I had a talk with my daughter tonight about religion, before she left for a sleep-over.  Her friend is Catholic; her family will drop her off back at home in the morning before they head to Mass.

No problem with me if my daughter wanted to go to Mass, too.  But we had to have a talk about communion and why she can't receive it in the Catholic Church even though she was baptized in the same.

It's just bread, isn't it? she asked. 

No.  Definitely not just bread.  You know this, we've discussed this.  It may look like bread and may be baked like bread; the Orthodox Church your cousins attend actually serves real bread.  You've seen it and tried it.  But it's far more than that, it's a symbol of Christ's body.  You know how important symbols can be; you are old enough to understand that meanings of things can be more important than the thing actually is in itself.  And the Church doesn't permit you to share communion until you've taken classes to do so.

She raises her eyebrows at this point. 

Yes, catechism -- classes in Christian religion and the history of the Catholic Church.  I had it, your dad had it, and so did your grandparents.  Both of your grandmothers, your maternal grandfather, your father and I all went to Catholic schools AND attended catechism, at some point during our childhoods.

She wanted a lot of answers in a very short time frame; she wanted me to explain the entire reason for all the catechism and the contents of catechism in the five minutes we sat together on the couch waiting for her friend's father to arrive to pick her up for the sleep-over.

No, I can't tell you everything.  And what I tell you can't take the place of catechism.  And no, you probably won't be getting catechism until you are old enough to choose to do this and make a fully informed decision about your choice.

At this point, we talk about the problems I have with being Catholic.  There's always why about everything; it all starts with that innocent question, why?

I'll explain this in as few words as possible, without going into details, I tell her.  We've talked about this before, a little bit here and a little bit there.  Being Christian means believing in Christ's teachings, for starters.  It's a little bit more complicated than that, but we'll start there.  Being Catholic means being part of a church that started with Christ's earliest followers, the Apostles.  But somewhere along the line, being Catholic meant following rules and laws set up by men of the church more than it meant following the teachings of Christ.  And this I can no longer do.  Until the rules and the reasons behind them -- the dogma, they call it -- are less important than the teachings of Christ, we won't be really Catholic any longer.

So what are we? she asks.

I'm still trying to figure that out.  We will set time aside every Sunday to talk about that, and what we can believe, and about what other people believe, and where it came from and why.  Like the Beatitudes that Christ taught, and the Eight-fold Path that Buddha taught; these things aren't very far apart and we should talk about them.  Home church ourselves, I guess.  Until now, we've talked a lot about values, what is good and what is evil, what God is, that we expect you to do good and not evil; but we've not talked much about the big picture.  Religion is a big picture, where all of these things fall into place, into one big story.  I guess we are trying to write the big story we can understand instead of trying to understand very old and broken ones that have been given to us by our families.  It's like some of the antique furniture we have around here, also given to us by our families.  It might be pretty to look at, might be worth something, but it's old and decrepit and can't hold us.  This old clock that won't keep time, for example; it's pretty and it sounds lovely when it chimes, but we can't depend on it if we had to be somewhere on time.  Sometimes you just have to use something new that works.

Okay.  Her face relaxes, the questions resolved for the moment.

I wonder what she will talk about tonight with her girlfriend.  I'll bet religion comes up in conversation.

11:38:32 PM    comment []