Maddie hopes to be a Pre-K teacher someday, just like thousands of other college students. What makes Maddie’s hope unique is, as Paul Harvey used to say, the rest of the story:
My favorite line from the video: “She has broadened what I understand as the Body of Christ.” I hope to see Maddie visiting this site some day as a Catholic educator.
Here are some ideas for using the video in the classroom:
Inspire students to talk about their own limitations and how they can overcome them;
Show it before beginning a unit on the dignity of all human life;
In marketing parlance, there is a concept known as the “elevator speech,” in which one tries to deliver a compelling idea in less than two minutes, or the length of an elevator ride. Archbishop Daniel Pilarczyk comes close to an elevator speech summary of Catholic beliefs in this video from TeamRCIA:
Okay, so the speech was eight minutes, but the summary didn’t begin until about 3 minutes in. In any case, it’s a terrific distillation of Catholic teaching. It’s simple enough that it could be presented to young children, yet profound enough that it could be meditated upon. Here’s my transcription of just the summary portion of the archbishop’s presentation:
The most important thing in the world is that God is madly in love with us. There’s no reason for it, God just loves us. That’s why there is a world. That’s why each of us is here. God has loved us for a long time, ever since the beginning of human history. And God has never stopped loving us, even when human beings made a mess of things and did their best to forget about God’s love for them.
But that’s not all.
God loves us so much that he wanted to be one of us. In Jesus God became a human being not just to tell us who and what God is, but also to show us who and what we are supposed to be. Jesus was faithful to that mission even when it cost him his life.
But that’s not all.
Jesus is still alive, because his heavenly father wouldn’t let him stay dead. Jesus is with us still and has sent us the Holy Spirit that unites him and the Father to make us live God’s life in addition to our own. To be part of that life, we don’t have to earn it, and we don’t have to deserve it. All we have to do is accept what Jesus offers us, and then act in accord with what he has made us to be.
But that’s not all.
Jesus has established a community of those who have accepted him so that none of us ever needs to be alone. Jesus nourishes that community with himself and he marks every major moment in the life of every member with his personal action in the sacraments.
But even that is not all.
God loves us so much that this life of Jesus that we have been given to share will never end. God wants us with him forever. No matter how confusing and painful our life may be, we have God’s guarantee of final fulfillment. In the most literal sense, God has promised us that everything is going to be all right. God invites us to take constant joy in hope.
But there’s still more.
Because we share the life of Jesus, we share the mission of Jesus. Each of us is called to extend the love and care of the Lord to those around us. We may not seem as individuals to have all that much to offer, but what we do have to offer is eternally important because it’s not just ourselves that we offer, but the Lord Jesus himself. The Lord has chosen to need each one of us to get his work done. Nobody’s life is insignificant.
The long and the short of it is that God is crazy about us, and once we accept that, everything else falls into place.
Ben Gullett, an eighth grader at Nativity Catholic School in Tampa, Florida, is learning economics the hard way: his dad Mark recently lost his job as a marketing executive with the Tampa Bay Lightning hockey franchise . But Ben is also learning about marketing. He’s created a YouTube video to help his dad get a new job, and he’s drawn almost 20,000 viewers to see him flip through cards that tell his dad’s story.
The video tells potential employers about Ben’s dad, but more than that, it’s Ben’s way of expressing his admiration and love for his father. See for yourself in the video below, and if you know anyone looking for an experienced marketer, download Mark’s work profile and pass it on.
In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, this week’s video is a retelling of St. Patrick’s life from the adorable series Give Up Yer Aul Sins. Cathal Gaffney directed this short which takes recordings of school children telling Bible and saint stories and animates them in a documentary style. This one of the cutest films I’ve ever seen, and rightly deserved the Oscar nomination it received.
You might consider recording your own students telling stories of the saints and then setting their narrations to pictures using iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or some other video editing software.
“We do have faith in our future,” says Archbishop Timothy Dolan in the following 2007 video. Dolan, the new archbishop of New York, speaks about Catholic education in this message to Milwaukee Catholics:
