Loving ~ Learning ~ Living Our Faith

It is the beginning of the new school year and on its albs comes the new church year.

They come down our hallways and into our classrooms having spent the whole day inside a box. Most of them come forced to our classrooms. They are restless, fidgety, bored.

Every year I give our teachers plans for religious education in the classroom.  I encourage movement and hands-on and trips outside the classroom. Something…anything…to cut through the boredom, their restlessness, their fidgetiness.

I hear those passionate with conviction, desiring to enarmor and impart knowledge. They are wise to desire this transfusion of faith and Word passed from Christ to the Apostles onto the Church Fathers and now to this next generation of Catholic children who are living in a mad, mobile, wired, stressful, furious world.

I realize the church’s mission is to educate.  We must never forget that our religious education programs are to educate, to impart knowledge. I focus on this each year, a learning theme for each class, all the while inviting teachers to take the lesson and let it dance and breathe away outside the classroom.

And that has been a challenge.

I realize we only have one hour a week to connect.

That’s pretty discouraging, isn’t it?

I mean, how does one connect, inspire, and educate in only one hour a week???

It isn’t possible. Or is it?

It is a mission broader than anything we do all week because, honestly, learning about God and His church and its message is more than educating in a classroom. It’s about a relationship that prays, a message that bleeds, a life that loves, an empty tomb that reveals, and a person who teaches all this. All outside a classroom.

I believe, in order to take our religious education lessons outside the classroom, it helps if we focus on the three “L’s” of our faith this upcoming Year of Faith: Love, Lesson, and Live

Our children have to love the faith before they will learn the faith in order that they can live the faith.

This upcoming Year of Faith invites us to have Faith outside ourselves, outside our books, outside our classrooms. To explore our faith anew. I hatched it open almost a year ago in this column and have thought and prayed and harbored some ideas through the past year which are on the drafting board for this Year of Faith.

In my next column I will explore how to take this living, bleeding, breathing message outside our classrooms and into the world.

Because that is what we are called to do with the Gospel message.

{Praying for each of you as you begin this new year of loving, learning, and living our faith.}