Slow and Careful Work

One of the best and most challenging parts of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd's approach to education, is the way in which it invites, and almost demands, one to make a radical change in pace.  The pace is so very calm and slow (despite the way that that word is mostly used as a negative one)!  Every aspect of the work is this way -- both the child and the adult slow their pace in the prepared space, the "activities" are slow and prayerful, the "curriculum" is slow-paced, the words spoken are slow and sparse, the movements are slow and deliberate.  "Slow and careful," we say again and again to the children.  To ourselves.

When I took the Catechesis formation classes in 2012-2013, something that many people questioned was the "inefficient" way in which the course was provided.  Why, if this is such a great thing, isn't it more streamlined and mass-produced?  Why don't you have video recordings showing how to do this?  Why isn't there a "teacher's manual" that we can just get a hold of so that we can go start teaching right away?  Why isn't there a store where we can go and buy all the hundreds of specific, specialized materials that you say that we need to teach this way?  Why do I have to make all this stuff myself?

There are many different answers and reasons behind the way that the Catechesis is taught.  I couldn't name them all here.  One that came home to me, however, as I was making prayer cards for the Atrium, is because it is good for us -- all of us -- to do work that is slow and careful.  

I could have printed the words of Scripture on the computer.  My formation leader could have passed out flash drives with the dozens of typed files that the Atrium ready made for printing.  But when I sat down to write these words -- pencil, paper, Bible and pen beside me -- something in me responded.

I didn't have "time" to write them.  I had been delaying for most of the summer because I couldn't fit the work in.  As I wrote, slowly and deliberately, the beautiful words of God onto smooth cool paper that would be used and prayed with by many children, I had a sense of the worth of my work that I wouldn't have had bent over a printer or a xerox machine.  We know "slow and careful" is good for very young children.  But it is so very good for us too.

When I enter the Atrium every week, I am usually rushed.  I've spent the morning hastening my children through morning routines, breakfast, coats, buckling seat belts.  When we arrive, I am admonishing, directing and organizing my children into the various places they need to be, hastening my toddler last minute into the bathroom before I leave him for 2 hours, getting him his slippers, his clean pants . . . . and then I fly over to the Atrium where I need to be, a little breathless and anything but recollected.

And then I step through the door.  It is as if the very voice of the room stills my breath.  The flurried morning flows out of my lungs and the next breath I take is slower, steadier.  I am in this place of stillness, a space that I can move and breathe and speak slowly.  There is no more rushing.  The children come through the door with the spilling of the sunlight behind them and whatever agendas or to do lists in my head are laid aside and we, all of us together, have come to this place to stay.  Two whole hours of slow and careful work.

It is hard -- for me and I'm sure many others -- to look at education in a restful way.  There can be a feeling of urgency, of importance, of time too short.  But again and again, week after week, I return to the Atrium and I see the slow, restful way unfolding beautifully.  I see the flowers opening to the sun, the seed growing, the Holy Spirit patiently moving through the children and through me.   I am so grateful for the opportunity to join in this slow and careful work.