Telling our Christian story to
others, especially young people--what we used to call
"catechetics"--needs to be structured. It needs to be structured
across more than just one year, or just grade school or just high school. We
need to structure the telling of our story throughout our Christian lives.
There are two basic principles for
structuring the telling of our story. 1) the story must fit into a predictable
and easily understood pattern, so that the listener can look forward to the
next development of the story. If the story-telling appears to the listener to
be random: "this semester we are looking at the sacraments, next semester
we will look at the commandments," the listener has no idea of what is
coming next, or why it is coming. He or she has nothing to look forward to. The
result is boredom.
And 2) the story must engage the
intellectual challenges of the environment of the listeners. There is a wealth
of scriptural and historical and theological development that can enrich our
faith, so we must find ways to include that wealth into the telling of our
story. Too many of our secularist peers know the story of those developments
more than we people of faith know them. Our lack of knowledge gives them
evidence that we cannot handle real intellectual challenges.
To meet the requirements of the
first principle, predictability, I use the framework of the seven-day week. We
are used to living the week over and over again. We know what to expect on
Mondays, and on Fridays, and on Sundays.
To meet the second requirement,
engagement with present-day intellectual challenges, we need to know the
scriptural and historical and theological developments of our time.
The
Structure
Monday
On Monday we tell stories from what
we Christians call the Old Testament. We adapt the telling to the listeners. It
may be enough simply to read the story out loud. The stories themselves have
held people's interest for thousands of years.
Take, for example, the story of
Joseph in the last chapters of the book of Genesis. I get overcome with emotion
every time I read how Joseph made himself known to his brothers after he put
them through serious testing. Think of the long story of Samuel and Saul and
David and Solomon.
But the term "story" need
not be limited to narratives. Reading the books of Job, or Proverbs, or the
prophets like Jeremiah or Daniel can be equally interesting.
The important thing is that the
listeners know that on Monday they are going to hear Old Testament stories
straight from the source.
Tuesday
On Tuesday we tell stories about
how the Monday stories got written down. Here is where scriptural and
historical knowledge come in. We need to tell our listeners that these stories
did not just drop out of heaven. They are the products of human authors, living
in historical times, and those historical times shaped the way the stories have
been written. How did the book of Genesis get written? Who wrote it, when did
they write it, where did they write it, why did they write it?
Obviously, this Tuesday work will
be different when we are talking with second-graders than when we are talking
with seniors in college. But the basic structure will be the same: we will be
helping the listeners to think critically about the origins of the stories that
shape our faith.
Wednesday
On Wednesday we tell stories from
what we call the New Testament. The stories need not be limited to the Gospels
and Acts. They could include the writings of Paul, or the book of Revelation.
Once again, we may simply have to read the passages out loud and then talk
about what we have read. We simply let the Scriptures speak to us. We ask the
students what the passage says to them.
Thursday
On Thursday we look at how the New
Testament stories came into being. We share present knowledge about who wrote
the Gospels, when and where they were written, and why they were written. Once
again, we need to share what the scripture people and historians and
theologians have already worked out for us. Our faith is not just for children.
But children need to be introduced to the processes of thinking critically
about their sacred writings.
Friday
On Friday we tell stories about how
Christians have lived and what they have done in the centuries since the time
of Jesus. We need to talk about Constantine, and Thomas Aquinas, and Martin
Luther, and Georg Hegel and Sts. John XXIII and John Paul II. We Christians
need to know our story as a people, and not just the story of Jesus.
Saturday
On Saturday we tell stories about
the bad things we Christians have done. We need to know that we have been a
sinful people, and we need to own up to our history. Forced conversions, the
atrocities committed during the Crusades, the religious wars of the 1500s and
1600s, colonialism, slavery, and some of the ways we Christians have made peace
with violence in our own time--we need to know and reflect on all these parts
of our story. Not knowing them will allow us to repeat them.
Sunday
On Sunday we look at how we
Christians relate to other religions of our time. We examine Islam, or
Buddhism, or secularism. I call secularism a religion because religion is one's
picture of the world. If I see the world as a result of blind evolution, the
result of random chance and without meaning, I will live my life out of that view.
I may very well act in morally admirable ways on an individual level, often in
ways more admirable than my fellow Christians, but my secularism does not offer
me a reason to avoid the kinds of human and environmental destruction that
capitalist societies make peace with so easily.
Monday
again
On Monday we begin the pattern
again. Old Testament, study about the Old Testament, New Testament, study about
the New Testament, church history, church sinfulness, and Church in the midst
of today's world.
The
Seven-day Pattern
Obviously we cannot do religious
instruction seven days a week. We treat a series of meetings as though they
were in seven-day sets. Week one would be Monday, week two Tuesday, and so on.
Do that twice and you have a fourteen week semester. Do that over and over
again and hopefully both students and teacher will continually deepen their
knowledge of the Bible and our history. The result will be a combination of
novelty and predictability. Each meeting will offer the promise of new development,
along with a sense of direction--we are going somewhere, we are making
progress. The enterprise is good.
