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Ash Wednesday for Kids

As a parent, pre-priesthood, I struggled during Lent to find services that would introduce my young children to Lent without giving them nightmares.  But family-friendly services on Ash Wednesday and during Holy Week were hard to come by.  So when I started working at St. Aidan's, one of my favorite projects was creating services that would give children a taste of Lent in an age-appropriate way.  St. Aidan's family Ash Wednesday and Holy Week services have since become two of my favorite services of the year.  Here's a taste of Ash Wednesday...

We started outside. I had outlines of butterflies and crayons for kids to color if they wanted - symbols of Easter that we would be saying goodbye to during Lent but that would reappear on Easter (when we'll have them streaming overhead in church). Once the crowd had gathered, we burned a bunch of last year's palm branches to make our own ashes. The kids were entranced.



After saying a prayer, I introduced the idea of Ash Wednesday as the beginning of a journey to Easter. We handed out rhythmic instruments and John played guitar as we headed inside and up to the front of the church. I had a circular liturgical calendar there, and we talked about the 6 weeks of Lent and how people often give things up or take things on as they get ready to enter the mystery of Easter. The kids and their parents shared some of their Lenten practices. John led us in another song and we headed back to the font.



We heard a Bible reading about Jesus' baptism before he headed into the wilderness and talked about our own baptisms and the promises that we make, or have made on our behalf.  I demonstrated what a baptism might looked like and talked about how after the water, my favorite line of all is when we seal the newly baptized person with the blessed oil and say that they are "marked as Christ's own forever."  That same mark of the cross in oil is made again with ashes on Ash Wednesday.  The ashes are a reminder of our promises, and a reminder that we are Christ's own forever.  The kids are then invited to continue their journey on the labyrinth, where they can receive ashes at the center.

The kids love exploring the labyrinth.  When I put the cross on their foreheads, I tell them, "You are a beloved child of God."  My favorite moment came last year when one child ran excitedly to tell her mother, "Mommy, I'm a beloved child of God!  You are too, Mommy, come on!" and pulled her into the labyrinth.  I suspect that some of my colleagues would be aghast at how different this service is from the Episcopal Ash Wednesday service, but to be in that place with those kids so full of love and joy was truly to see God.


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