 My name is Jared O'Shea, and as many of you will realize, I'm Australian. I really am, even though I don't talk like Crocodile Dundee. So we're here today to talk about teaching the Eucharist at different age levels. And we're not going to leap straight into that, that is, the different age levels, because the more important thing is to teach the Eucharist to human beings. And we need to understand what they are before we actually teach them. I've got up here on the screen already a beautiful image of something very special. It's the road to Emmaus and the words of St. Luke. And their eyes were opened and they recognized him. How intriguing that those disciples who were walking around with Jesus for a long time did not recognize him after he had risen from the dead and was walking beside them. And it was not until the breaking of the bread that they did recognize him. What does that mean? Does it not mean that Jesus wants to be recognized after his resurrection in the Eucharist itself? I have another famous quote there by the great Pope Leo. And he said, in a sermon on Ascension Thursday, 451 A.D., our Redeemer's visible presence has passed into the sacraments. Just think about that. The visible presence of Christ on earth is now in the sacraments. If you want to meet Jesus now, you cannot ignore the sacraments. And according to Pope Leo, this is a doctrine whose authority is accepted by believing hearts and enlightened from on high. That's true. You can't believe this unless you were enlightened from on high. And so we don't rush into teaching the Eucharist at any level. We must first prepare the heart to be enlightened from on high so that we can recognize him in the breaking of the bread. That's where I want to start. Now, my doctoral work is in the area of theological anthropology. And as a teacher, I always found this incredibly important as well as fascinating. I studied in particular the relationship between nature and grace. Who are we by nature and what are we given by grace? And when you're educating children or adults, that's what you need to understand. We are not just bodies, nor are we just spirits. We are both. I want to do a little bit of preliminary work now. On some basic theological anthropology. The normal way human beings enter into their understanding about anything is through the senses. Saint Thomas Aquinas would have it nothing in the mind that is not first in the senses. He doesn't actually fully believe that, by the way, but mostly that's the way it is. And so if we're to enter into the Eucharist, there must be something that our bodies can sense and there is. Once our bodies have been able to sense something, we move to the next level. Our minds have to work out what we have. We refer to this as our rationality. And believe it or not, rationality has two aspects. And you may be surprised at the first one. The heart is part of our rationality. As well as the mind. Let's just explore that a little. Some here may be old enough to remember the television series Star Trek. Is anybody going to admit to that? OK, you will remember Mr. Spock, who is very strange because he seems to lack heart. He doesn't understand some things that are going on. Because even though he claims to be completely logical, he's got a dimension missing from his rationality. And anybody who shuts down the effective dimension, affective dimension is missing something. So you would think that we're finished, wouldn't you? We need to activate the body, the heart and the mind. And usually in that order. But it's not over when we've done that. There's another stage. We refer to it in Latin as intellectus. But let's stick with English understanding. Do you know there are many times when you can have all the information, but you just don't get it. You lack understanding. And so there is a certain point where you must leap over a wall, so to speak. And suddenly come to the aha moment when you understand. This is leading somewhere, by the way. When you're teaching children, particularly young children, this is the order you must go in and you can go a long way. You can help their bodies to encounter. You can give them really interesting things to look at that will make them love. You can teach their mind things, but the understanding is given by God. You have to wait for that. No matter how hard you teach, if God is not with you in this field, they're not going to learn. All right, now, so saying that, I want to show you something else. Saint Thomas acknowledges another way of learning. It's called inspiration or simplex intuitus. Did you know that you sometimes know things and you don't know where they came from? When you receive something by inspiration, it works in the opposite direction. It comes out of nowhere. You understand something and then you have to work out what you're going to do with it. And it must work its way out through the rational human processes. It needs to go into your rationality to heart and mind, then into the senses and then into the world outside. So could I suggest to you that this is the way that the scriptures were written. The sacred writers received an inspiration, but they need to work with it. It needed to be put into a language that they understood into forms they understood. It needed to be loved by them, then written down for that they needed a hand. And then it needed to go out into the world. I want to give some examples of this kind of learning because it's pretty important. I have the opinion that whoever you are and wherever you are, you're always going to just know something. You feel like that? You just know it? You just know it? My wife Anne is sitting down there, so I'd better get this next example very accurately told. Many years ago, about nearly 30 years ago, we were living in a tiny country town. Four hours drive west of the Australian capital, Canberra. And I think there were about 1000 people in the town. And fortunately for us, we knew the doctor because one night our four-year-old started screaming blue murder. I know that's unusual, but it just happened on this night in a different kind of intensity. And so we were worried. We consulted the doctor and he said, yes, this looks very serious. Take him to the base hospital in Wagga Wagga, first thing tomorrow morning. Now, neither of us was happy with that. We just didn't like the idea of waiting until the next morning and we don't know why. And that was very unusual for me because at that stage, if a doctor said something, I believed it. I'm no longer in that category. All right. But on this occasion, I was still there. And so we knew we had to take him to the hospital now. It was about a half hour drive and it was Anne who took him in. When she got there, she heard a chilling prognosis. She said, the nurse said after he had been taken into the emergency operation room, he had peritonitis. And she said, we only had another 20 minutes before we wouldn't be able to save him. Fortunately, he survived. But it's a chilling reminder of sometimes you just know something. You just know. In the last job that I had, I was a director of schools for a very isolated diocese called the Diocese of Wilcanea Forbes. And it has a lot of Aboriginal communities. And I was often in schools. And one year I was at a school in an Aboriginal community, Catholic school on about the second day of school. And I went into the class of kindergarten students. And I said, does anybody know where Jesus is right now? And they gave me much better answers than I expected. One child said, yes, he's in the church and you know he's home when the red light's on. Okay. And another one said, yeah, but he's in heaven too. I thought this is a very well instructed class. And I wondered why. And perhaps I discovered later that the missionaries of charity had been there. And these were very well instructed children. But the next answer I got floored me. One little boy, second day of school, Aboriginal child, said, yeah, but he's in my heart and is talking to me all the time. And one of the white children in the class said, what does he say? And this boy gave the best answer I've ever heard. He says, he doesn't say words. It's just like when you go for a long walk in the bush. And when you come out at the other end, you know something you didn't know before. And that's the way he talks to you. This is received simplex intuitors, simple intuition, whereby you receive things from God directly. Am I making this up? Well, no, because this has been well known for millennia. This understanding of what a human person is goes back to Heraclitus and probably before then. Ratio or rationality normally is an active effort of discursive thought and reasoning. And discursive is a long word that I always need to explain. It means moving from one thing to another in order to arrive at a conclusion, discursive reasoning. And when you're being properly human, normally that's the way you work. You look at this, you connect it with that, you come out there, and that's the answer. And that is what is referred to by Greek philosophers from Heraclitus to Plato to Aristotle as the properly human element of our knowledge. And it requires effort. It's hard. Nobody likes studying at school, but you need to do it if you're going to be human. However, every one of these philosophers, after observing human nature realized that there's something more. All of them said that there is sometimes a simple vision that you receive in which the truth reveals itself. It reveals itself like a whole landscape reveals itself to the eye. And Aristotle, the most materialist of all ancient philosophers, even went so far as to say, paradoxically, this spiritual vision is beyond the sphere allotted to man. In other words, the kind of thing that you are receiving every day is an inspiration that doesn't come from you, comes from God. When I first set my eyes on my beautiful wife, I immediately knew that I was going to marry her. She didn't at that time, but I did. Two nights ago, we had a phone call from our youngest son who wanted to tell me something intriguing. He said, you know, when you told me about how you met mom, I said, yes. And he said, I just met someone and I think I've had the same intuition. We're getting it all the time, aren't we? So we've got to make space to let God talk to us. And that's what I'm pleading for you now. Please make space for the people you teach, whether they be children or adults, to have the quiet time to receive something from God themselves. I don't want to stick with Aristotelian, Platonic and Heraclation philosophy. I want to go on to Saint Thomas Aquinas because he said the same thing, and that kind of makes it Catholic, doesn't it? Although the knowledge most characteristic of the human soul, he says, because in the Ratio, the rational faculties, nevertheless, there is a sort of participation in the simple knowledge which is proper to higher beings. Ah, sometimes we learn things the way angels learn them. Of whom it is therefore said that they, that is us human beings, possess the faculty of spiritual vision. Do you realize that when you're teaching, that those students sitting in front of you possess the capacity for spiritual vision? In the 20th century, the great German philosopher Joseph Pieper brought all this together for us. Commenting on Aquinas, he said, we participate in the angelic faculty of non-discursive vision. Got that? Non-discursive vision. We know things that we didn't think about because they're given to us. Our knowledge includes an element of non-activity of purely reflective vision. And this is the fulfillment of the highest promise in man, the contemplative life. I'm arguing that we must make room for the contemplative, if we're to teach the Eucharist properly. In Latin, just to prove that I didn't make this up, non-propriet humana said super humana. This is not properly human. It is super human and yet it's there. Man's spiritual knowledge then is both rational and intellectual, direct understanding. The discursive element is fused with intellectual contemplation. I know I'm pushing you intellectually and that's not what you need after lunch. But I'm doing it anyway. Now, this is the time when you can stand up and go boo his, because there is somebody who has caused damage to our understanding of what learning is. His name is Immanuel Kant. And I think I'm supposed to say Kant in America. Kant held that knowledge is, at this, exclusively discursive. There is nothing spiritual about it, it's exclusively discursive. And he says it like this, man's knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating. I'm exhausted just saying the sentence. But that's what we do in schools, isn't it? That's what we're doing in schools all the time. We're making them work and think and now do this and now do that. And this discursive learning exclusively is the most dogmatic assumption of Kantian epistemology. Now, I may need to duck behind the podium after saying this, but I'm going to say it anyway. All contemporary educational theory, aside from the Montessori method, is based on Kant's Kant's epistemological assumption. He doesn't believe that you can learn things spiritually. And when you go into any one of our schools, that's what you're going to see. You're going to see students being exhausted with non-stop learning on task behavior. And I'm not making this up. I've been a school principal and a teacher for many years. This is the way educational would normally proceed. But I'm here to tell you there's another way. There are strategies by which you can allow students to contemplate, to activate the intellectus, to receive knowledge that they need to when it's needed. Just like little Clinton, who told us how God doesn't say words, you just know things you didn't know before. Here are some strategies that Montessori suggested. After you've presented something with materials, let them play with it. Let them use it themselves. That's when they have their insights. Give them practical life activities. Allow them to sweep dust, wash leaves. If you come from Arizona, you will know what that means. Give them the opportunity to respond in art so that it's not being assessed. They're just doing it because they like it. The use of a reflective learning journal or the opportunity just to pray. At some stage, you need to put these things into the learning program, actually setting aside time to let them do it. Many of you will know the wonderful story of the curee of ours, who when he first went into the village, noticed that one of the peasants was going out to the fields and coming back. But each time he did it, he would step into the church and sit there for up to an hour. And when St. John Viani asked him what he was doing, he simply said, I look at him and he looks at me. St. John Viani was overwhelmed with this and understood that this peasant really understood how to receive nourishment from God. Recently in our parish, one of our final parishioners set up a holy hour of every first Friday into Saturday morning and overnight. And I congratulated him on having such a wonderful idea. But a lot of the parishioners asked him, so what do we do when we go in for an hour and sit in front of the Blessed Sacrament? And he really shocked me. He said, I just go in and keep him company. I don't have to say anything. How beautiful is that? I want to give you the opportunity now just to talk to one another about what I've just said to you. I want you to think about all of those ideas that usually we learn things by going from body to heart to mind. But sometimes we learn by inspiration. How does that work? And how do you make space for it if you're going to teach a proper understanding of what the Eucharist is? Because it's not what the Eucharist is, is it? It's who the Eucharist is. And how do you form a relationship with somebody who is spiritually present and physically visible in the Eucharistic science? Just spend about going to give you five minutes to talk about that. About another minute and we'll wrap that one up. Okay, that's five minutes. Is there anybody who feels desperately that they want to make a comment or ask a question at this point? Well, that's unprecedented. Okay, so what I'm trying to get across here is that you need to leave space. And when you do, children and adults of all ages will start to realize that they're in contact with the Lord himself. Some stories about that that I have to share. One of the places I went to, you can look it on a map, it's a real place and it's called Ningen. The bishop was visiting the Catholic school there. And we had introduced this kind of approach to all of the schools in the diocese. And he went into one of the classes and the children were drawing pictures. And he went up to one little eight-year-old boy and said, what are you drawing a picture of? And he said, I can see it's the sun, isn't it? And he said, yes. But don't you know who the sun is? And the bishop smiled. And he said, you tell me. And he said, the sun is like Jesus, I think, because Jesus is the light. And because of Jesus, we can see everything else. And the bishop looked over at the teacher and the teacher said, and he said, who told you that? And he said, I don't know. I just think I know it. And then the next part flawed us all. The next thing I want to draw a picture of is the moon. And the bishop said, why? He said, because I think the moon must be like Mary. Nobody told him. Where did this come from? He had the opportunity to allow that to come out. And this is what we're not doing, isn't it? We're too busy to let people have this relationship with God. One last story there. I was in one of our larger Aboriginal communities. And sometimes those young men can start climbing the wall and crawling across the ceiling and dropping down in front of you suddenly and doing all sorts of things you don't expect. So I bravely went into one of these places. And then I started talking and they were all over the place. And I'll just keep on going. And then eventually they stopped and calmed down and I gave them things to do. And then they went out and did other things. And one of them came up to me at lunchtime and said he was, you know, as big as I was at the age of 11. And he said, I drew a picture. And he said, this is the way you make me feel. And he had on it his name and mine and spread right across the page in big letters that he had colored in hope. I've got the, I've kept it. It's one of those things that I can't let go of, even though there's too much in my house already, apart from my lovely wife, of course. So you can affect people. And it's not always by instruction and how much they know, it's by encountering, enabling them to encounter Jesus. And he will be there if you let him in. Now for the boring part for you. I need to tell you some strategies for how you teach the Eucharist. And now I'm no longer on the simplex intuitus. I'm on the discursive. So forgive me from descending from the sublime to the less sublime. Children of various ages have particular characteristics. And if you want to go in when we've finished filming it, I'll spend a whole day of lecturing, telling you what those characteristics are and how they play into religious education. So how do you activate the body so that the heart and mind can do their work and reach over to the understanding in the properly human way of discursive learning, waiting upon inspiration. It's like this, understand that the three to six year old child has an absorbent mind. They pick up things by looking and naming. They have an innate sense of wonder. And wonder is always evoked by an attentive gaze at reality, at real things. So if they see a butterfly or a snail or something that goes bang in the night, a spider web or anything, that causes them to wonder and seek the origin of that wonder in God. So don't discount the possibility of letting them walk around in the beautiful created world in order to encounter God because that's what they're hardwired to do with this age. They need order, routine and repetition in order to feel safe. They are spontaneous rather than systematic and they desire to imitate what you're doing in order to be independent one day. So those are the basic things that you need to remember about the three to six year old. Of course, they may express other distinct realities too and I've compressed that to an extraordinary extent, but otherwise I'll be talking about this all the time. The six to nine year old child shifts gear. They have a reasoning mind. It's no longer an absorbent mind. They want to know what, why, how. They want to see how all this data that they've gathered when they were younger children fits together. They need a big picture. They are imaginative and creative. What does that mean? Imagination is a faculty that God gives human beings so that they can make links between the data that they've gathered. And children up until the age of six are amassing huge amounts of data in the world around them. And if you want them to be really successful human beings, you'll let them gather a lot of things. You'll give them lots of experiences, particularly tactile experiences. Let them put their hand in mud and eat it if necessary. Okay. Let them do all of those things. Show them the beautiful world of creation because that data will then form the basis of what they start putting together at the next level with their imagination. Mental order that is an emphasis on rules replaces the need for physical order in order to feel safe. Children of this age need repetition and hate repetition. So how do you get around that? Well, you do the same thing in many different ways and catch them unawares. There is a moral dimension that is developing. This is typically the age where they get to the point of having a real sense of right and wrong. Maria Montessori also described this age as the age of rudeness. Anybody teach this age of children? Would you agree? They forget all the nice things they learned and they become a little bit different. They're exerting their independence and you need to graciously call them back to order. There is a herding instinct and desire for communication at this stage. They learn better together. If they can talk to each other about what they're doing, it's not an interruption. It's a means by which they learn. They're seeking independence. One of the best things you can do for this age group is to become the most ignorant person in the world. Whenever they ask a question, you say, that's an interesting question. I wonder what the answer is. What do you think? One year I had an interesting experience of that. A new child came into my class and I was teaching this level. She came up to me on the first day and said, how do you spell because? The girl sitting right beside her where I was standing said, it's no use asking him. He's only going to tell you to look up on the wall and find it. That was true because if you give all the answers all the time, you're not encouraging them. You're not helping them. What you do is help them find the answer, not give it to them, because if you do, they no longer value it. Okay, nine to 12 year olds. This is a development from the six to nine year old child. They like to make their own discoveries, so you avoid too much direct instruction. You tell them just enough information to be able to work it out for themselves, and you stand back in wonder and awe as they tell you things that you've known for years, but you make out as if you've just discovered it because they told you. There are three mysteries of particular interest to this age group. Time. They're interested in time as a window on eternity because they become aware that some people have died and when they study history they see that these people are no longer there yet anymore, so they become aware of their own mortality in a big way. It starts to impact on them and because of that they become interested in questions of life and death. If you've ever taught 10, 11 and 12 year olds, you know you can get them completely interested in what you want to do that day by raising one of those issues. And finally, they begin to be interested in relationships. Salvation history and the plan of God is a great way of interesting them in time. Scriptural typologies from shadows to images to realities is also a helpful way of addressing time. And I know I'm giving you a big picture now and I'm going to draw this down into how you apply it to the Eucharist shortly. Timelines are of particular interest to this age group and they are also interested in looking at different levels of friendship. Dare I say this as somebody who hates technology and I'm not casting aspersions on any of the wonderful people helping us today, but I suggest you avoid too much technology or too many pre-digested handouts because children of this age need to become human by pondering the realities of time and history leading to life and death. I was once a teacher educator and I tried an experiment one year where I walked into a class and the teacher was teaching from a whiteboard at the front of the room and every student in the class had laptops they were working from. So I thought I'd go around and ask them how they were going and I said to each one of them, do you like working like this from computers? Every one of them gave me the same answer. No, I hate it. I wish I could use pencil and paper like my mum and dad told me they could use. So interesting, we may imagine that they're technologically engaged and they are, but for them it's no longer fun, it's just work and they'd rather use their hands. Teachers should then be very aware of the church's teaching on life and death. You can find the necessary information on paragraphs 1020 to 1050 in the Catechism. We also in our program Educating in Christ have a number of works that will help them through this. Finally, adolescents, I'm going to tell you things that you already know. There is a great importance of peer and social relationships. Isn't that a surprise? They desire critical evaluation. They're influenced by changing feelings so they will think one thing one day and the opposite the next day depending on how they're feeling that day. They need to confront the dilemmas and inconsistencies of life and they have boundless energy to sustain a sense of adventure connected with self-discovery. I've talked a great deal about that and I've covered it really quickly. Now I want to move on to how you actually teach, how you apply these things to teaching the Eucharist. All right, so at the beginning level, what are you trying to do? They have a mind which is somewhat absorbent still but also interested in touching things. Say you have little models, little models of everything they see in the liturgy, liturgical furniture, vessels, investments. You let them use the implements for the preparation of the chalice. You let them pour water and wine into a small chalice. You let them wash their hands because that feels great. You show them the epiclesis and the consecration and remember this is just at the level of early stage. They're touching things. They're seeing what it is, not yet what it does. You show them the offering to the Father so they become aware of all of those things. Then we move on to a later part of this early three to six year old stage but they can set up an altar for themselves. They don't know what it's about yet but they love setting it up in the right order. You can have liturgical tracing packets so that they can trace out drawings of each of the things that they're learning about and liturgical worksheets so they can color in the colors of the chageables and stoles. You can have cards that name and describe each of the sacred vessels that are out there on the altar. You notice that that's very concrete and tactile and so this is what you do for a three to six year old. I have examined a number of religious education programs for bishops in my country and very often something a bit strange happens. When it comes to teaching about the Eucharist you work out where the children are going to make First Communion and you teach them everything they're meant to know about the Eucharist in that year and then they don't touch on it for another three years. Can I plead with you not to do that? They need teaching about the Eucharist at every level and the teaching they receive at every level needs to be directed at their sensitive period and what they can do. All right. Not only do we need to teach them about the Eucharist using the liturgy we need to connect them with the scriptures. They need a last supper presentation as told from the scriptures. They need a presentation on the death and resurrection of Jesus so that those things are connected with what's going on in the liturgy. We move now onto the second level of the kinds of things that are appropriate. For six to nine year olds, remember they want to start putting things together for themselves so that's what you focus on synthesizing. You let them see how there is a connection between the gesture of Epichlesis and the gesture of offering. You synthesize the elements that they will learn about in the mystery of faith. You make sure that they know the purposes of each of the sacred vessels and give them labels and captions and you do a synthesis of the mass. See what order do all these things go in? Just in case you're worried that this is a lot to ask, we have all of these things done out for you as instruction booklets in the program Educating in Christ being filmed so you don't have to think too hard. But what I'm describing to you are the kinds of things that you need to do for the various age group. Further teaching activities for this six to nine age group. You link the mass moments that they already know with a first mass book where they bring those together and put them in the right place. You have a contents of the first mass book where you simply present the basic parts of the mass and then you give them a blank page to put that together. We still do something on the last supper at this level that refer to it as the origin of the Eucharist in which you present the last supper again and then little by little you take the apostles away and put them in different parts of the classroom because they're going off to preach the gospel to the whole world. And one stays and then you turn the background around so that it looks like your parish church. Then you replace the figure of the last apostle with the figure of your parish priest saying, look, God made provision for extending his presence throughout the world and throughout the centuries. Finally, we get to this stage, the third moment. The moment when you let them put together fully the structure of the mass. If you have a look at that, you'll see that there are many different colored tiles. The green ones indicate the liturgy of the word. The yellow ones are the prayers that you find in the preparation of the gifts. The orange ones, the Eucharistic prayer, and the gray ones for the right of communion. The white ones, what are the white ones for? They are the propers of the mass. Those are the places that change every day with the kind of mass. And the tactile nature of putting these together allows them to go out and search out what these things are. Other aspects that you can use at this level are the mass as a memorial. You can do a great mystigogy of the mass. In my last session, I told the participants that I once had a student teacher who was studying with us to attain accreditation and became absolutely fascinated with the fact that everything in the mass related to something in the scriptures, as Sophia Cavalletti put it, the Eucharist. In the Eucharist we find symbolized everything that God has done in the past everything he is doing now and everything that he will ever do. And so he was so captivated by this that he said, I want to do my final project on making up a mystigogy of the mass where I have the main parts and I'll connect it to scriptures. So I said, that's a great idea, but I don't want you to do it. He said, why? And I said, because you'll never finish. He was insistent, so I let him because sometimes that's the only way to let them find out. Eighteen months later, after ten extensions, he said, okay, I see that I'll never finish. And that's true. He took me out to a double basketball court at his school where he had moments of the mass ranged out in front of him and linked to pictures that he'd put on wood of the moments in the scriptures which these seem to link to. And then there it was, covering the whole floor of both basketball courts. A few years after that I was at a first communion of one of my grandchildren and lo and behold, he was there too. He said, you remember me? I said, I'll never forget. He said, you know that project I did? I said, I'll never forget. He said, I've kept on going. I thought you would. He said, I've got about as much again. He said, because every time I go to mass, I think of something else. I hear something else. And if you can addict somebody to that, you have a lifetime of learning about Christ in the scriptures and in the liturgy. There's your goal. Go forth and do it. Now, we have another 20 minutes and I'm going to finish off one more aspect of this. Then I'm going to give you time to talk and then we'll have questions. I want to make a case for the model of Lectio Divina, not just as a way of praying, but as a way of catechesis. Some time ago it struck me when I was looking at both the Montessori Method and Lectio Divina that they have remarkable congruities that there's a confluence of insights in them. Lectio Divina is the Benedictine version of the Montessori Method, only about 1500 years earlier. What happens? There's a Lectio part where you present something. It can be inspiring like the scriptures or the creation or the telling of something using concrete materials. There's a Meditatio, always about thinking and exploring and asking questions and following the discursive line, being human in other words. Then there's the Oratio. After you've learned all these things, what are you going to do with them? How about praying? Why don't you just ask God to help you with some of these things? Finally in Lectio Divina, there's the Contemplatio where you receive from God. It's something that you can get children to do in the ways I just showed you earlier on. You can let them draw or paint or wash leaves, something that doesn't engage the mind but allows them to be in the presence to receive something from God. Okay, now generally speaking, I don't give out pieces of paper because I'm an old teacher and I know what happens to the pieces of paper. I am however quite willing to send you digital materials online if you ask them. That's my email address. I'm happy to send you anything you want. Underneath it, there is a link to the First Communion program I created for our parish. It's about 68 pages long but it's mostly images, connections, descriptions of what you might do, pictures to color in, questions about what you've learned and so forth. I'd like you to go back now and think about the things that we talked about. First of all, that there are certain age groups where it's appropriate to do certain things with children. Then the kinds of things that typically are done with these different age groups are focus on the liturgical vessels, the setting up of a model altar, connecting it with the scriptures that are most appropriate for what you're doing and then at the second level trying to put these things together, synthesizing them and then taking the next step in the last supper by sending all of these apostles out. And the third level, by looking at how the mass is put together and see it as a memorial and a mysticogy, how does it link to what's going on in the scriptures? And finally, a process, a catechetical process by which you can integrate the contemplative dimension with all of the other dimensions.