|
Books he has authored include Daily Meditations with Scripture for Busy Parents, Stress Therapy and Raising Faith-Filled Kids. He has also written a monthly newsletter, At Home with Our Faith, and contributed to a number of best-selling books as well: I Love Being Catholic, I Love Being Married and Christmas Presence: Twelve Gifts That Were More Than They Seemed. He was recently named vice president in charge of product development for Loyola Press.
Arias, who handled the translation into Spanish of McGrath’s presentation, as well as providing additional insights of his own, holds a bachelor of arts in philosophy and received his master’s in Pastoral Studies at Catholic Theological Union with a focus on liturgy. He has been a faculty member at Tepeyac Institute, the Cultural Institute of Leadership in the Midwest, and the Hispanic Institute of Liturgy. He has served as a newspaper editor and editor of liturgical books and is now an editor at Loyola Press.
McGrath explained the day’s program would be based on two core beliefs. The first, he illustrated with a story by Father Donald Senior, president of Catholic Theological Union. Every year, Father Senior accompanies a group to the Holy Land, some of whom are physically handicapped. The group made a pact that they would visit every single site to be seen, their motto being, “We all get there together.” And with the help of a specially outfitted bus, specially built ramps and people looking out for each other, they did just that.
Father Senior would later say, “We saw everything everyone else has ever seen and we saw a lot more, because we saw what we did for and with one another — that everybody was a giver; everybody was a receiver.”
Noting that he loved the way Father Senior’s tour group overcame obstacles, McGrath pointed out having different languages can be an obstacle as well, hence the adoption of the day’s bilingual mode. “Miguel and I are committed to the same thing,” he said. “We are going to do what it takes to make sure we hear everything that there is to hear, see everything that there is to see, in the same room, in the same time, together.”
Another core belief for the day’s presentation, McGrath noted, was the understanding that to reach people “you go in their door,” as Jesus himself did. “You find out where their pain is, where their joy is, where their prayers are, where their hopes are,” he continued. “God is at work in everyone’s life. Sometimes it’s not apparent to us on the outside and sometimes it’s not even apparent to the person themselves and so a big part of our work is to help them see that.”
Attendees were then asked to imagine themselves as they were between the ages of seven and 14 and recall the person in their life at that time who had been the most positive spiritual influence on them, as well as the most important faith lesson they learned from them and how it was taught.
After sharing stories at individual tables, participants were asked to share with the room and told of lessons learned from parents and grandparents as part of everyday family life. “That is why we all who are ministers in the church are so eager to involve the family and prepare them,” said McGrath. “They are the first catechists and the first teachers of the faith.”
He noted it is the catechists’ duty to equip parents with the skills and opportunities to weave faith into their children’s lives, illustrating this with a quote from Pope Paul VI, “We are not so much in need of teachers, as we are of witnesses.”
McGrath related Jack Shea’s story of an elderly woman he met at a workshop in Ireland to illustrate his point. During a session, she had related an incident from her childhood, telling how her mother would line up her 14 children to check them over before Sunday Mass. After each child’s inspection they were allowed to go out and play before the family left for church, and the woman recalled her mother one such morning noticing her little sister, further down the line, was missing a shoelace.
The mother asked the daughter, who was about to be released to play, if she would run and get the needed shoelace but she refused, eager to rush outside. Later, she looked in and saw her mother kneel down, take a shoelace out of her own shoe and thread the younger sibling’s shoe with it.
The woman related, “Seeing that, I went into the back and I got a shoelace and I knelt down and I put the shoelace in my mother’s shoe. And while I did that, she combed my sister’s hair and patted my head, combing my own hair.”
Later that afternoon on a break, the woman came across Shea outside and, noticing he was minus his usual cigar, asked him about it. He had forgotten it that day. The woman then handed him a cigar, saying she had suspected as much and had gotten one for him. Moments later it struck him that the cigar represented the childhood shoelace. He ran after the woman to tell her this revelation and she replied, “I know that. It was a pact with my mother.”
This, McGrath said, shows that often the most powerful lessons parents teach are not the ones they purposely verbalize to their children, but “the ones we didn’t know we were teaching.” He added that lessons parents can teach without realizing can include “that God doesn’t really matter in our lives” or “we keep God only to Sunday” or call on him only in times of emergency.
He addressed practical things catechists can do to help parents have the awareness to be their children’s first teachers of the faith. These included having students interview their parents and grandparents about whom their own spiritual models were, perhaps creating a book (simple with today’s computer generation) out of questions asked of family members as to their favorite saint, prayer, or hymn. Parents and grandparents can also describe seasonal and religious family traditions as well, to be passed on to the younger generation.
Recalling how the priest at his daughter’s baptism asked, “What do you want for this child?” McGrath asked the audience, “Think of the children that you work with and say, ‘What do I want for those children?’” He added that this is a question catechists must also put to the parents of the children in their classes.
McGrath remembered the excitement as each new school year started in his parish, with parents called to an opening meeting for such mundane but necessary things as filling out milk money forms and paying gym fees. “I always thought,” he related, “this is the golden opportunity to check into what I think is the key entrée point of all parents into their faith and into the nurturing the faith of their children — and that is their fierce love of their children.”
He noted a recent study found fewer Catholics believing in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, which immediately had people blaming the catechists. It is not the catechists, McGrath said, who are doing their best in a difficult situation, but the fact that people are really missing real presence their own lives. “They don’t know what it means to have real presence,” he said, noting there can be four family members under one roof, each on different electronic devices — televisions, computers, BlackBerrys.
“What’s missing, I think, in a lot of children’s lives,” he said, “is the real presence — that encounter that would teach them what it means to look for the real presence of Jesus.” He then asked the group to share and come up with their own ideas of how children can be led to this real presence.
Answers to this included blessing a child whenever you tell them goodbye as a reminder of God’s love, utilizing teachable moments for a family experience at times of sacramental preparation and asking parents at such times to imagine themselves at their child’s age.
One participant noted we have a “sensual church,” that fills our senses through the sacraments and the liturgy and advocated making the church experience come alive for young people in a way that fills the senses. Others spoke of bringing our cultural traditions to the liturgy, experiencing the eucharistic way of living at home in order to make a true celebration of the liturgy as family, developing a rich prayer life, having religious art in the home, and teaching by example.
McGrath then related a personal story of his father’s recent death from cancer. Despite an especially trying day, he turned to his son, winked and made a typical comment that summed up his philosophy of life, “All in all, Tom, we’re in pretty good shape,” which reminded McGrath that “there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God, neither suffering nor death. No matter what, all in all, the world is trustable; God is good. We are in the palm of God’s hand.”
Bill Smith, director of religious education at Sts. Peter and Paul in New Braunfels and local representative for Loyola Press, then gave an overview of the Finding God program, which he has used in his own parish. He noted its two key themes as being the “we’re all in this together” philosophy of Father Senior, and the centrality of prayer. Rather than the usual opening with a prayer, the program calls first for discussion and meditation. It also challenges catechists to model what they are going to teach, going through similar modeling for parents and children.
Smith noted the weakest part of faith formation lessons is often the ending, but this is handled differently in Finding God. Perforated pages at the end of each lesson can be taken home to tell parents what their child learned that day. A space is provided on this page for the child to illustrate what they can do that week to put the lesson into practice in daily life.
Parents also become involved through special sessions themselves, giving their children the opportunity to reverse roles and ask them, “What did you learn today?”
McGrath then addressed threats that hinder parents handing on their faith in a good and positive way and how to deal with this. Threats include lack of time and money, having to work multiple jobs and being a single parent. Problems also arise when parents are of different faiths or did not receive good faith formation themselves. Another factor is the media, which often seems to be working against family values.
A sample baptismal letter (actually one in English and an adapted one in Spanish) from a godparent to a child is included in the Finding God program and can serve as a springboard for ideas on what our heritage has to offer a child in faith formation.
“Each one of us longs for God,” said McGrath. “Each one of us has love in our hearts, especially when we have our kids involved.” He urged getting parents in a receptive state by drawing on this, asking them to name a sacred object in their home. This can help them see what they truly want for themselves and their children.
Sharing family meals is especially important, McGrath noted, and is an extremely powerful tool in raising one’s children well. It is also a good time to teach prayer.
Arias elaborated on the significance of a shared meal, noting that in Jesus’ time sharing a meal meant you were in agreement with those at the table. He added that in today’s busy world, we often don’t take time to share meals as a family and that it is a ritual that needs to be emphasized.
“The act of sharing the table at home is not only to fill our stomachs,” he said, “it is to connect what we are going to celebrate on the following Sunday, the breaking of the bread, the pouring of the cup and the communion in the blood and the body of Jesus Christ.” He added that before receiving communion on Sunday, we must first, at home, “learn how to share the tortilla, the tacos...”
He noted that in Hispanic homes, you know you are accepted into the family when you are invited into the kitchen “because the kitchen is where stories are told, where life is shared, where stomachs are fed.” He fondly recalled his own grandmother who always welcomed the friends he would bring along to her table.
Group discussions and brainstorming at the individual tables followed. Delved into and then shared with the group were responses to: listing the threats to modern families and how they can be combated; coming up with ideas for engaging parents and grandparents; relating ways this has been successfully accomplished in participants’ parishes; and telling what they had learned that day that gave them the most hope.
Responses included the suggestion of welcoming families to the parish in a special way and offering family retreats and workshops. One parish, for the Holy Thursday liturgy, adapted the traditional foot-washing to choosing 12 families who washed each other’s feet and grew closer in the process.
Also found helpful were having shared meals accompany the classes, accommodating parents’ work schedules and offering them a range of activities, having a telephone committee to personally invite parents’ attendance and making use of e-mail to build relationships with people as well.
McGrath noted, “It’s a very rich harvest today — and we all got there together.” In concluding, the group formed two circles around the room’s altar table, with McGrath asking them to imagine the parents, catechists, teachers and others who had been their spiritual influencers as standing behind them, with their own spiritual models behind them, in ever-widening circles reaching back to the apostles and Jesus. Standing at the circle’s center would be the children of today.
“We offer our blessing to these children,” he said. “The witness that has been awakened in us, we call forth in them. We show them that they belong and where they belong.”
|