AGE: Secondary |
THEME: End of Term |
AIM: |
| To provide a time to reflect on the events of the past term and to think more deeply about time and our responsibilities. |
RESOURCES: |
| None needed, apart from 3 readers. |
DEVELOPMENT: |
| LEADER: In the recent film The Matrix, humans don't live - they simply exist, floating in jelly-like pods, with their brains plugged into a computer. Nothing really happens to them. Their lives consist of fantasies generated by the computer. In fact the computer can rewrite history, erasing the past and reconstructing alternative histories. 'Life' is simply a web of unreality. READER 1: Here's another science-fiction story to think about. Imagine it's the last day of term. You run to the school gates, but just as you are about to go through, you find yourself running backwards. You go back into school and take your coat off. You sit and look at a page of writing. You run your pen across the page, starting at the bottom and, as it moves, it sucks up the writing like a vacuum cleaner. You are left with a blank piece of paper. READER 2: And so you go backwards through the day, uncreating everything you've done. At last, though, it's time to go home. You cycle home backwards. You pick bits of food out of the bin and arrange them on your plate. Then you open your mouth and take a piece of food out. You keep doing it until the plate is filled with food. Then you put the food back in the cupboard. READER 3: Your teeth are clean. Surely they don't need another brush? But you find yourself going to the bathroom and giving them a good scrub. When you've finished they are dirty. Your hair, though, is tidy - but now your hand picks up a brush and messes it up until it looks like a scraggy haystack. Then you take a deodorant stick and wipe off all the deodorant. You now look and smell horrible. You look at yourself, bleary-eyed - YUCK! - and then walk backwards to bed. You sink into a deep sleep. This is a nightmare, you think, as your brain switches itself off. LEADER: Don't worry, that's probably not going to happen. It's a horrifying idea, though, isn't it? The modern British novelist Martin Amis wrote a whole novel like this - Time's Arrow - which starts at the end and works backwards. READER 1: An old man emerges 'out of the blackest sleep'. Doctors strap heart-attack equipment on his chest. He's no longer dead, but he feels very old and ugly. He has no friends. You feel sorry for him. READER 2: But then he moves into a big house and finds he has a job. He's a doctor. His body starts to ache less. His bald head sprouts hair. He has friends. But at night he has nightmares. One day he gives up his job and finds himself running away. He moves from America back to Europe. The world is in chaos. He has to hide. READER 3: And then comes the horror of the book. He finds himself marching into a concentration camp - not as a prisoner but as one of the doctor-guards who carry out unspeakable 'experiments' on the prisoners. There's nothing he can do to stop it. LEADER: Time's Arrow is a very frightening book. It's frightening because although time can be wound backwards, it can't be changed. What's done is done, replayable but fixed for ever. As in the Bob Dylan song 'Slow Train', the rails are fixed and the train moves inexorably along it. In some religions - Buddhism and Hinduism for example - time flows in endless cycles. In others, though - like Judaism, Christianity and Islam - each individual has only one life. When you've used it up, it's gone and that's it. Forgiveness is possible but changing things isn't. This is perhaps why, in those religions that believe in just one life, time is often set aside for reflection - the past can't be changed, but the future is open. Mistakes in the past need not be repeated. The Methodist Church, for example, begins the year with a Covenant Service, in which the events of the past year are reviewed and the people recommit themselves to the ideals of their religion and to God. People often make New Year resolutions - not to eat as much chocolate, not to kick the cat, to visit elderly relations more often and so on. Today isn't the end of the year, but it is [nearly] the end of term, so perhaps it's an appropriate time for something similar. At the end of the day, time won't flow backwards - you'll get out of school and escape! Your future is open. But quite what you make of it depends on how you look back over your shoulder at the past. |
PRAYER AND REFLECTION: |
| Let's be quiet and think about things that have happened over the past term. Remember all the times that have been good. Maybe a brilliant goal that you scored. Maybe a really good time that you had with your friends. Maybe the surprise that you felt when you found you'd got 99 out of 100 in a Maths test. What else can you think of? But remember also things that have made you unhappy. Perhaps the time you said something mean to a friend. Or the time you fouled someone deliberately in a football match. Or the time you failed to revise, got caught copying - and still got only 13 out of 100 in an English test. What is the least good thing that you did last term? What can you do to make sure that these things don't happen again next term? How can you make things better? |
MUSIC: |
| 'Slow Train' by Bob Dylan, from the album of the same name. |
FOLLOW-UP ACTIVITIES: |
This collective worship tries to lead in to the concept, important in Western religions, of 'Judgement'. This is often avoided in RE, but its importance - and power - are difficult to overestimate.
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