The other 99

Read today’s gospel, The Parable of the Lost Sheep, last night with my mother.  Here are the thoughts our discussion prompted:

How do the other 99 feel when the Shepherd leaves them behind to go and find his prodigal sheep?

Abandoned?

Sad?

Are they tempted to stray themselves?

Or are they too afraid to wander far from the familiar confines of the fold?

And that prodigal sheep?  That’s not actually in the text.  We assign lost to wayward and sinful.  But all we know is he has strayed.  Perhaps he is bold and courageous.  Perhaps he went out in service of the Shepherd or the fold and lost his way.  Perhaps he was pushed out by the others because he was different.

Perhaps he was a day dreamer and was lost in thought when the others moved on to greener pastures.

All we know is for whatever reason, he is not like the other 99 and this brought him closer, on the Shepherd’s shoulders.

This parable has always been a comfort when we recognize our own sinfulness.  But what about when we feel comfortable in our faith?  Comfortable in our spiritual life? What about when we identify with the 99?

We are certainly not called to sin.  But perhaps we are called to stray from OUR ways.  Push the boundaries of our complacency and comfort.  Perhaps we are called to trust the Shepherd.  Trust that if we try and live a radical life even just a little bit and fail, He will find us and put us on his shoulders.

Perhaps we are called to be afraid of the next step in our spiritual journey, but we take it any way trusting that what we fear is not going to take us a way from Him but closer to him.

Do we have to sin to identify with the lost sheep?  I wonder.  We certainly want to be him at the end of the story.  Who wants to be the boring 99?  We want the Shepherd to pick us up and carry us home.  

So is there something we can do for him to achieve that place on his shoulders besides leave him?  Maybe we aren’t leaving him but the 99.  Maybe we venture away from the safety in numbers, in convenience or in convention.  

Maybe it is a call to imitate the Shepherd’s own radical love which sets us outside the fold.  And in straying from the status quo, on his shoulders we return.

The Devoted Friend and Today’s Gospel

 I use Oscar Wilde’s story The Devoted Friend for a dual purpose when I teach.  As a former middle school literature teacher I know one of the hardest skills for kids at this age is to love a book they don’t like.  And so I begin:

I hate this story:  the plot, the characters, especially the ending!  But I love Wilde, and so I know if I hate the plot, the characters and the ending, he intended it.  He wants to teach me something.  And because I approach it this way, I still hate the plot the characters and the ending, but I love what he has taught me.  I use it often in my life.  By learning what he clearly believes is not devoted friendship, I ask myself:  am I being a Hans or the Miller:  am I being taken advantage of or using another?

We then switch gears to study friendship.  We take the stated tenants of friendship and analyze them.  One is that a good friend will do anything for friendship.  Is this true?  Should you lie or cheat for a friend?  Would a true friend even ask? Are there times friendship requires you don’t keep their secrets…

I also ask:  if your friend asks you to help move them to a new apartment, should you?  Yes, of course.  But what if to move them, you miss your daughters first communion or the funeral of your parents?  Should you help your friend?  No.  Friendship requires it be put in a proper order.  It must strengthen relationships with more priority, not diminish them.

In today’s gospel Jesus says, “let the dead bury the dead.”  I have always found this harsh, as my students often struggle to put friendship in its proper order.  But isn’t this just another way of saying the same thing.  Should we bury our dead?  Yes, of course.  But not if it diminishes our primary relationship, our friendship with Christ.  

In my last reflection on the Devoted Friend we came up with something I had not thought of before:  the Devoted Friend is not the story of friendship, but it is the story of a saint.  Hans gives up everything, even his life, for a misguided notion of friendship and a person he believes is a friend but is merely a tyrant.  But if the story had been called The Devoted Follower and he had done all he did for love of Christ in the face of a tyrant, we would hate the Miller but love Hans.  

I wonder if Wilde intended us to make this connection, it wouldn’t surprise me.  But if not, we at least have learned that to be used by a friend isn’t friendship and that to make friendship our primary focus diminishes its role in our lives.  And when we hear Jesus today, we know how to nurture all our relationships:  put Him first.

Happy belated Father’s Day!

When we think about the family as a living icon of the Trinity, what has always been forefront in my mind is the Love between the Father and Son which begets the Spirit:  marital love is so powerful and beautiful it creates not just children, but the proper environment for them to flourish.  It is not what we give our children which benefits them most, not even the unconditional love we have for them.  No, our greatest gift is our love for each other which creates in them a sense of well being and security.  My children have often questioned my love for them, this is natural when they do not understand why I denied what they wanted.  But they have never questioned my love for their father nor his love for me.  And it is that love which begets their security in a world with so few certainties.

But lately I have thought a bit differently about this icon.  My nephew recently got married and on his marriage certificate was a painting of a Bishop hearing the vows of a couple.  It clearly brought to my mind Rublev’s icon of the Old Testament Trinity.  But as I contemplated it, my thinking was stretched in new ways.

The bishop shares the spot of Christ in the triangle.  This makes sense as the church is His representative on earth.  But the bride held the place of the Father which made me contemplate how mothers are like God the Father.  The comparisons between earthly fathers and the divine Father are many.  But why does the future mother sit at His seat at the table?  

But more interesting is that the future father sits in the place of the Holy Spirit.  This is worth contemplating.  Mary is of course the bride of the Holy Spirit.  One of the most profound things I have read was from Maximilian Kolbe where he states that beget from the Father and Son, the spirit is THE immaculate conception, and thus Mary as the mortal Immaculate  conception is the bride taking her spouses’ name.  I love that!

But also, when we think of the father’s role in the family, he is the spiritual life blood.  While mothers primarily deal with the day to day, the father must be more forward thinking.  While we feed and comfort, nag and cajole, to make sure they are prepared for the world, he must lead his children to be prepared for eternity. We teach them to imitate Christ, he teaches them to be the force behind Christ: The unseen power that turns a seed into a tree.

It is for this reason that men must again take seriously their job of spiritual leader in the family.  For too long this has fallen to moms.  We are as spiritual, do not mistake my meaning, but the child sees in his earthly father a different sort of leader.  If our children see eternity as the stuff of women, even our girls may turn away.  They, boys and girls, must see eternity as the stuff of warriors, the stuff of heroes, the stuff of their father!

The Prayer of Children

 

One of the greatest gifts of being in the atrium with children is to experience how they pray.  To receive this gift, the catechist must make an enormous pedagogical shift from traditional methodologies of transmitting the faith.  We must begin by understanding on the deepest level:  We do not teach prayer.

When we understand that prayer is a means of knowing God (allowing him to reveal himself to us and a means for us to respond), we see that in many ways, the child’s prayer is more profound than our own.  The job of the catechist is not to fill an empty vessel but to create conditions for prayer.  Prayer is an experience.  Think of a roller coaster ride.  I can define it, explain it, give language to express how it makes one feel, even show pictures or videos of my own ride. But I cannot share the experience.  It is something one must do for oneself.  All I can really do is present to the child the roller coaster, and if I am blessed, experience it with him.

To aid in the child’s prayer, we must first look at how they pray.  Through many years of observation of the three- to six-year-old child, we have seen the primary characteristics are:  Silent and meditative; short and spontaneous; praise and gratitude; song and movement.

The first condition we meet to aid the child is to give them something to respond to.  We call this Kerygma or Proclamation.  The richer the content, the deeper and more meaningful the response.  But I must be careful to never impose my own ideas onto the child’s response. 

Let me give an example.  After reading a passage from scripture, we will ask the children some open-ended questions:  What did you hear?  What might this mean?  In the beginning, it took an enormous discipline to sit in the silence that often answers these questions.  But then I came to truly understand the profound response that IS their silence.  Perhaps it is because they don’t yet have the language or perhaps there is no language sufficient to express what is in their hearts.

Normal behavior of three- and four-year old’s who are bored or confused or frustrated is not silence.  They will ask a million questions one after the other, they are picking at their shoestring or poking the child next to them, they are telling a completely unrelated story about their dog or throwing something at you.  It is a big joke of parents everywhere:  The only time your children are silent is when they are absolutely doing something they want to do that they absolutely don’t want you to know about. 

And so too with their prayer:  They are absolutely doing something they want to do and, at that moment, they don’t need me to know about it.  It is between them and God.

How can this gift from the youngest child aid in our own prayer life?  I think often in the season of Lent, as we focus on our prayer lives a little bit more, we can get caught in the rut of thinking there is only one right way to pray.  Or that there is a particular way that prayer should make us feel. Perhaps you were told you should say a rosary every day, perhaps you were told you should do a weekly holy hour.  These are not bad pieces of advice.  But they are merely conditions for prayer, they are not the prayer themselves.  The rosary gives us the proclamation of events in the life of Christ and the words to respond. The Holy hour gives us the environment of being in the Presence of our Eucharistic Lord and the opportunity to respond.  But our experience flows from these. And the experience can be found in a carpool line, a laundry room or while washing the dishes.

Sometimes the experience is like a roller coaster. 
Sometimes it is like rocking in our mother’s arms.

Sometimes it is like standing alone in the desert.
Sometimes we respond in the poetry of a rote prayer,
Other times in our own voice of praise or in shouts of frustration,
And still other times with no words at all.

But what the child teaches us is that prayer is an experience between us and God.  It is our own unique response to what He has to say to us personally.  

And if we can become like little children, whatever He has to say and whatever the nature of our response, it is ALWAYS accompanied by peace and joy!  And will allow us to more fully realize and participate in the source and summit of our faith this Lenten Season.

"Our prayer is both a preparation and a vehicle for arriving at the greatest prayer of thanksgiving:  The Eucharist."  (Listening to God with Children, p. 117)

To Know and to Love

The metaphysical and material reality is one reality.  God so desires us to know Him, he has made himself accessible through both.  In my short life, the knowledge we have of the material world has expanded enormously in both directions.  We are simultaneously learning the Universe holds secrets which make it both larger and smaller than we could have ever imagined.  We focus in on the microscopic and out on the world beyond our own galaxy with greater and greater clarity. 

With high school and middle school students, I contemplate the Philosophical arguments for the Existence of God.  One which they grasp with ease is the Intelligent Design:  If there is a design, there must be a designer.  We look at three pictures: Help written in the sand, a letter found in a wall and a watch found on the beach.  They are asked: What has written Help in the sand, is it the wind?  What has left the note on the paper, is it mice feet?  What created the watch, was it the ebb and flow of the ocean?  We conclude quite quickly that it is not a what, but a who.  Behind intelligent designs must be an intelligence. We then look at two paintings, that of a young child and that of a skilled artist to deduce that the more complicated a design, the more intelligent and/or creative the designer.  By observing the known Universe, it is unreasonable to believe it was created by chance.  The more we learn, the more we understand it holds a design so complicated; its designer has an intelligence and a creativity far beyond our own.

The child in the Level Two Atrium uses similar logic:  If creation is a gift, there must be a Gift Giver.  When we look at Creation as a banquet of gifts set out before man containing all he would need to both survive and to thrive, we must ask ourselves:  Who gave all this to me?

The study of the Trinity is a mystery.  But this is not a limitation, it is an invitation.  God wished for each of us to have the opportunity to be surprised by Him.  If all that could be known about God could be known by one man, Thomas Aquinas would have figured it out.  What few loose ends he left would have been tied up by John Paul the Great.  We know much about God, yes.  But there will always be more to know.  He invites you to solve the mystery as well.  He invites you to know Him in a way that no one has ever known Him before.

God desires we know him and love him.  It is through our reason that we may come to know him more fully.  But how do we come to love him more fully?

To aid in the search this Lenten season, look to the youngest child, who simply delights in time spent in the presence of the Lord.   

Gift and Response: The Parable Method

 

Gift and Response is the essence of reality:  Reality of the Trinity, of the universe and of the nature of what it means to be human.

Catechesis of the Good Shepherd seeks to illuminate this very heart of reality.  With the older children six to twelve we reflect on the History of the Kingdom of God.  We see all of creation as a History of Gifts given to us by a loving God. 

The study of theology, philosophy and even to a great degree literature are disciplines relegated to the frivolous and insignificant in academia.  Ours is an age of progress, of Science.  If it can not be proven by a study of the natural world, it must not be real.  But this misses what the youngest child seems to grasp almost effortlessly.  Sophia Cavelletti in her search to proclaim the Good News to the youngest child sought a method which matched the mystery.  The mystery of reality is one of inexhaustible wonder but contains truth which can in fact be grasped by the human mind.  In Catechesis we call this the Parable Method.

With even the youngest child we contemplate the Kingdom of God as a Mustard Seed.  It is the smallest of seeds but grows into the biggest of bushes.  But in observation of the child, it is almost as if they see the growing of the seed as a secondary truth.  Where we the adult see the example of growth of the seed in the natural world with ease, we struggle to comprehend its deeper significance. The child sees the Kingdom grow in their hearts, in the world, outside of the world with an inner eye that somehow understands the seed is merely a tool to understand what is “really real” or as we would say of them, what is most essential.

But the seed is in fact not merely a metaphor.  It speaks to a reality in the natural world as well.  What makes the seed grow?  The older child will acknowledge its need to be planted, to be watered, to receive sunlight.  But do any of these things explain how a tiny seed holds within it all that will become a tree?  There is an unseen power which is contained in the seed.  To ask a scientist:  Where does this power come from will yield no answer.  To ask a child of three, they will tell you with a certainty so clear it makes you cry at your own lack of faith:  Ah, it is God!