Using the Audio Meditations
SACRED STORY YOUTH
Teacher Information
&
Meditation Program Overview
You are about to embark on a relationship building journey with your students! This journey is one where children are provided the opportunity to attune themselves to listening to God’s voice. Sacred Story Youth presents a model for mapping and connecting relationships between self and God and self and others. It is a sophisticated application of the time-tested Ignatian Examination of Conscience for children.
What is most important to this prayer discipline? It is the daily repetition of the guided meditation that will slowly draw children of all ages into their interior life where they will learn to “discern” the voice that leads to God and the voice that leads away from God.
The teaching of religious content, doctrines, commandments and sacraments is significantly enlivened when children have an active relationship with Christ and God. The Sacred Story Youth course is designed to augment regular religious training and so make faith come alive.
THE RECORDED SACRED STORY DAILY MEDITATIONS
(IN TWENTY FORMATS AUDIO AND VIDEO SETTINGS)
ARE USED DAILY
YET EACH DAY IT IS A DIFFERENT
EXPERIENCE FOR YOUR STUDENTS!
As an educator, you know that repetition is the key to learning. The listening and engagement of the “same” prayer meditation each and every day will not elicit the “same” response on the part of a student. While the meditation text/themes/music are similar daily, the spiritual, emotional, intellectual and physical nature of a person, made in God’s image and likeness, is constantly changing. Like any regular prayer discipline, these meditations will strike a new cord each day and will gain depth as the children progress.
Why? Because the repetition of the guided meditation will be fresh each day as students’ interior lives open to their spiritual nature. The body and mind constantly grow. This is even truer of our spiritual lives. Sacred Story Youth is designed to feed the interior spiritual life of children.
You can tell the students that they will be listening to the same words and music daily. Also tell them that because they are different day to day, God will respond differently to what is happening in their hearts and minds that particular day. So every day will actually be different! You can tell them that they will learn to listen deeply to their hearts and find the voice of God present thereto them daily in the very way they need God.
Since the text for each year is the same, we have provided variety in the musical settings and the ambient background sounds. There are two musical settings with songs by the artist Paul Cardall: Redeemer & Come Ye Children. There are five different ambient backgrounds for each musical setting: Lake, Ocean, Mountain, Prairie & Forest. And for each ambient setting, there are options to have the Our Father that ends the meditation be spoken by Fr. Watson, or to have the space free of the spoken word so the students can pray the Our Father on their own. There are also the options of having just audio or to have the audio incorporated into a video format. So each year of Sacred Story Youth has forty options for the meditation settings. That should provide the variety you need to engage children daily.
We are grateful that you using this new spiritual resource!
Gratefully,