Later this month I will be watching a performance of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and so I was reading through the play earlier this week to refamiliarize myself with the text. I was delighted to see in context the little bit that our lower elementary students have been using for handwriting and memorization--"I know a bank where the wild thyme grows, where oxlips and the nodding violet grows..." I was even more struck by a line I had never noticed before near the play's conclusion, when the lovers are awoken from their enchanted dreaming and are paired up with their true mates. Helena, still shocked that her beloved Demetrius truly loves her, compares him to a jewel found in the woods and declares that he is "mine own, and not mine own."
How true that is with our beloveds, with our children, with our vocations, with even our very bodies. Each of these in a sense is our own, but there is a transcendence to each that is deeper than the foundations of the earth and reaches into the heavens. This has haunted my mind each day after recess as we pray a rosary for our three students preparing for the first confession and First Holy Communion later this week. As CS Lewis wrote, none of us have ever met a mere mortal. Each member of our family, each child at this school, all whom we pass in the supermarket, or stand silently beside in an elevator--each of these people were thought into being by God and are called to be with Him forever.
My mind turns immediately to Joseph, Leah, and Michael, three students who Christ died for and longs to make His home in.
As we prepare for this great and celebratory day, I want to leave you with some excerpts from The Child and the Church by Maria Montessori and others. The following is her description of how she prepared students for their First Communion when she was teaching in Spain in the 1920s. When I first read this work in 2015, I resolved that I would someday see this with my own eyes. In a way, this book introduced us to each other. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.
"The choice for the candidates for first Communion is a great event for the whole school; the children are the object of the love and protection of everybody; their names are printed on cards with a petition for prayers that they may be really ready to receive our Lord. Each classroom, the chapel, even the entrance to the school has one of these cards affixed to the wall, so that all who enter are informed of what is about to take place, in order that they may unite in prayer. Every day their companions are reminded of the need of divine help for those chosen for the reception of the Eucharist...
In the last week the children go into retreat for five days before their first Communion--Monday through Friday. They live apart from their companions, and a portion of the garden is set aside and reserved for them. In the classrooms too, they are separated. They dine in school alone and are recollected. This isolation is, however, neither sad nor wearisome, for innumerable proofs of love reach the small solitaries.
Meanwhile, the older boys in the school give all their attention to the preparation for the solemn Mass, sung in Gregorian chant; and the music being practiced in their honor sweetly reaches the ears of the future communicants . During retreat, the children laugh and work. Special and tender care surrounds them...
The suitability of a five-day retreat for little children was well considered and discussed before the experiment was tried. I had faith in the dispositions developed by their education which had made them patient and tranquil students--already given to a kind of spontaneous meditation by the "cycle of work"--observers of external things and therefore capable of finding satisfaction for themselves; lovers of silence, and the stillness which produces it; attentive to the little movements of their own muscles and capable of controlling them. Such children are ready to go a step further and apply the directions to their own interior actions. Not only do the principles of human justice interest them, but a simple love of Jesus is born in their hearts and with it a great desire of purification. The soul of the child is capable of high aspirations which are reflected in this behavior and in his acts. We have many proofs of this, in diverse conditions and places.
This retreat of our first communicants represents a temporary separation of their group from the rest of their school companions, who are engaged in various tasks and therefore capable of involuntarily disturbing their concentration. But it is not a life of complete sacrifice and absolute interior recollection that is expected of them; they are left free for their own amusements and are to be seen for the greater part of the time in the garden, amid the blossoming flowers of May, picking little bouquets or scented grasses which they carry to Christ...
There is more, but that is enough for now.
I ask for your prayers as we practice our songs and pray for our beloved classmate
First Communion in a Montessori School