One of the beauties of the Church is the celebration of seasons. Christmas is not just a day. It is a season that last weeks. Similarly, Easter is a seven week season. There is great wisdom in this plan. These celebrations are for mysteries that cannot be contained in weeks of pondering, let alone a single day.
This Easter Season we have added another new tradition that takes advantage of the week of weeks of the Easter season. For years, LG had wanted to purchase the Easter sticker calendar called the Garden of the Good Shepherd. However, the book was fairly expensive. The original book which is now sold out can be seen
on Amazon. It came complete with illustrations by Tomie dePaola.
LG was thrilled to find out that Charlotte of
Waltzing Matilda had kindly reproduced the 50 symbols of the original Garden of Good Shepherd book and made them available free of charge on her
site.
Thanks to Charlotte's generosity, LG was able to make her own Garden of the Good Shepherd "Sticker" Calendar. On her blog, she provided wonderful versions of the 50 symbols along with the background images. These can be found
here. LG took it from there to draw the rest of the background and to color everything. She decided to use magnets. The background is attached with magnets on a magnetic white board. We have attached small pieces of thin magnets to each symbol. Then, each day a new symbol is added to the picture.
There is a theme for each week of the seven weeks of Easter. For instance, the first week's theme is the Good Shepherd. The symbols for that first week include a shepherd, a shepherd's staff, a gate, a sheepfold, a wolf, and several sheep. In addition, each day there is also an associated Scripture reference. From the first week the Scripture references are from Psalm 23 and John 10 where Jesus called Himself the Good Shepherd. Here is what the calendar looks like part way through week four.
And here are the remaining symbols for the rest of the 50 days.
We always enjoy adding to our liturgical traditions. And this new calendar is certainly a well-welcomed addition.
Posted by David at
9:30 AM
|
Comments (0)
|
