Book Review -Prayers and Plays for Christmas and Holy Week by Elizabeth Smith
by Kay McLennan retired recently from ABC Religious Broadcasts and Classic FM after twenty-five years behind a microphone
Once upon a time our wise wise Sunday School teacher riveted her group of young teenagers for two years as we explored Dorothy Sayers' THE MAN BORN TO BE KING. We learnt more about Our Lord and to love Him more than ever before. And it stuck!
Last Christmas I spent the day with a family who'd made its annual visit to church the night before, and had struck a Christmas play written to be performed by his lively parishioners by their beloved locum. My friends had been entranced by the whole thing, were still alluding to it, and have determined to take even MORE of the family next year.
And now gifted hymn-writer the Reverend Elizabeth Smith has come up with her own highly accessible Christmas play. HE MUST HAVE BEEN A BEAUTIFULY BABY is based on the birth stories of Matthew and Luke. They're fleshed out, in eight scenes, with some very likely vignettes: gossiping Nazareth neighbors, terrified shepherds, concerned inn-keepers, an exhausted mid-wife, kindly Bethlehem matrons, and three very shrewd travellers with their baggage handlers. The whole comes with some wondrously punchy carol poems set to familiar tunes.
Contained also in the book are four meditations for Holy Week or Good Friday based on the gospel accounts in turn.
Nothing if not salient, they're intended to be walked in Stations of the Cross style.
The play can be read by half a dozen performers changing hats, or thirty or more. It will work in any congregation. The meditations may be led by from two to eight or more readers. They might NOT work outside Luna Park in down-town St Kilda where our own wonderful Good Friday ecumenical walk led by Fr Terry Kean and Sr Clare Griffin of Sacred Heart Mission comes to its climax. They WILL work in standard suburbia and country town in a park, a church garden, or around a church itself.
In one book: a dozen very valuable resources for any parish.
-Kay Mclennan retired recently from ABC Religious Broadcasts and Classic FM after twenty-five years behind a microphone