Key Stage 4 Year 10
A Fertile Heart Receiving & Giving Creative Love
Love is creative. To have a fertile heart is to love, grow and make a positive difference.
A Fertile Heart Receiving & Giving Creative Love
Children have a natural desire to love. They have a longing to make a difference. They love growing. A Fertile Heart helps them understand that these desires are all connected. God’s first words to us were, “Be fertile!” And the whole of the Bible teaches us that we are fertile through healthy, loving relationships – with God and each other. Learning to authentically and appropriately receive and give love leads to us having fertile hearts. Using the concept ‘fertile’ helps the children see the similarity between plants growing through fertile soil, sun and water, and us growing through a caring environment, love and truth.
Key Stage 4: Year 10
Contents: Year 10 Year 10 deals most with human sexuality, beginning with the importance of trusting in one’s own beauty. It explores the integration of the objective and subjective dimensions of life and love: reality and feelings. This requires thoughtfulness, stillness and patience. We then see the beauty of complementarity between masculinity and femininity. This helps us see authentic sex as expressing a communion of love. We truly own our sexuality by offering it to God, in chastity. Adolescence is an important time for getting in touch with the joy of fertility, in every dimension, and learning how our biology and our hormones affect us. Finally, we look at the very important issue of the fertility of suffering, and then at how to be fertile within society. Module 10a: You’re beautiful! To appreciate that when we understand our true beauty, we cooperate with it and become more beautiful. When we panic into settling for second best, we sell ourselves short and tarnish our beauty. Module 10b: Growing up: objective and subjective love To understand the difference between the truth of love and the movement of love, and why they need to be integrated into true personal love. Module 10c: Being and Stillness; Personhood and Panic Knowing God loves me dispels fear and allows me to gradually, fully discover who I am, what is going on inside me, and how that can be fully integrated - so that I can become a happy, relational, fertile person. Module 10d: Equality and Complementarity To be clear that God created male and female equal in dignity. To understand complementarity specifically in relation to male and female. To begin to think through what makes up this complementarity. Module 10e: Sex as Expressing a Communion of Love To more deeply understand the intimate link between the communion of love and fertility, which is uniquely reflected in marriage and sexual union. Module 10f: Sexuality and Relationship with God To understand that we are called first to enter into communion with God, within his communion of love, and how this then opens us up to deeper communion with each other, and opens us up to greater responsibility. Module 10g: The Joy of Fertility To realise that the whole process of discovering one’s fertility, understanding and owning it, and offering it appropriately, makes up one of the greatest joys of life. To be more aware of what can help or hinder this process. Module 10h: Sexual bonding To understand something of our complementary biology and the hormones that are connected with sexual activity and how they affect women and men, so that we can make wiser choices. Module 10i: Fertility of Suffering To reflect on how the brokenness of life does not diminish the truth of the human calling and, through the Cross, can even be at the heart of even deeper growth. Module 10j: Social fertility To apply what we have learnt about the pattern of fertility - making a difference, growing and helping others to grow - to our role in society.
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