The Old Fashioned Way

Last Saturday we celebrated the sacrament of Confirmation with ninety-seven young people from our parish. While the young people remind us of the future of the Church and how challenging our world is, one was also reminded of our retro-experience of our younger years. There’s the bishop with his mitre and crosier, the red robes and vestments, the flowers, and the gathering of friends and family. There is continuity in the movement of the Spirit among God’s People. The Spirit of God continues to enliven the Church and urges believers to Christian life and mission.

As I watched from my very good seat and shared in the rites of the day, I wondered at the Church that goes on, the faith that is shared, and the challenges to continue the process of discovering of God with us by the action of the Spirit.

How are we challenged and enabled to pass on the faith to the continued generations of believers within the Church? The day was not only about the young people, but about the older, adult believers in the community. There is a gratitude for the blessings of God through the years. There is the lived experience of the presence of God’s Spirit within the community and within us. How can we share that with our children and young adults?

The starting point of sharing the faith with our young people is our own faith journey. How did we come to believe? How did we learn to pray? How were values and virtues translated into personal values? These realities, despite the indwelling of the Spirit within the community, just don’t drop out of the sky. Our experience is filled with grace-filled moments, people who shared their lives and stories with us, and events which occasioned thought and prayer.

With all our technology we learn to believe, to pray, and to live Christian lives the old-fashioned way – by life within a believing community. Often enough in the religious education community, we hear that the community itself is the context of religious learning. Faith, prayer, and life are best learned as they are shared experiences within the community itself.

Sources of Prayer
The renewed Rites of Initiation in which people come to the sacramental life of Baptism, Confirmation, and Eucharist engage the inquirers in the common life of faith, which they experience by coming together with other believers. They read and learn the Scriptures. They examine their personal lives and they share prayer together. Common rites mark their journey to the Easter Sacraments.

Our liturgical celebrations, especially the Eucharist, are a common source of learning to pray and celebrate. There we learn God’s Word and there we come to know the presence of Christ in the bread and wine which we share.

How to pass this faith on to our young people is a challenge. First step is that they need to participate with their families and other parishioners at the Eucharist on a regular basis. The scriptures and homily should be ordinary conversation within the family. The ritual actions of worship should be explained. The meaning and intensity of communion should be explored. These are not private events, but community and family experiences of God present among us. Adult believers take the lead in the process.

Family prayer and religious conversation are a normal and constant way for young people to learn to walk in the ways of faith. Prayer is learned by praying. Grace at meal times gives young people the context and opportunity to give thanks and how to fashion words of gratitude to God. Other prayer times in the morning or at night gather the family for safe space to pray and to reflect together about life and its meanings.

Prayers by memory and ritual actions by practice give young people forms on which to hang their piety and spiritual needs. The old-fashioned way was described as learning prayers “by heart.” How else to learn interiority and the inner movement of God except by doing it within the inner spirit! Words and rituals give young people forms on which to hang their faith and their experience.

Ritual Forms and Words
Remember the days of our youth and how we learned to pray. Prayers like the Sign of the Cross, the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, the Rosary, and the Apostles’ Creed gave us words and forms from the long faith tradition of the Church. Rituals at Church like blessing ourselves with holy water, genuflecting or bowing profoundly on entering, standing to sing, extending one’s hands to share in communion call us to faith and devotion. In them we learn to express our spirits and our faith.

Liturgy and family life provide a wonderful school of piety, where we learn to pray, to speak of the things of the heart, and to live Christian lives. As older believers, priests, parents, grandparents, we need to share and articulate these things with young believers in the Church. I learned from my first pastor, when I was a young priest, “Things don’t happen… you make them happen.” Faith comes by expressing it, not by hoping for it.

CDH