Homework ( 10-15 minutes the day before ) 

Together with their parents, have students read Handout A: Making Visible the Mystery of God and answer the questions.

Activity I ( 10-15 minutes the day before ) 

Note to teacher: This activity should be presented to girls and boys separately. Work with another teacher and have a male teacher lead the boys group, and a female teacher lead the girls group.

A. Before reflecting with sacred art, distribute to your students Handout B: Masculinity and Femininity. Make crayons, markers, and/or colored pencils available to your students. Then, have them draw in each box a visual representation of masculinity (manliness) and femininity (womanliness). Tell your students that they cannot use any sort of recognizable signs or symbols (such as smiley faces, letters, numbers, or other recognizable forms beyond basic shapes), but must use purely gesture drawings, color, basic shapes, lines, and so forth. Also, be sure to tell your students to keep their eyes on their own drawings and not look at what others are drawing. (This is important for the activity to work properly.) Give students one minute to draw each picture. (This is to ensure that they are drawing their first impression and not over-thinking the activity.)

B. Have students place their completed drawings on their desks face up. Then, allow a few minutes for students to circulate around the room to look at each others’ work and then return to their seats.

C. Then ask the following questions:

• What did you notice about the drawings you saw? More than likely, most of the drawings were similar to each other, even though they did not look at each other’s drawings while making them. This activity tends to produce the following results (with a few outliers, but even those tend to follow similar logic even if they look different): Masculinity drawings tend to include hard, thick, or jagged lines, squared shapes, and bold or dark colors. Femininity drawings tend to include soft, thin, delicate lines, rounded shapes, and soft, light, or pastel colors.
• Why do you think there were so many similarities in your drawings? Accept reasoned answers. Help your students recognize that masculinity (manliness) and femininity (womanliness) are essential parts of our identities. We are, at our core, male or female, and this essential truth is reflected not only in our bodies, but in the way we think, the way we respond to the world around us, and so many different aspects of being human. We automatically recognize and understand the truth of maleness and femaleness because it is so essential to our human nature. In fact, as this activity shows, maleness and femaleness are not socialized concepts but are truths we inherently know.

D. After discussing and reflecting on the drawings, project the image of The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. Give students a few moments to observe the painting. Then, ask your students the following questions:

• What first stands out to you about this painting? Accept reasoned answers.
• What do you think the artist wanted to communicate with this painting?
• What do you see that tells you that? Accept reasoned answers.

E. Arrange students in groups of three or four and give each group a copy of Handout C: The Kiss. Have them discuss the image in their groups using the questions as a guide. A digital image can be found at SophiaInstituteforTeachers.org/Art.

F. After a few minutes re-convene and have groups share some insights from their small group discussion with the larger group.

Activity II ( 20-30 minutes )

Note to teacher: For time consideration, this activity may be conducted over a period of two or more days. Preserve single-sex groupings throughout.

A. Begin by reading aloud or having a student read aloud Matthew 19:3-8:

Some Pharisees approached him, and tested him, saying, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any cause whatever?” He said in reply, “Have you not read that from the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female’ and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” They said to him, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss [her]?” He said to them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts Moses allowed you to divorce your wives, but from the beginning it was not so.”

B. Explain to your students that in this passage, the Pharisees challenge Jesus with a difficult question about the nature of man and woman and marriage. The most important part of Jesus’ answer is the last line, “from the beginning it was not so.” Jesus wants to restore God’s plan for humanity and save us from our fallen state. In order to do so, He invites us to return to the beginning and consider God’s original plan for our lives and for marital love. Jesus proposes that, for us to understand who we are now, we must consider where we came from.

Note: This is a sensitive topic to discuss. Many students today come from different family situations that may include divorce and remarriage or single parents. It is important to be compassionate toward these situations and affirm the goodness and love that God still brings forth from them. However, this does not minimize God’s original plan for humanity and marital love, which Jesus seeks to restore in our hearts.

C. Next, arrange your students into three groups (or six, depending on the size of your class). Assign each group one of the “original” states of being of man — Original Solitude, Original Unity, or Original Nakedness. Distribute to each a group a copy of the handout that corresponds to their assigned “original” (Handout D: Original Solitude, Handout E: Original Unity, or Handout F: Original Nakedness).

D. Have each group work together to read the material on their assigned handout and become “experts” about their assigned “original” by completing the comprehension questions and reflecting together on the discussion questions. Let them know that after this part of the activity they will be responsible for teaching members of a new group about their assigned “original.”

E. Once the “expert” groups have finished their work, rearrange your students into new groups of three students each. Make sure that each group has one member from each of the different “expert” groups

F. Distribute to each student Handout G: Original Solitude, Original Unity, and Original Nakedness Expert Summaries. In their new groups, have students take turns teaching the group about the “original” that they were assigned. Students should complete Handout G during this time.

Activity III ( 5-10 minutes ) 

A. With students still in their second groups, give each group a piece of poster board or butcher paper and make crayons, markers, and/or colored pencils available.

B. Have each group create a poster that illustrates what it means to be made in God’s image and likeness. Posters should represent artistically in some way that God is love, that He is Trinity, and that we are made in His image. Note: Given the nature of some of the topics addressed in this lesson, it may be wise to tell students to keep their posters and illustrations appropriate and respectful.

C. When finished, have each group briefly present and explain their posters to the class.