A few months back, I started to think about getting ready to renew my consecration to Mary, which I do every year on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Gianna has been deeply interested in all things to do with faith lately, so I went searching for a consecration prep designed for children her age. I found an absolutely beautiful one for children of about 9 or 10, but nothing suitable for a four year old. So I sat down and began to write. I thought about all the things I wanted to share with Gianna about having a relationship with our Blessed Mother, and all of the ways I could expand and build on her understanding of Jesus and His Mom.

As I know I’ve said before, I’m a big proponent of my mother-in-law’s adage, “begin with the end in mind,” and so my process for approaching most situations is to think about my end goal and then work backwards and figure out the steps that I’ll need to take to get there. One of our major goals as parents is to teach our children how to pray. We do this in a variety of ways, including teaching them the rote prayers of the Church, modeling praise and thanksgiving and intercession at different times of the day, and offering them opportunities to pray for others. But one thing that I was struggling with how to teach was contemplation. It’s probably the trickiest form of prayer to teach, right? Learning how to hear God’s voice in the middle of a busy, noisy word is tough, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. I didn’t learn til I was an adult for heaven’s sake, how was I going to teach my children?

But then, as I was writing my consecration preparation for G, I remembered Lectio Divina. If you aren’t familiar with it, Lectio is an ancient form of prayer that involves meditating on Scripture.  St. Ambrose said of the Lord, “we speak to Him when we pray, we hear Him when we read the Divine Oracles (Sacred Scripture)”. So for the section of the consecration, I tweaked the process to make it applicable for littles, as a way of introducing Gianna to praying with Scripture.

Last night was our first opportunity to test it out, and it was better than I had hoped for. As has been our habit for the other days of the Consecration, Gianna and I snuggled up in my bed and made ourselves cozy with lots of blankets. I took out my own Bible, a worn text that has traveled with me for decades. She has children’s Bibles of course, but this was her first interaction with the “big Bible” as she calls it. I held it gently and explained how special it was- the Bible is the living Word of God, and a special book. We explored it together, I showed her the passages I’ve underlined because they struck my heart, the prayer cards and notes from friends that remind me to pray for them, the dried flowers pressed between its pages that bring my mind back to a day spent in prayer in the Mexican desert. It was an opportunity to show her my reverence for the Word of God, but also my familiarity with it- she got to see the well-loved and worn pages, the cover marked with use and the passage of time.

Only after she had explored the Bible and asked questions and made herself familiar with it’s touch and feel, did we open to Luke to read his account of the Annunciation, our passage for the day. And I watched her as the story unfolded with the Bible in her lap, she listened intent to the Word of God, read from His Book, and took it into her heart in a way I wasn’t expecting.

As we talked about the passage and followed the method for Lectio Divina, I watched as she thought about the story of the Annunciation in a new way. We talked about what Mary might have felt, what she would have felt if she was Mary seeing an angel, what parts of the story were our favorites. And then we sat and had 30 seconds of silence, where I modeled listening to the Lord and gave her an opportunity to ponder the passage in her heart, like Mary.

I’ll write out a post later with the details method that we followed, in case anyone would like to try it out.

Updated to add: Here’s the post with all the steps!