Having Faith: The Spiritual Education of Mommy, part I

Our patron saint, Elizabeth of Hungary

The boys and I have just begun our second year of religious education at our church. Remember, if you are/were Catholic or grew up with Catholic friends, the old CCD, or Confraternity of Christian Doctrine, a.k.a. a weekly class either in a parents’ home or at the church, that pretty much ended after Confirmation in around the seventh grade? Yeah, that. Well, our parish has a different approach. At St. Elizabeth of Hungary RC Church, we have the Family Program.

The long and short of it is, there’s no dropping off. Parents get classes, too, and have to complete five years before they earn the privilege of going out for coffee or sitting in the car listening to NPR and filing their nails while the kids take classes.

I was dubious at first. Religious ed? For me? When I’m not even sure about this whole Catholic thing to begin with? (I’ve had my share of run-ins with the church, from an inappropriate priest heading up the Catholic community in college, to a hard-nosed parish in Queens whose pastor refused to sign a paper allowing me to be my niece’s Confirmation sponsor because I didn’t “officially” belong to their parish, and who told me, when I asked what I should should tell my niece, “maybe she can pick someone else.”)

But when push came to shove — that is, when Daniel got to first grade and hadn’t been to church aside from our family’s many christenings and Communions, and thought “Church” was “place you sit for a while and are plied with fruit snacks, and afterwards there’s a party” — I decided to go for the gusto and give him something similar to the background his father and I had had, so that he and James would, later, be free to embrace or reject their heritage.

All a part of good (mean) parenting, right?

The hitch is that at St. E’s, there’s this pesky Family Program.

But you know what? Educational geek that I am, I’m finding I actually enjoy it. I’m especially liking the second-year parents’ class I’m in now. My teacher, a theology professor who donates her time to the Family Program, talks about the sacramentality of everyday life. How nice is that? A baby’s face, a gorgeous sunset, someone patiently holding a door for an old woman with a cane, all are as sacramental as the murkiest liturgical mysteries a 2,000-year old Church can conjure.

We’ve been talking a lot the last couple of sessions about faith. I used to think of faith, when used in religious terminology, as a kind of blindness, a simple and even foolish thing. Not so. I don’t take notes in this class, but last night this is what I wrote down, on a scrap of notepad I found in my bag:

Faith is the confident assurance of things hoped for, a conviction of things not seen.

If that’s not a perfect metaphor for parenting, I don’t know what is.