Freeish art: origami prayer cranes
I’m not an expert on the tradition and significance of paper cranes in Japanese culture. But from what I’ve read, making them can be a spiritual practice and they’re symbols of peace, prayer, and goodwill. Without co-opting this rich and beautiful tradition, I find so many resonances here with Christian prayer and I hope I used this activity respectfully to help my youth think through prayer in some choose-your-own-adventure ways.
First show your youth how to turn regular computer paper into an 8.5 by 8.5 square by holding it with the short sides at the top and bottom and pulling a top corner across the page until it meets the opposite long edge. Make a crease (it will run diagonally across the paper) and cut along the bottom edge of the folded side to remove the bottom 2.5 inches of paper. They will either use this to create their crane, or trace it onto another type of paper.
Choose your own adventure prayer options:
Scripture (Psalms, especially) references finding refuge and joy in the shadow of God’s wings (see Psalm 63 for example). Youth who want to meditate on that promise can rewrite Psalm 63 across their paper square in any style or orientation they choose, and then choose to make the words visible or hidden during the folding process.
You can also invite youth to choose a word to use as a mantra for their crane. Peace, hope, healing, safety, etc. The crane will come to symbolize this one word prayer. They can write and decorate the word however they want on one side of the paper. On the example above, I wrote “peace” all over one side.
Youth can draw a picture of a person, situation, or symbol representing something in their life that they want to lift up in prayer to God.
You can also invite them to trace their square onto another piece of paper: newspaper, paper bag, a piece of mail, wrapping paper, etc., anything that has some kind of significance that they want to transform into a prayer.
After the youth have decorated their paper on one side (or prepared a different kind of paper), watch a youtube video together and follow the steps to make a paper crane. I liked this one. In this demo, the purple side corresponds to the side of the paper the youth want to have showing at the end. Leaders should do one first to prepare!
I really enjoyed this activity because it models the way that we transform through prayer, and the way that prayer can shape us, too. Spending time with God’s promises and the deepest needs of our hearts does transform us, even if that process is slow and messy and needs some do-overs. Single words can be powerful prayers if we can internalize them. Bad news is still bad news no matter how you fold it, but sometimes once we manipulate and mull over something difficult with God it starts to take a different shape. Instead of being alone in a dark place, God meets us there and at the very least, it may feel less lonely. This in itself is a beautiful transformation.
In Japan, paper cranes are sometimes offered at war memorials and are intentionally left out in the elements to degrade slowly. This is a symbol of releasing the prayers inside them, but I love it as a symbol of the fact that we do not need to always pray our same old prayers. We sit with prayers for a while - sometimes for a lifetime - but eventually we grow and change and may find ourselves praying new prayers, or even praying old prayers in a new way or from a new perspective.
Making beautiful things out of regular, every day people is God’s wheelhouse. And we are also called to create, to participate in the transformation of the world. This simple activity was a lovely way to get inside these claims from a different angle. You might find Gungor’s Beautiful Things to be a nice way to close your meeting.
This would work well as an in-person or a remote-ministry activity; we did it remotely over zoom, sharing the video over my screen.
