Preparing the congregation and parents for this special liturgy gives you another opportunity to explain the Word as a significant part of the Eucharist. Training presiders and helpers for the liturgy can lead the participating adults to a keener awareness of the gospels. Most important, the children in the parish are given an opportunity to break open the Word at their own level of understanding. I like to remember that children are not just the future Church. They are also a part of the Church today and deserve to receive at least equivalent benefits.   

The important thing to remember about the Liturgy of the Word for children is that it is liturgy, not a time for catechesis. It is neither a convenient way to babysit children beyond nursery age nor a Sunday Bible school complete with arts and crafts. Rather, it is a time for children to gather, pray together and break open the Word of God. It is no less sacred and no less estimable than the Liturgy of the Word for adults.

We are a Church of ritual, and children love ritual. Try deviating from a familiar story and youngster will call you on it. We don’t have to fear that by following the rites we will lose our children’s attention. As long as we remember to keep it simple and repeat, week after week, the same procedures and format, the children will make the ritual their own.

In my book Practical Catechesis: Visions and Tasks for Catechetical Leaders, I talk about the importance of understanding children. They do not like to keep still or quiet for long. They are sensate; they like to touch, smell, taste, talk and listen (for a few minutes anyway). It’s okay to do some cutting and pasting if it will help them understand the Scripture better, but crafts for the sake of having something to take home is not of value.

It is important to set an appropriate environment. Keep the decor simple and comfortable. Make sure the setting, particularly the table or lectern where the book of Gospels is placed, is kept the same with only the color changing for the appropriate seasons. Call children forward at the beginning of Mass and process out solemnly together. Done this way, children will know where their parents are and can return to them with a minimum of fuss after the prayers of the faithful.

Finally, make sure you read and follow the rite from the Directory for Masses With Children published by the Sacred Congregation for Divine Worship. (If you would like to read more about adapting the rites for children, click here.)

While the Liturgy of the Word is not supposed to be a time for catechesis, it will still be a learning experience. Hopefully, no youngster will walk away without having learned something. At the very least, children will leave knowing that they are respected and loved by the parish community of which they are a valued member.

The themes for each year in the God Is Calling series are Yahweh Calls (select stories from Hebrew Scriptures), Jesus Lives (stories from the gospels) and Spirit With Us (stories form the epistles and lives of the saints). The series contains storybooks with matching Together Time books that offer children and adults a chance to share their faith. Basically, Mary and I wanted to talk about the “plan of God” throughout salvation history, beginning with the story of creation and ending with the reader’s own story. (The reader is asked to write the last story in the “Spirit” storybook, so they can see they are a part of God’s plan.)

The Leader’s Guide includes the usual help in setting up the program in your parish. It also contains the once-a-month large group lessons for intergenerational gatherings. The sample you will see is the intergenerational lesson for “Spirit of Prayer.” (Click here to see this lesson.)

After the intergenerational gathering, the parents are sent home to read and talk about two stories found under the heading. In “Spirit of Belonging,” the stories are “The Church at Home” (the story of Nympha and the house church taken from Colossians 4:15) and “The Woman Who Laughed With God” (the story of Sister Thea Bowman).

There are several chapters in the Leader’s Guide that explain how this series can be used for children’s catechumenate. The intergenerational family group that gathers monthly becomes the smaller faith community for the child, and a support group for the parents.

We need humility to pray, to acknowledge our need for God. The late Anthony Bloom, monk and archbishop of the Russian Orthodox Church in Great Britain, starts his book Beginning to Pray with true humility: “As I am a beginner myself, I will assume that you are also beginners, and we will try to begin together.” An archbishop claims to be like me: a beginner at prayer!

Okay, I’ve been praying in some way nearly all of my life, but as with any relationship, my prayer relationship with God changes and grows, ebbs and flows. It’s a dance of sorts, and there are always new steps to learn. I’m not today the same as I was yesterday much less 10 or 20 years ago. My relationship with God reflects those changes—and my prayer will too. At least it should. And the more that God is revealed to me, the more I realize that while in some ways we pick up where we left off, in others, we begin anew.

Beginning to Pray is a little gem for those of us who are working on our prayer relationship with God. He addresses “The Absence of God, “Knocking at the Door,” “Going Inward,” “Managing Time” and “Addressing God”—all basics of prayer—with the wisdom of one whose life of prayer is dynamic and rich and ever-growing. I recommend it for your Lenten reading and for sharing with small groups and individuals who are also beginners at prayer. I’ve selected an audio clip from the chapter “The Absence of God” to share with you (Windows Media | RealMedia). I pray that it entices you to explore this audiobook and helps you make a renewed commitment to your prayer relationship with God this Lenten season.

This year I’ve found an exciting little book to help me focus on my annual Lenten renewal effort: Make Room for God: Clearing Out the Clutter  by Susan Rowland. I first picked up this book thinking, “O.K., I need to clear up the clutter in my office and in my home, so maybe this will be helpful.” I had picked up what I thought were similar books in the past, each one promising to show me how to categorize, organize, simplify and codify all the “things” in my life (papers, books, possessions, acquisitions), like those “get organized” shows on the Home Improvement Channel on cable TV. But within a few pages, I realized that Susan was offering me much, much more. Her message is simple and straightforward: Our lives are cluttered, but so are our spirits. We can organize the things around us, but we still have the “clutter” of our feelings of discontent, anger, disconnect, jealousy, abandonment, bitterness—all those things that fill up our spiritual space, leaving little room for God to enter in and fill our lives.

Susan leads you through five areas of concern—Self-Care Without Clutter, An Environment Without Clutter, Productivity Without Clutter, A Spirit Without Clutter and A God Without Clutter—on a journey of self-discovery and self-simplifying. She shares her own journey, suggests tasks and strategies to make tangible changes and shows how she used these strategies to help herself become a stronger, healthier, more productive, more peaceful and more spiritually cleansed individual, with plenty of room for God. And, after all, isn’t that what prayer is all about—making room for God in your heart and in your life?