Amazing Catechists

Teaching and learning the faith together

Teaching Children to Cherish Life

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It is such a blessing from God to have children. Sometimes, it is challenging and may seem less of a blessing in a moment that is not so inviting. As I step back from certain situations with my children and evaluate how to approach it the way God wants me to, to meet my child’s needs; I learn something new every time. It often catches me off guard when my three and a half year old responds positively to my discipline after taking a second to ask God for guidance. I have noticed in the past year that teaching my son to cherish life by respecting life around him has been an important part in raising him the way God would want my husband and I to.

I think it is important and crucial to first, before we make any rules in our household, to ask God what he wants for our children, because they are ultimately his children first. God has gifted us with another soul to help guide and protect here on earth.  Then we can start to discipline. When my son started to display some destructive behavior during one of his temper tantrums, I knew I had to stop it right away. I began thinking to myself what would God want me to teach him, to help him stop this behavior. Then I had a discussion with my son about treating his body with respect (except I didn’t say respect, I used the word: “nicely”. I used words that I knew he would understand). I did not only have to talk to him about what treating our bodies nicely versus badly, I had to show him examples of these two behaviors. Ephraim did not understand this concept in one session, but we still work on it anytime he would want to start hitting something or someone. That’s the trick with toddlers, parents have to repeat the consequence until their child begins to understand the behavior is wrong and know how to practice self control. It is definitely hard to practice patience with young children, especially when you have to constantly repeat yourself. This is where prayer plays a key role when raising little ones.

I realized while I was helping Ephraim understand why he was being corrected for hitting or saying mean things to others, I also needed to explain why this was not good. When I started telling him, “God wants us to use our bodies in a nice way and not a mean way,” he started to stop this type of behavior.

I also, came to the realization that I needed to show Ephraim how to show respect to all of God’s creation. In the summer, I would show him how to treat the small insects and animals outside. Instead of killing, stepping on, or pulling at a creature, I would show him how to hold and explore that animal. I know it may seem trivial and going against the “boys’ nature”, but this small experience is a little lesson children can learn on how to treat all of what God has created around us. Children always need to be shown how God would want them to act towards others. I think the biggest mistake we make as parents, is that we assume they know why we tell them to stop a certain behavior. If we do not show them the correct way to behave, they may never learn. If children do not learn how to respect and treat the littlest of things around them with respect, how do we expect them to understand how to respect life itself; especially when it comes to the most vulnerable of God’s creation?

We can help our children learn how to respect life in simple ways, in everyday occurrences. Parents can help their children speak nicely to others, obey their parents, elders, and people in charge of them, offering to help others, using manners, practicing patience, and the list can go on. The most important way to help our children is to pray for them to always do God’s will and pray that you raise your children the way God would want. For He knows your children best, even though we forget that often. He knows them inside and out, just like He knows us.

Humanity Now Counts the Face of God Among Its Own

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Belief in the Incarnation is distinctive to the Christian faith.  It is a basic tenet in the Creed: Jesus Christ “was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit, and born of the Virgin Mary.”

The Incarnation is a unique and singular event. Its truth transforms the way we view God and ourselves: The Incarnation of Christ is the height of centuries of Divine Revelation…. Divine Revelation, of course, being the revealing, or making known, of God Himself to humanity.

In the Incarnation, God now chooses his divine communication to be made known through the Person of His Son.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) defines the Incarnation as “the fact that the Son of God assumed a human nature in order to accomplish our salvation in it  (CCC 461).”

St Paul taught:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. (Phil 2:5-8.)

 

This holy condescension of God means we can never accuse God of being absent or lofty or unreachable or inaccessible. The Incarnation – the taking on flesh in the Virgin’s womb – is the moment whereby the inexhaustible, inexpressible, invisible, omnipotent, and almighty holy One takes on human visage. The divinity of God shines through a human person now. And God used the humanity of Jesus to save us all.

CCC 479:

At the time appointed by God, the only Son of the Father, the eternal Word, that is, the Word and substantial Image of the Father, became incarnate; without losing his divine nature he has assumed human nature.

The Second Vatican Council had this to say about the Incarnation:

The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear. It is not surprising, then, that in Him all the aforementioned truths find their root and attain their crown.

He Who is “the image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15) is Himself the perfect man. To the sons of Adam He restores the divine likeness which had been disfigured from the first sin onward. Since human nature as He assumed it was not annulled, by that very fact it has been raised up to a divine dignity in our respect too.  (Gaudium et Spes, 22.)

As God reveals Himself and his love for us via the Incarnation, he reveals much about the humanity to which we belong:  we are now enlightened by Christ.  Having once been darkened by the sin of Adam, human life is restored and re-dignified to an even greater height than when it was first made in the image and likeness of its Maker.

Humanity now counts the face of God among its own.

Never again may I look at another person, or my own self, with disdain or disrespect. For there is an inherent dignity in all: we too are robed in flesh; now the Son of God, the Savior and Lord, images us.

For by His incarnation the Son of God has united Himself in some fashion with every man. He worked with human hands, He thought with a human mind, acted by human choice and loved with a human heart. Born of the Virgin Mary, He has truly been made one of us, like us in all things except sin. (Gaudium et Spes, 22.)

This is why we celebrate Christmas: the Nativity is the realization of the Incarnation.

This is why we kneel with wonder, praying at the manger. The Christ Child gives us insight into the God who truly knows us, loves us, and still chooses to save us. And as we yield to that love, we receive a keener understanding of our own true selves.

CCC 477:

The Church has always acknowledged that in the body of Jesus “we see our God made visible and so are caught up in love of the God we cannot see” [Roman Missal, Preface of Christmas I].

The individual characteristics of Christ’s body express the divine person of God’s Son. He has made the features of his human body his own, to the point that they can be venerated when portrayed in a holy image, for the believer who venerates the icon is venerating in it the person of the one depicted.

Come, the Crèche awaits us… let us pray and gaze into his Holy Face.

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This article was previously released at CatholicExchange.com as “The Unique and Singular Event of the Incarnation”, and is reprinted and re-titled here with the author’s permission.

 

 

Holding the Pillars (of the Catechism) in the Palm of Your Hand

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An Overview
To embrace the Catechism of the Catholic Church, we need to understand the basics, to see it as a whole before delving into specific subjects.  This article presents the Catechism’s basic 4-part format and helps you memorize it in ten minutes or less. Don’t worry, this will be fun… using a common nursery rhyme to do it.

The Catechism contains a prologue and four major parts. Those four parts break down into sections, articles, and numbered paragraphs. We’ll come back to the prologue after describing the four parts, also called “pillars.” (If the Catechism were a cathedral, these four pillars would uphold the weight of the entire structure.)

Here are the four parts of the Catechism using their official titles from the text (with my brief explanations in the parentheses):

  1. The Profession of Faith
    (Part One explains the capacity we all have for God, plus the major beliefs of the Faith, as found in The Creed. It is the largest part.)
  2. The Celebration of the Christian Mystery
    (Part Two explores our redemption and the grace we find in the Seven Sacraments.)
  3. Life in Christ
    (Part Three pertains to the Christian’s vocation, and modern applications of  the Ten Commandments.)
  4. Christian Prayer
    (Part Four describes what prayer is and its importance. Special emphasis is given to The Lord’s Prayer: “Our Father!”)

Its okay if don’t remember the names of the four parts. Here’s a shorter list of four summary words to remember the content of four parts: beliefs, sacraments, life, and prayer.

Now for the memory task: You are about to be treated to how brilliantly, er, rather, how simply my mind works. (At my tender middle age, if I can conjure up mnemonic devices to trigger my recall of certain subject matter, so much the better! My apologies to the more sophisticated minds among us.)

Start with the names given to your hand’s thumb and four fingers by the children’s nursery rhyme and finger game “Where is Thumbkin?” as sung to the tune of “Frère Jacques.”

Hands in position? Ready? Go!

“Where is thumbkin? Where is thumbkin? Here I am! Here I am!” (Don’t know this rhyme?  Relive a joy of childhood here:https://www.kididdles.com/lyrics/w010.html.)

Just how does this benefit our memory, you ask?

Where is thumbkin?
“Who” comes first in the song?  Thumbkin. Who comes first in the Christian life? God. Right.  Always remember: God is first in all things. (God is also the end of all things, but that’s another article!)

Better to know God first, rather than a million details about the Catechism.  So, thumbkin gives the first lesson: In the beginning…  there was God.

Thumbkin reminds us there is a prologue to the Catechism. In cosmic terms, HIS story came before our own story; God’s goodness brings us into existence and invites us into relationship. We find this out in the very first numbered paragraph of the Catechism’s Prologue:

God, infinitely perfect and blessed in himself, in a plan of sheer goodness freely created man to make him share in his own blessed life. For this reason, at every time and in every place, God draws close to man. He calls man to seek him, to know him, to love him with all his strength. He calls together all men, scattered and divided by sin, into the unity of his family, the Church. To accomplish this, when the fullness of time had come, God sent his Son as Redeemer and Savior. In his Son and through him, he invites men to become, in the Holy Spirit, his adopted children and thus heirs of his blessed life. [See Catechism, paragraph 1 or CCC 1.] [Emphasis mine.]

Our American culture gives thumbkin some familiar sign language: “thumbs up!” Thumbs up means “yes” or “it is good” or “I approve.” In spiritual terms—saying “yes” to God—indicates our positive direction: to be “heirs” of God’s “blessed life.” It can also remind us of the positive attitude we need to embrace the Catechism, and church teaching in general.

Finally, the thumb acts as a metaphor for the unity of Trinitarian content throughout the Catechism. The central Truth of theCatechism is the three Persons of the Holy Trinity and the life of love they share.  All other truths flows from that core. While the four fingers can and do touch one another in certain alignments or combinations, only the thumb most easily extends and flexes to the fingers and makes them function smoothly as a unit. Between the four parts of the Catechism, there is interconnectedness and overlap between certain doctrines, just like the four fingers on a hand. But, this central Trinitarian truth permeates and unifies all four parts, much like the thumb.  All of the Catechism makes sense with, in, and through the Trinity.

Moving from prologue to parts… we utilize our four helpers: “pointer”, “tall man”, “ring man” and “pinky.”

Where is pointer?
Pointer “points” to beliefs in Part One of the Catechism. Think of your index finger as pointing to the index, or list, of beliefs.

What is the first and primary listing of what the Church believes and professes?  The Creed! Based on the Trinity, the Creed’s twelve Articles of Faith shape the foundation of our Faith.

Another memory aid: first finger starts with “f” which stands for “faith”.  Or this: first finger = faith = foundation = beliefs.

Where is tall man? 
When discussing “the middle finger” in American culture, one needs the innocence of a child. We’ll get there with the help of our nursery rhyme.

The middle finger, otherwise known as tall man in our rhyme, stands distinctively above the rest. Its tall placement is unique.

This second finger stands for the second part. Here’s how: What defining practice makes the Catholic Church unique and distinct in the eyes of the world? What makes Catholicism stand out among world religions? The sacraments.

Remember, the second finger starts with “s”, or second finger = sacraments.

Where is ring man? 
Ring man, the third finger, commonly called the ring finger denotes Part Three of the Catechism, our life in Christ.

American culture identifies the ring finger as signifying to whom we may be betrothed or wed. For Catholics, it denotes vocations. In short, ring man proclaims our “life” to the world: the way we live our life of love.

Another memory hint: ring = marriage = life. Or use this idea: the word “r-i-n-g” has four letters, as does “l-i-f-e.”

Where is pinky? 
You’ve got the idea by now… the fourth finger—pinky—stands for prayer, the fourth part. Both pinky and prayer start with the letter “p”, (and not to be confused in meaning with “pointer.”)

The pinky might seem a humble little finger… but certainly not the last nor least. Incidentally, Part Four on “Christian Prayer”, like pinky, is the Catechism’s smallest part.

If you cannot remember anything else about the Catechism, know that it contains a deep call to prayer in your life. Always put God first, even if you don’t know or understand the rest of the Catholic doctrines.

In coming before the Lord God each day in prayerful humility, you will hold more wisdom in your little pinky finger than an entire catechism could hold.

©2009 Patricia W. Gohn

This article originally appeared at CatholicExchange.com.