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PASSING ON FAITH TO YOUR
CHILDREN by Peter Kahn All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY PUBLISHERS TO THE HOLY SEE
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CONTENTS Introduction.....................................................................3 The Faith of Our Father.................................................5 Faith-Shaped Daily Life ...............................................12 Parents and Children....................................................28 A Man and a Woman....................................................37 Faith and the Wider World..........................................47 Look at the Stars ...........................................................58 Acknowledgements I am indebted to many people for this booklet. The notion of explicitly placing love at the heart of family life stems from a reading of the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar and from Aidan Nichol’s book Christendom Awake (T and T Clark, 1999), as well as various Church documents. In addition to those authors and sources quoted with the text, insight has come from reading work by Clayton Barbeau, G K Chesterton, Elizabeth Davies, Thomas Dubay, Michael Paul Gallagher, Bishop Victor Galeone, the Heythrop Insitute for Religion, Ethics and Public Life, Michael Hornsby-Smith, Peter Leithart, Thomas Mann, Francis Mannion, Cardinal Marc Ouellet, Patrick Riley, Mary Shivanandan, David Thomas, Jean Vanier, Christopher West and others. The idea for a booklet was stimulated in part by the Listening 2004 initiative on the family that was carried out by the Catholic Bishops Conference of England and Wales. I am obliged to all those at the Catholic Truth Society who have helped with this booklet and the wider series which it introduces, particularly Pierpaolo Finaldi, Fergal Martin and Richard Brown, as well as Stratford Caldecott. Denis Riches and Richard also provided early encouragement. Various people have reviewed the text as it emerged, and made suggestions to incorporate, including Petroc Willey. I am also grateful to those who have written of their experiences. God has given my wife and me the gift of faith in large part through our own parents, but also through a number of movements and communities within the Church. And my wife, Alison, and our young children, David, Joachim and Barnabas, deserve thanks beyond measure.
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arents and godparents, this light is entrusted to you to be kept burning brightly. This child of yours has been enlightened by Christ. He is to walk always as a child of the light. May he keep the flame of faith alive in his heart. When the Lord comes, may he go out to meet him with all the saints in the heavenly kingdom. (The Rite of Baptism)1
Do you remember receiving a lighted candle at a Baptismal ceremony? The candle expressed the hope that the faith of your child would burn brightly; and maybe since then you have seen your child’s innocent bedtime prayers or a cherubic First Holy Communion. A young child’s faith has charm beyond measure. These early acts of faith may flourish as a child’s life unfolds. Perhaps the parents will see their child’s courage in standing up for their beliefs at school or they are eventually able to celebrate Mass with their child’s own children. Other parents, however, will see a different story: belief in God disappears at the same time as belief in Santa Claus or the child tries to get out of going to Mass on Sunday while still in primary school. Who can appreciate the sorrow that someone can feel at the loss of faith in a son or daughter? 1
The text of the rite allows for ‘he’ or ‘she’.
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And yet it seems now that stories of sorrow are common while tales of elation are rare. If you simply hope for the best, living much the same as everyone else around you, the chances are that your child or your children will leave their faith far behind. But we do make a promise during the Baptism to pass on faith to our child. After all, the candle is given to the parents rather than to the baby! How can we carry out this promise? The aim of this booklet is to consider this question, whatever our circumstances. We begin by exploring what faith actually is; otherwise how can we pass it on?
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THE FAITH OF OUR FATHER
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braham is our father in faith. He somehow managed to pass on faith all the way down to us, so where better to start than with his story. It begins with a call from God: Leave your country, your kindred and your father’s house for a country which I will show you; and I shall make you a great nation, I shall bless you and make your name famous; you are to be a blessing! (Gn 12:1-2)
God asked Abraham to move house. God did not expect him to be perfect all at once, but he did ask him to take a risk. Imagine the precariousness of Abraham’s life as a wanderer in foreign lands all those years ago: he would surely have been at the mercy of every local warlord. All this for a crazy promise that stood little chance of ever being fulfilled, and with pleasures of life at home in Ur that were only too real. Pope John Paul II 2 in his poetry captures the impossibility of God’s promise to Abraham: 2 John Paul II (2002) Roman Triptych, translated by Jerzy Peterkiewicz, Catholic Truth Society, London.
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The Voice said: You will be the father of many nations. Your offspring will be numerous as the sand on the seashore. How can this promise be fulfilled, thought Abraham, since nature has denied me the gift of fatherhood? My wife, whom I have loved from the days of my youth, gave me no son. It pains us both. But the Voice kept saying: You will become a father, you will become the father of many nations. Your offspring will be numerous as the sand on the seashore. The Voice is insistent, and in response Abraham set out into the wilderness with everything he possessed; and with Sarah his wife, and his servants and other relatives who were willing to come with him. Blessing did follow for Abraham, as he became the father of a vast people; not because he was so virile, but because God had called him. Love alone Abraham’s story teaches us a great deal about faith, and how to pass it on to our children. Imagine what Isaac must have felt when he was about to be sacrificed, only to
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hear a voice from heaven call it all off and then see a ram take his place on the altar! Isaac was able to see in an entirely concrete way that God was looking after him. We also read later in the story that Isaac married in an unusual fashion. Abraham’s servant travelled all the way back to Ur to find a wife for Isaac, and the first person he met was one of Isaac’s cousins, a young woman who also believed in God and was ready to leave everything. Abraham thus allowed his son Isaac to experience the power of faith. We can see in all of this that God revealed himself as someone who wanted what was good for Abraham. After all, God did not actually require Abraham to sacrifice his child, a habit to which other gods of the time were prone. God’s care for us provides the key motivation for faith. The Catechism of the Catholic Church observes that faith involves giving over our entire lives to God in response to his call: ‘Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God.’ (150) Why else would you adhere to God other than because of his care for you? The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it this way: ‘Only love can be believed’.3 The love that God bestows on us also underpins what we believe. (This is even true of more controversial beliefs - an issue we will return to later in the booklet.) Balthasar, Hans Urs von (1968) Love Alone: the Way of Revelation, Sheed and Ward, London, p68.
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The Catechism goes on to state that our beliefs about God are inseparably related to our personal adherence to him: ‘At the same time, and inseparably, it (faith) is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed.’ (150) We do not believe the various truths of our faith - the contents of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, as it were simply because the Church tells us to. The Church asks us to believe in a God who wants what is good for us. We see this in Jesus Christ, who only thought of our interests. Our call The call that we receive from Jesus to love each other stems quite directly from his concern for us: ‘This is my commandment: love one another, as I have loved you.’ (Jn 15:12). We too are called to put the interest of others first; St Thomas Aquinas puts it in the classic definition of love: ‘to love is to will the good of another’.4 Life is a series of opportunities to do good to others; nothing more, and nothing less. God calls us to a family life in which we are continually sacrificing our own interests for each other. This does not mean that individuals no longer find fulfilment, but that everyone gains by pulling together. If our children see us as parents responding to such a call, then like Isaac they too will be able to see in their own lives that God is merciful; and they will believe. 4
Aquinas, St Thomas, Summa Theologica, Primae Secundae Partis, 26, 4.
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They need concrete experiences that generosity to others offers more than designer clothes and admiring glances. This means that we will need to take a good look at our family lives. Companionship in one’s leisure time is hardly a sufficient basis for mutual selfsacrifice, as Aidan Nichols points out in Christendom Awake. We will need to see how work, child care, finances and so on can all support a mutual exchange of love within the family. A pair of shoes Such an extended companionship within the family also gives us the space to point out to each other how God is at work. In this we can follow the example of the martyrs, who lived and died as witnesses. St Margaret Clitherow chose to suffer a gruesome death, by suffocation, to ensure her children were not forced to testify against her Catholic faith and perjure themselves. But she not only suffered martyrdom because she loved her family, she also used her death as an opportunity to witness to her children. St Margaret walked barefoot to her place of execution so that her daughter could be given her shoes, and follow in her footsteps. This is the witness of a Christian parent. It is no surprise that her daughter gave her life to God as a nun and that two of her sons became priests.
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Towards the impossible Perhaps the examples of both Abraham and St Margaret seem a little beyond us. We are more likely to find ourselves shouting at our children rather than dying for them! Are we really expected to think of the interests of others when we ourselves can barely cope, in the face of accidents, illness, separation or conflict in the family? And what of teenage children who are simply not interested in anything to do with faith? Everyone will experience ways in which a life of sacrificial love, and thus any credible witness, seems impossible to achieve within their own family. As we shall see throughout this booklet, we can only give ourselves to others as a response to God’s intervention in our own lives. We need to experience in a truly profound way that God cares for us; not simply as an abstract belief, but in an utterly practical fashion like Isaac. The rest of this booklet explores how, in response to God’s love for us, we can emulate these heroes of faith in our families. How can our daily lives express an openness to the intervention of God, so that we can witness to our children? How does parental love influence whether our children believe? We will explore how the parent’s own example can convey the centrality of love, as we look at the union between a man and a woman. Finally, the way in which a family interacts with society more widely is
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critical, so we look at how our interactions with parish, school, community and the media affect our ability to put others first. If we walk in the path of love, and give witness to this, then with God’s grace our children too will follow in our footsteps.