradicate them--that helped Christianity spread through so many different cultures to become the largest religion in the world today.

However, I also encouraged the student to think of the multiple dying cycles as representing the many different types of trials that Jesus went through during Holy Week, or the last week of his normal human life on Earth.  That is, obviously the focus is on his physical death by crucifiction.  But also during that week, he had to suffer doubts and abandonment (his friends fell asleep during his final hours of freedom), betrayal and denial by his disciples, false claims and judgements by both religious and political authorities,   rejection by the masses who had acclaimed his entrance into Jeruselum only days before, physical torture, and attempts to mock and humiliate him.  His ability to retain his faith and his dignity, and even to forgive those who participated in all these trials, are inspiring lessons in themselves, regardless of what religious beliefs you have about truth and/or meaning of the crucifixion and resurrection.

Anyway, we had a good discussion and created some pretty eggs, even in our rushed and limited situation.  Here are some of the eggs we made:

Lesson Plan: Celtic Christian Prayers

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!  I hope the Leprechauns were kind to you.  They visit us every year, but didn't cause too much mayhen this time...  And my son and I did a great Green activity, which was to visit the beautiful gardens at the Arboretum at NC State, where all the flowering trees are blooming beautifully, before coming home to our new tradition of eating Bangers and Mash for St. Patrick's Day Dinner.

But last week in our World Religion class, where we have just started studying Christianity, we prepared for Saint Patrick's Day by studying Celtic Christian Prayers.  Ireland is an interesting place in terms of Christianity because it retained its Pagan religion longer than many other places that are now Christian, and I believe the Irish Christianity has more of an Earth-based-religious flavor than many other strands of Christianity.

For this lesson, I gave the students several pages of Celtic Chrisian Prayers (there are also current Celtic Prayers that are more Pagan, but the ones we used were all directed to the Christian concept of one God, along with Jesus as his special Son/Helper/Teacher).  We read them and then the students journaled about what they had in common and/or what seemed different to them from traditional Christian prayers they knew.  The list we came up with were:

1.  A concentration on concrete, rather than abstract, things or themes
2.  A focus on everyday life and/or common items
3.  More emphasis on gratitude for simple things than asking for "miracles" or personal goals
4.  Much attention to natural items

After that, I had the students write their own prayers or blessings, as influenced by Celtic Christian prayer philosophy.  As always, what they came up with was very different, but very beautiful.  Here are some examples:

May the rain nourish the plants
May the plants nourish the people
May the people nourish the Earth,
Let the earth provide for its providers.


May friends assist and bless you
And may beds aspire to rest you
And may you live under a roof
And may some dogs always woof
And may you earn substantial dough
And may you wear a wig Afro
And may your soup always taste good
And may your forest always have wood
And other stuff to be taken care
And may you have a rhyming prayer.


Let God be upon you when you are going through hard times.
Let God help you through your struggles and let him help you get out of the struggle.


May the sky always be blue
May the grass always be green
May the Earth always be saved
And may the people always want to save it.


To wake up looking at the trees
With the birds' songs in the air,
To break the fast
With healthy, nourishing food,
To fill the day
With creative, productive work,
To end the day
With loving family and good friends,
And to look forward to the next day filled with the same,
For this, God, I thank you.

They were all lovely and heartfelt reflections of the personality of each student, and I really appreciated each one.  So it was one of the best Saint Patrick's-related activities that I have ever done, as well as I great way to look at a different Christian tradition than most may be exposed to, at least here in North Carolina.

Lesson Plan: Buddhist Prayer Flags

Of course, we couldn't complete our World Religion unit on Buddhism without doing Buddhist Prayer Flags!  This class was run by artist and teacher extraordinaire, the Reverend Donna Belt!  She explained the tradition of prayer flags, and the fact that they are hung in a set order by color, which symbolize different elements.  So the traditional order is:
Blue--representing sky
White--representing air or wind
Red--representing fire
Green--representing water
Yellow--representing earth

She discussed the fact that the flags are called "Wind Horses," and that the belief is that every time the wind moves the flag, it send the energy and prayers contained in the flag, not to a divine being, but through the space, blessing everyone.  So it is a belief practice much in line with the Buddhist tradition of universal connection and compassion.

Reverend Belt helped the students create universal healing prayers involving all of the different elements.  They they wrote those prayers on their flags, sometimes also decorating them with a horse image or other decorative elements.

Once they were completed, the teachers demonstrated the traditional way to hang a set of prayer flags...

First one

Then another

Then many

It can be a very powerful--and beautiful--way to talk about Buddhist beliefs.

Lesson Plan: Zentangles

We did such a wonderful activity as part of our Buddhism unit in World Religions.  One week we focused on Zen Buddhism, which has a great focus on being in the moment.  I wanted the students to have a Zen experience, so we did three activities in a row in complete silence (a total of 30 minutes, which is a LONG time not to talk when you are 12-14).

First, we did a silent Zen meditation that focused completely on the breathing.  That lasted for 10 minutes (and felt like a LONG 10 minutes for some of them, although others found it relaxing).  We ended up with a 5 minute silent journaling activity, in which they wrote down their experience of the three events.

In between those, however, we did 15 minutes of this wonderful thing called Zentangle ®.

We used Zentangle as a drawing meditation.  It is a deceptively-simple art form created by Maria Thomas and Rick Roberts that is supposed to improve the artist's focus, awareness, feelings of freedom and relaxation, and artistry by creating repetitive patterns on a small (3.5 inches) square of paper.  The square is first divided into sections by a few lines, and then each portion of the square is filled with a different pattern.  In its purest state, it is supposed to be only black and white, but some add colors as well.

The students and I all LOVED doing this.  Compared to the breathing meditation, the students felt that the time seemed to fly by and that it was easy to maintain the silence.  Making a Zentangle  is very liberating, because even those who claimed "I can't draw" felt like they could draw lines and "doodle."  It does capture your focus and your attention in a very relaxing way, and is mostly spontaneous, and yet repetitive.  And it does draw you into kind of a Zen experience.  Apparently, people are using it all sorts of way, including doing it before tests to get students into a relaxed and focused way, or as part of the process of addiction recovery and other related theraputic uses.

It's the sort of thing that is hard to explain.  But I highly recommend you visit the Zentangle website, or other online resources about this new art form (one of my favorites is Zentangle Patterns), get the basic instructions, and try it yourself!

Below we have the beautiful tiles (as they are called by their creators, Maria and Rick) created by our class.  As always, even though everyone was given the same materials and directions, the results turned out to be very different and reflective of the varied personalities in the group.

Curriculum Resource: Buddhism with Dharma Games

I recently found a cute little website when I was looking for things for my World Religion class.  Buddhism and computer games--two things you wouldn't necessarily put together.  But the site Dharma Games has a number of computer games, but all with Buddhist themes.

The games are mostly typical game formats--pinball, concentration, pacman-like--but are overlaid with Buddhist concepts and imagery.  So for most of them, you don't really have to know a lot about Buddhism to play them, nor do they really help you experience or work through Buddist principles or thinking.  But still, it is a fun and different way to get students to learn a little bit about Buddhism.

They have one called It's Meditation Time, which is a puzzle game where you have to get all the Buddhist monks to sit down in order to meditate.  But when one monk changes position, the others next all take the opposite position from before (so that the neighboring monks that were seated are now standing and vice versa).  It's a good puzzle, because I have no idea how you re going to get them all seated.  If you figure it out, let me know in the conments below.

                                                                                    

New Year's Day 2012 Blog: Welcoming the New Year

Welcome to 2012!

That was what I wrote on the white board for the Sunday School class I taught this morning.  We had a really great discussion about "outside of the class" things they enjoyed last year and wanted to do this year. We're going to try for our first-ever "lock-in" for this class, some fun and interesting fundraisers, and some experiential spiritual workshops.  I don't want to give away all of our secrets, but let's just say that have some real "out of the box" ideas that I think our entire spiritual community will enjoy.

In addition to some brainstorming and planning, we did a nice Buddhist meditation that is called "Transcending Karma" that helps us detach from our past, and participated in our annual New Year's Burning Bowl and White Stone Ceremony, which I describe last year in this post.

It was a gorgeous day, so our family had a nature walk to enjoys the great outdoors.  Then we came home and ate our traditional "nuevo-Southern" New Years Dish of white chicken chili (made with black-eyed beans, which we feel compelled to eat on New Years but don't really like on their own, but are delicious in chili) and green salad (I can't cook collards, so we have fresh leafy greens instead).

All in all, a pretty fantastic way to spend the first day of the year.  If the next 364 days go anything like this, we're in for a wonderful year!

This will be the last of my holiday posts.  However, starting tomorrow,  I will be running a time-related series of posts.  What could they be?  Check back tomorrow evening to find out......

Hanukkah Blog 2011: Lighting the Cupcake Menorah

Happy Hanukkah!  The eight-day celebration of Hanukkah begins today, December 20, at sundown.  We are not Jewish, but we have a greater appreciation of Jewish traditions since our study of Judaism in our World Religions class last year.

We are currently in Washington, DC, visiting my father (who lives there) and other family members (who are coming for what my son calls "the annual Cross family Christmas reunion") and seeing the sights.  But if we were at home, I would be tempted to make the fabulous Hanukkah Cupcake Menorah from the very interesting blog, Shiska in the Kitchen.  The cupcakes she makes for her menorah are Coconut Chocolate Chip Cupcakes--doesn't that sound wonderful?  Yum!

She also has a nice recipe for a more traditional Hanukkah food, potato latkes, along with some tips about how to make these deceptively-simple treats turn out neither burned nor soggy.

But blessings to any Jewish readers who celebrate Hanukkah, while the rest of us can just enjoy the good food!

Lesson Plan: Bodhi Day, or Rohatsu in Buddhism

Happy Bodhi Day, or Rohatsu in more traditional Buddhist language.  Rohatsu is the celebration of the day that the Buddha achieved enlightenment under the Bodhi tree.  The day is recorded as the 8th day of the 12th month, which makes it December 8 for us in the US, but it may be celebrated other days in the Asian or indigenous culture.

At least one of the celebrations of Bodhi Day involves decorating a Bhodhi tree (which is a type of fig tree, or related to the ficus tree) in bright, electric lights, and colorful decorations.   This is yet another of the basic religions that is geared to protecting the immediate spa

So when we opened our study of Buddhism in our World Religion class, we began with practices such as Bodhi Day.  We created trees for students to decorate, either as Rohatsu trees or in their more original format.   You can see the trees below:

Visiting A Hindu Temple

This week in our World Religions class we had a real treat.  We visited the Sri Venkateswara Hindu Temple here in Cary, NC.  While there are quite a number of temples in our area, this one is the only one I know of that was built in accordance with an ancient Hindu tradition that requires exact placement of different elements, etc. (but don't worry--they also had to meet the US building code regulations, our guide assured us).

We loved visiting the temple, in part because it was so different than the churches that most of us are accustomed to seeing.  Its several towers were covered with elaborately molded concrete displaying vines, gods, monster guards, and other curly cues.

We had to leave our shoes outside the fence before entering the complex.  Hindu temples always open to the East, according to our guide, which is thought to be the place of the gods, so that was where this entrance was.  However, you are supposed to go around the temple outside from East to South to West to North, and to honor at the smaller shrines outside, before entering the main building.

Once inside, you are again expected to show your respect to the minor deities and creatures--in this case, two wives and the giant bird the god rides--before coming to worship at the main alter, which in this case is Venkateswara, which is one of the avatars of Visnu, the god of protection.  There is no set time for worship and no sermon or service; rather, people just come at their own time and honor the god/s in their own way.  They believe that the god actually inhabits the statues that they build, so it is a very personal connection between the worshiper and the deity.

It's a great thing to see, and a great concept of religion to consider.  If there is a Hindu temple around you, I recommend that you check it out.

Studying Hinduism Through Art

In our World Religions class this week, we had as a guest speaker the Interfaith minister Rev. Donna Belt, who specializes in exploring spirituality through art.  She did an exploratory art project with the students that helped them connect parts of Hinduism to their own lives.

We started on the floor, with Donna talking about her own attraction to and study of Hinduism, then heard a version of the famous Hindu story of Ganesha, the elephant-headed god who is the remover of obstacles:

One of the lessons of Ganesh is to focus on possibilities and creative ways to overcome obstacles, rather than focusing on our limitations.  We did a brief mediation on obstacles in our own life, and then moved to an art project on the tables.

Donna gave everyone some watercolor paper with an outline of Ganesh's head on it.  The students were to use not only watercolors, which can flow together in ways we can't control, but also to adapt the watercolors by using them with items that give other unpredictable effects, such as scattering the paint by putting salt on it, adding wrinkles with plastic wrap, or using crayons for wax resist ornamentations.

After the painting was done, we returned to a circle on the floor, and each artist displayed his/her work and explained his/her design and color choices, as well as discussing anything they had discovered about themselves through this process.

They did an excellent join on their paintings, so I wanted to share them below: