At a Lenten Journaling Workshop: Midway Through

A week ago, I was out of town, so our church's Lenten Journaling Workshop didn't meet.  Last night, we met again and did some thinking about parables--although we might not have always known we were thinking about parables!

First, I handed out 4 slips of paper in different colors. Each person had all four colors. On the green slip, we wrote a natural object. On the lavender sheet, we wrote an action or a verb. On the ivory sheet, we wrote a tool. On the salmon colored slip, we wrote an arts and crafts supply or medium.

Then we pulled slips of paper out of a box. We ended up with these words:

sunset
throw
pen
watercolor painting

We wrote/sketched/pondered for 10 minutes with the prompt to write and to use these words as we thought about what God is like.

Then I read Matthew 13: 24-35, which contains two parables where Jesus tries to explain what the kingdom of God/heaven is like. We talked about how the word "kingdom" might mean something different than "heaven," which is a common translation. What might it mean? Perhaps the world as God conceives it.

We then pulled all the slips out of the box:

Ivory:
drill
drill
pen


Green:
pine tree
river reeds
sunset


lavender:
throw
sharing
dance


salmon:
watercolor painting
embroidery thread
brushes


We then took another 10 minutes to write/draw/respond to create parables of our own. The last thing we did was to try transforming our ideas into haiku. You may or may not remember that haiku is a 3 line structure. The first line has 5 syllables, the second has 12 syllables, and the 3rd line has 5 syllables. Haiku specialists would want me to tell you that there's much more to haiku than the structure, so now I have.

We took some time at the end to read what we wrote, if we wanted, or to discuss our approach.

We talked about why Jesus would teach in parables. I think it's to shock us out of our complacency--Jesus uses some bizarre comparisons to explain God. For example, yeast would be seen as something that pollutes perfectly good bread dough. It would be as if I said, "The Kingdom of God is like mold that takes over your bathroom when you're away on vacation and the AC stops working."

We talked about haiku and the value of condensing ideas into just a few syllables. And then it was time to go.