Graduating Christianity

So here's my thing. I'm all about the Sacraments. All seven of them, in fact. And I am all about their efficacy in delivering God's Grace into our lives. They're great at that! But where my issue happens is when they get treated like some sort of family rite of passage or a kind of graduation to (or from) Catholicism. More than this, while they serve to give us the Graces needed for salvation, they are not intrinsically salvific. Turns out, you still need Jesus. You still need that desire and belief. TRUTHFLASH.

So why do I bring this up? Well, another year of Religious Ed wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, another year of watching all the kids who got Confirmed stop coming to class right after the Easter Vigil. Oh, well, that's cool. I guess you got it now. It's been a few (16) years since my own Confirmation, so maybe I'm just misremembering, but I don't recall the Holy Spirit endowing me automatically with all the knowledge and belief necessary to go out and march, good and faithful Christian Soldier, march.

But of course the kids (in my class's case, high school age) can hardly be blamed, not fully at least. They are, in many ways, simply products of their environments. And while I do mean that in a "look at this secular culture we're immersed in!"kind of way, that's not specifically what I'm talking about. The environments in their homes reflect the general culture and, in many ways, amplify it.

I understand that kids have their own personalities and wants and needs and that they'll end up any way they dadgum please after all is said and done. But the fact remains that Christian homes overwhelmingly produce, gasp, Christians. The whole cliche of the kids rebelling against their hyperreligious stuffy conservative parents (here hyperreligious can simply mean attending a church service regularly and keeping a bible in plain view instead of stacked beneath a bunch of novels and TIME magazines gather dust) is just that. A grain of truth buried under a mountain of what basically amount to lies.

I know this is a bit of a blanket statement, but you know that friend who says something along the lines of "I was raised Catholic, but after I hit high school an college I started thinking for myself and I just realized that it's just not the church for me"? Yeah, what they really mean is "My parents, out of a misplaced sense of family obligation, signed me up for catechism class every year and made us go to Mass so I never got to sleep in on Sundays like my friends did, although usually we didn't bother going during the summers so that was nice, and so after I got confirmed they let me not go anymore because we made grandma happy" but, you know, that takes longer to say.

You know what comes out of devoutly Catholic households? Priests. You know what comes out of lackadaisically Catholic households? The same thing that comes out of totally secular households, except now they have a chip on their shoulder about the faith. The idea of holding back your faith and letting the kid grow up and "decide for themselves" is one of a huge pile of lies that most of us have swallowed. If you give someone without a fully formed conscious (like all kids, ever) the choice between a life of faithful discipline and one of no holds bared hedonistic relativism.. well, they'll choose the former approximately 0% of the time. It takes a serious gift of Faith for anything to happen otherwise.

Is it possible to raise actual Christian kids who don't become cafeteria converts, picking and choosing what they want to believe based on what gives them the most warm fuzzies? Absolutely. Is it possible to do it alone? Absolutely not. You need Christ, and you need His Church. You need to build an environment in your home that will effectively combat the one outside of it (this will never happen by accident). Does this mean locking your kids in their rooms and forcing them to read the bible or pray every time they do something you feel requires discipline? Well no. In fact, if you're using the graces and sacraments of the faith as disciplinary actions, you've got things pretty turned around as it is ("No, Mom, please don't make me love God! I promise I'll be good!" is not a thing you want to be grooming your child to say).

What it means is YOU need to be Christian. A real one too. Don't like a teaching? Tough, submit to Church Authority (this applies even if you're not Catholic. Instead of hopping to another denomination and teaching your kids to perpetuate the cycle of splitting churches from churches from other churches, or giving them a great visual example of how you believe doctrine is contingent on you agreeing with it, try submitting to it and seeing what happens in your life. You'll probably be surprised.) and maybe even give thanks for that hardship at the dinner table with your whole family present. Instead of moaning about how tough it is to live a Christian life, actually bother to live one and show some joy about it.

And for goodness sakes, if you send your kid to Sunday School, please realize that the teacher has them for about an hour a week. You have them a tad bit longer, I suspect. Act like you're the primary influence in your kid's life. Because if you're doing it right, you are.

PS - If this post seemed slightly more cynical than some in the past, blame the Lutherans.