Byzantine Catholic Family Matters

Evangelizing Ourselves and Our Children II

Allowing God into Our Lives

Farmer-novelist-essayist Wendell Berry wrote that contemporary American society is shaped by advertising and propaganda. Essentially we are swayed by sound bytes at the expense of substance and the art of argument. Berry argues that this has hurt our democracy. I would also suggest that our advertising and propaganda saturated culture has helped marginalize faith and religion in our everyday lives. Indeed it has also marginalized a good number of our civic institutions, traditions and rituals. (How many people take the time on Memorial Day anymore to honor our war dead?) In the first essay in this series I wrote about the scheduling of Opening Day at Fenway Park on Good Friday. Attending a major league baseball game on Good Friday makes the statement that baseball is more important to my life story than is Christ's Passion. The marketplace - and Major League Baseball has a major marketing apparatus - wins out with its seductive advertising and propaganda. When we think about passing on our faith to our children, we have to realize first and foremost that we and our children are bombarded with advertising and propaganda and then take a long, hard look at ourselves and ask to what extent is faith and religion marginalized in our own lives (looking at those win-loss columns I mentioned in the first part of this series). Orthodox psychologist -theologian John T. Chiran, studied the writings of the Eastern Church Fathers, and identified five stages in Christian spiritual development. Of particular interest here is the process of cleansing or apatheia which a person enters into after making a commitment to directing one's life to Christ. In this cleansing process a person removes him/herself from worldly passions and other distractions that keep us from the attaining the last two stages of spiritual development: illumination where the person is illumined as she/he approaches he light of God and theosis in which the person allows the Holy Spirit to guide him/her in life.

Four years ago psychologist Merton Strommen, PhD and minister Richard A. Hardel, DMin, both Lutherans, wrote a book entitled Passing on the Faith. Based on solid research, the authors present a model for helping to ensure that our faith is passed on to our children. Given that we are saturated with distractions from the media in terms of advertising, it is not surprising that the two very emphatically state: "A faith-formation program limited to religious instruction for children and a youth group for high school students no longer equips one generation to effectively pass on the faith to the next generation. A paradigm shift is needed . . ."(p. 19) In this age of the internet, cable and satellite TV, the number of competing messages or stories has increased exponentially making the process of cleansing all the more difficult in our spiritual development. Rather there needs to be a partnership between family and parish whereby families are strengthened as loving, nurturing domestic communities; parent's embrace God's story, continually learning about it and celebrating it throughout the liturgical year; and parents provide models of fidelity to one another and to Church while actively involved in the work of the Church.

The bottom line is that parents, through word and example, must be committed to Christ and His Church and work to set aside all earthly cares so that the message to their children is clear that this is a Christ-centered family. For its part, the parish needs to help families be strong and healthy, provide opportunities for education from the pre-school aged child to the oldest member of the community; provide opportunities for prayerful worship; facilitate the development of a youth subculture to help teens and young adults firm their identities as Byzantine Catholic Christians; and strive to be a welcoming parish family. In the remaining parts of this series we will examine specific things that families and parishes can do to grow in faith and pass that faith on to their children.

(If you would like to share something that is done in your parish that is an example of a family centered ministry that is helping to pass on the faith to our children or to the unchurched, please write drtom@byzcathfamilymatters.com)