BY GRETCHEN KEISER

Staff Writer

ATLANTA--“It will begin with this sound,” said the speaker, rapping her knuckles loudly on the podium several times.

“With a knocking at midnight on Christmas Eve in the city of Rome,” Maria Harris continued. “The whole world will be attuned to the knocking on the Holy Door in Rome.”

Speaking to approximately 1,300 people who teach in Catholic schools and parishes in Georgia, North and South Carolina, Harris described the Great Jubilee Year 2000, which will begin Christmas Eve, as “a powerful gift for all of us.”

“We are called to celebrate it, but first we are called to the Scriptures of the jubilee,” said Harris, who teaches Catholic religious education at the university and college level and has written several books on jubilee spirituality.

“You discover celebrating the jubilee does not come first. On the way to celebrating the jubilee there are five jubilee commandments … You are to let the land lie fallow; you are to forgive debts; you are to set free the prisoners, especially children; you are to do justice; you are to throw the party of your lives … to sing and to dance in the streets. It is a time of jubilee.”

The keynote speaker at the Southern Catholic Conference ‘99 encouraged teachers from Catholic schools and religious education classrooms in the Province of Atlanta to apply the jubilee teachings found in St. Luke’s Gospel and in the Books of Leviticus and Isaiah within their school environments. The Jubilee Year begins when Pope John Paul II opens the Holy Door at St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Eve 1999 and closes on Epiphany 2001.

“Think about the possibilities of teaching the spirituality of the jubilee,” Harris said in her talk Oct. 8 at St. Pius X High School, Atlanta, where the two-day Southern Catholic Conference was held.

The commandment that the Jubilee Year is meant to be a sabbath, or resting time for the land, means teachers need to “cultivate stillness and quiet” in their classrooms and create “the kind of classrooms where kids get the sense ‘I’m really valued. There is something safe about this place.’”

“Attend to this,” Harris urged. “Create an environment where people can work soft, not hard … Let the land lie fallow. Let the kids lie fallow.”

Forgiveness of the international debt of 36 poor nations in sub-Saharan Africa is being considered by the United States for the Jubilee Year, Harris said, “in order to feed the children” in those countries with funds that would otherwise go toward the interest on the debt.

Teachers face the challenge of forgiving individual students every day for disruptions they cause or because their personalities are hard to handle, Harris said. But she encouraged teachers to send students home every day with gestures of acceptance.

“Forgiveness is never easy … Every day it must be fought for and prayed for and struggled for and won,” she said.

When Jesus began his public ministry, in the synagogue in Nazareth, he read from Isaiah, chapter 61, about the year of the Lord’s favor, Harris said, and about comforting those who mourn and giving them a garland instead of ashes.

“Even in our classrooms, there are children whose lives are filled with ashes,” Harris said. “Give that child the oil of gladness. Give that child a mantle of praise instead of a faint spirit … Isaiah says the spirit of the Lord anoints us to do that work.”

The call to free prisoners during the Jubilee Year can be applied to children, she said. “We must care for the freedom of children … Make sure they have enough nutrition, enough health care, enough education.”

The speaker affirmed the profession of teaching and the teachers who sat before her in rows of chairs and in the bleachers of the St. Pius gymnasium.

“If you work with children, take a bow,” she said, “because you are doing the work of jubilee.”

The theme of the conference, “Celebrating the Jubilee,” was set by the talk of the keynote speaker, who addressed participants both Friday and Saturday morning and also gave several workshops on the topic of the Jubilee Year. On both days, participants were able to select from over 100 workshops taught by master catechists, youth and young adult ministers, or Catholic school educators on a wide variety of topics. Four workshop sessions were offered throughout each day. At lunchtime, those attending could talk to their peers, visit exhibits or join discussion tables set up around particular topics of interest with a facilitator.

Kathy Wolf, archdiocesan director of religious education, who coordinated the provincial conference, said the conference was the first held in Atlanta since 1994. It attracted a total of 1,300 people, with approximately 1,100 attending on Friday and approximately 750 attending on Saturday. Some participants attended both days.

In addition to Harris, a featured presenter was Donna Peña, a bilingual musician and liturgist, who led workshops and also gave a concert at Immaculate Heart of Mary Church, Atlanta, on Oct. 8.

“It is very important that the Catholic Church be a church of diversity and a church of more than one language,” Peña said in a workshop on bilingual liturgy. “Even though English is the language spoken in America, Spanish is quickly coming along. The future of the church is going to be in the Spanish language. It is very important that the church come along with that. We should all become comfortable with that.”

Playing her guitar and leading workshop participants in bilingual liturgical music, Peña encouraged them to help congregations sing the parts of the Mass in both Spanish and English.

Bilingual music is available through publishers GIA in Chicago and Oregon Catholic Press, she said, and the Lutheran publisher, Augsburg Fortress, has produced a new all Spanish hymnal, which can be an additional resource. Peña also recommended the World Library missalette for its presentation of Spanish and English translations.

St. Paul of the Cross parishioner Frances Kennedy, who is in the parish choir and works with the youth choir, said she was looking for bilingual music.

“We have a group of Hispanics within our community,” said the Atlanta parishioner. “We have taken familiar parts of the Mass and used them in different languages,” particularly on Pentecost Sunday.

In two workshops, Jim McGinnis, founder of the Institute of Peace and Justice in St. Louis and author of materials for families, schools and parishes on these topics, offered practical strategies for teaching students how to resolve conflicts without violence.

With dozens of participants offering ideas, the workshop discussed providing a “peace table” in classrooms where students learn to negotiate and “where you use words and not fists” to resolve disagreements. One middle school, McGinnis said, has a special flag that is raised every day the school is “fight-free” so students develop peer pressure for that atmosphere to continue in the school.

He said that in touring schools in India modeled on Gandhi’s nonviolence, “every one had a vegetable and flower garden. The kids learned how to grow food. They were learning to appreciate life, how to tend life and nurture it. It has a powerful effect,” McGinnis said. “A place of beauty can be used to gentle down. Beauty gentles. Trees and gardens make a difference.”

He also spoke in his workshops of the need to prepare children to live in a world that is multi-racial and multi-cultural. “We probably grew up in a mono-cultural world,” he said. “We are the bridge generation.”

Sts. Peter and Paul School Principal Queen Grady said she found the keynote speaker and the workshops valuable for her work as a teacher and administrator.

“It has been a wonderful day,” said the Decatur school principal. “The keynote speaker and this (workshop) --because we are focusing on nonviolence in all our schools. We are teaching our kids to be peacemakers. We try to be peacemakers ourselves in relating to one another.”

Grady said the emphasis on verbal and non-verbal communication was relevant to her work.

“Students, teachers, parents—everyone wants to feel important” in the life of the school, she said. “It is our challenge to make them feel that way. When you set a positive environment in a school, you feel it the minute you step in.”

Conference planners overall received positive feedback, Wolf said. “St. Pius High School was a wonderful host. They made my job easier.”

“The overall feedback has been very, very positive,” she said, particularly on the caliber of the speakers and workshop presenters, the planning, organization and punctuality of all the sessions. Coming together as Catholic school teachers and religious educators in the province “helps us to realize a lot of people are working together to pass on the faith to young people,” Wolf said.