This year, the Malta Catholic Youth Network has collaborated with Lifelong Catechesis to explore the attitude of longing during the Advent season. Whether you are simply searching, in this journey of faith without belonging to any particular community, or or already part of a group, we extend an invitation for you to delve into these reflections either independently or with your community.
We have met four categories of people in Malta who are all longing for something in one way or another. We encourage you to explore their stories, finding resonance and acknowledging your own experiences of longing. In this liturgical period of Advent, consider redirecting your yearnings towards Christ, turning this season into a transformative journey of spiritual growth.
Ġirja ma’ Salm 23 huwa sett ta’ riżorsi, maqsum f’ħames sessjonijiet, intenzjonat għal żgħażagħ minn 14-il sena ’l fuq. Ħossok liberu li temenda d-diskors jew il-format tas-sessjonijiet. Fuq kollox, dan il-ktejjeb huwa gwida għalik bl-għan u bit-tama li l-parteċipanti jsiru iktar midħla tas-Salm u jidħlu f’iktar intimità ma’ Ġesù.
‘ERBGĦIN’ is a Lenten reflective resource produced by MCYN in collaboration with Lifelong Catechesis, intended to be used with young people during Lent.
As the title of this project suggests, all sessions revolve around the number 40 as inspired by the 40 days of Lent. We do not have many books in the Bible which consists of more than 40 chapters. In view of this, 2 out of 4 sessions would be reflecting on Isaiah 40 and Psalm 40. As observed, there is an additional session following the 4 sessions to be held during Lent. This added reflection should take place during the first days of Easter so as to manifest how the Easter celebration can redeem the 40 days of Lent.
All sessions have been recorded in Maltese in audio-visual format which you may access on YouTube. You may also download all content and reflections in writing in both English and Maltese so that you would be able to amend the content or format according to your group’s needs.
Whilst wishing you a blessed time of Lent and Easter, we promise you our prayers. Should you require further information, do not hesitate to contact us via email on:[email protected]
For the feast of Pentecost in which we celebrate who we are as Church, in collaboration with Spiritual Development in Schools, we are providing you with a prayer space to animate with your groups/communities. The ultimate aim of this project is to better our understanding of who we are in unity with each other as Church, and our dependency on the Holy Spirit who makes sense of our frailties.
On this feast of Pentecost, we express our gratitude for your work and tangible presence with adolescents and youths within our communities. Related artistic audio-visual content will be reaching you all in the coming week. Stay tuned!
We have recently collaborated with ‘Lifelong Catechesis’ to come up with a resource pack to accompany young people aged 16+ throughout the four weeks of Advent. We encourage all leaders to make use of this resource which delves into the themes of hope, faith, joy and love through an exploration of 4 movies.
This series is based on Yahad, a document prepared by the Justice & Peace Commission (JPC) to help us reflect on how we can act constructively to build peace within our nation. You can find the full document here: https://yahad.mt/ Yahad is a term in Hebrew that is used in the Bible most often as an adverb in the sense of “together” and “with each other”. It also conveys the sense of unitedness and community.
CONTENTS
MCYN, in collaboration with JPC, has created a series of 6 different sessions to be used with young people, each one based on the Gospel readings of the first 5 Sundays of Lent, and Ash Wednesday. The titles of each session are:
To link Scripture and the Teaching of the Church to real-life situations happening in our country.
To give time to young people to reflect on the world around them.
To help young people see matters of justice in light of Scripture.
To encourage young people to be the positive change they long to see in the world.
SESSION OUTLINES
Each session plan has an outline on the first page in order to give a brief overview of the meeting.
A team overview can also be found before each session in order to help people lead different parts of the session smoothly.
Each session is timed to be around 1 to 1.5 hours. The timings are estimates and are not there to be strictly adhered to.
Although this resource tries to be thorough, it is not thought out to be read off the paper as is, but to serve as a basis for sessions given by leaders. Each group is different, and therefore activities, discussion methods and teaching all need to be tailored according to the dynamic of the group. Should you need assistance in developing the resources further, or have any questions, please feel free to contact us.
Present a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas or opinion.
Have the participants generate responses by writing ideas on sticky notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall or whiteboard.
Once lots of ideas have been generated, have the participants begin grouping them into similar categories.
Label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.
Variations:
Have the participants do much of this exercise—recording their ideas and arranging them into categories—without talking at first.
Participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs.
To help participants reflect on an experience/session.
Resources:
Papers
Pencils/pens/markers
Basic Structure:
Participants are asked to write down one of the following in exactly one minute:
the most eye-opening revelations from the session
the biggest questions they’re left with
a summary of what was said during the session
an answer to a reflective question presented by the leader
what they want to remember from the experience/session
A timer for 1 minute is set & participants start writing.
Variations:
One-minute papers can be stuck onto a noticeboard.
One-minute journals: Participants can be asked to write one-minute papers on a personal journal at the end of every session (journals can be kept by the leaders or by the participants).
One-minute monologue: Participants can be split into pairs & asked to give a one-minute monologue to their partner about the topic.
One-minute message: Participants can be asked to write a message for one minute that is then sent to a leader. (This can be a way of receiving feedback of what is actually being retained.)
To help participants consider opposite views than the ones they have.
Basic Structure:
Divide participants into two groups.
Assign each group different viewpoints (for example, Group 1 in favour of eating gummy bears for lunch and Group 2 in favour of eating burgers).
Allocate some time for the group to discuss their viewpoint.
Groups are to debate against each other on the topic for a set amount of time (for example 5 minutes).
Once the debate is over, ask each group to argue the opposing view (for example, Group 1 now argues in favour of eating burgers).
The debate is then repeated (for the same amount of time).
Variations:
Instead of assigning viewpoints to each group, as participants to group up according to their opinion (without mentioning they will have to argue against their opinion).
Divide participants into 3 groups and have 1 group act as observers to the debate.
