The goal of religious education is to pass on the “Deposit of Faith” and to instill in children a love for the Lord that is an integral part of their being. We cannot consider ourselves successful if our children are merely “Mass attenders” who withstand temptation. We want them to be courageous men and women who make a difference in His Church — men and women whose love for God is contagious.
St. Teresa Benedicta (also know as Edith Stein) writes “the goal of religious education is to prepare young people for incorporation into the Mystical Body of Christ. Intimate communion of personal love and life with Christ means that all who cling to Christ also belong to one another.” We are equipping our children with the knowledge and instilling in them the passion for the Lord that will inspire them to go out and conquer the world for Christ. With this goal in mind, parents must reject the idea that religion is taught in a classroom, x hours a week. Religion is not a subject studied, but a lifestyle lived.
Children naturally learn through activity and sensory experiences. The Catholic Church, with its sacramentals, its music, its rich liturgy and its heritage of feasting and fasting is ideally suited to engaging a child’s mind, heart and soul. As this school year begins, invest in a book for yourself. Buy The Catholic Parent Book of Feasts by Michaelann Martin and others (available online at www.Catholicfoundations.com or at most local bookstores). Sit down with the same calendar where you plan PTA meetings, soccer practices, and birthday parties and plan to celebrate at least one feast day a month. There are plenty of ideas for celebration in Martin’s book.
For each saint you celebrate, do a little more than simply read the short biography in The Catholic Parent Book of Feasts. For that month, read a biography of the saint aloud to your children. Children are inspired by the lives of heroes. The Catholic Church has a full repertoire of heroes from every walk of life. Books like the Vision Books biographies and the Wyndeatt biographies (also available online at www.Catholicfoundations.com or at most local bookstores) not only educate a child about the lives of holy men and women, they educate a child about life in the Church and traditions of the Faith. Most importantly, they inspire children (and their parents).
No education is successful if it is contained in a box and limited to traditional school hours. Education is a living process. Our aim in education is to give a full life. The question is not how much does the child know, but how much does he care. Children are naturally inclined to seek God, to know their Creator. This intimacy is the ultimate vital interest. They need exposure to a full life in the Church and they need one more thing. They need time.
Intimacy with Christ requires that the child not just understand the catechism, but that he develop a strong interior life. In order to do this, he must have time to develop his soul. At least some of this time should be spent outdoors in a natural setting. This might be the most challenging need to meet.
Our nation’s children are over-programmed. The children in my neighborhood leave their homes at 8 a.m. and return on the bus at 3:45. They then run off to an assortment of lessons or sporting activities before rushing home to do homework. Whatever free time they might have is spent in front of the TV or computer. They have no time for wonder. They have no time for prayer. It takes “downtime” to develop a soul.
If we want our children to grow up to be people of prayer, we must provide, protect and defend their quiet time. If we want our children to define themselves based on their relationships to their creator, to develop in the image of their God, and not to be defined by the activities they participate in, then they must spend some un-programmed time forming relationships with the eternal components of their world.
This might be the most difficult job of all for the parent who is educating a child in the Faith: to turn away from the clamor of the culture, at least for a little while everyday, and encourage the child to be quiet with his Lord.
In this paper a year or so ago, Dr. Robert Wicks wrote an insightful article entitled “Spiritual Sanity.” In it he quoted Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel who said, “We teach children how to measure, how to weigh; we fail to teach them how to revere, how to sense wonder and awe. The sense of the sublime, the sign of moral greatness of the human soul and something which is potentially given to everyone is now a rare gift.”
Read them stories of the saints, celebrate the feasts of the year, encourage quiet contemplation. Give them the rare gift of a real life in the Lord.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
