Rave Review

If you're tired of the endless parade of children's books that chronicle the story of creation and Noah's ark as if they are the only two child-friendly accounts in the Bible, you'll love The Lord's Prayer by Tim Ladwig (Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, 2002).

A great gift for Baptism, First Communion, or just because, Ladwig illustrates the Our Father with watercolor and acrylic pictures of an African American dad and his daughter. The father brings the Lord's Prayer to life for his little girl as they go about their day, helping an elderly neighbor. They eat lunch together on the porch (give us this day our daily bread) and the girl returns to her neighbor a medallion she finds in the grass (lead us not into temptation). The realistic yet beautiful illustrations make reading this book aloud to a child a prayer in itself.

Family Spirituality

Faith is best served family style

The editors of U.S. Catholic interview Kathleen O'Connell Chesto This interview originally appeared in the June 1995 U.S. Catholic.

Religious faith isn't like a loaf of bread you send your kids to the corner church to pick up. "Religious truths need to be connected to experience, and that's where parents come in," says Kathleen O'Connell Chesto. Passing on the faith needs the parents' touch, and it's up to the church to "stop convincing parents that it can pass on faith by simply sacramentalizing their kids."

Chesto, a national consultant on family spirituality and religious education, believes that people have within them the religious truths to enrich their lives but haven't developed the religious language yet to talk about them. She helped develop the group FIRE - Family-Centered Intergenerational Religious Education - as a religious-educational process to help people express their spirituality in their families and faith communities.

Chesto holds degrees in ministry and religious studies and is the author of Risking Hope: Fragile Faith in the Healing Process (Sheed and Ward, 1990), Children's Scripture Puzzles (Sheed and Ward, 1992), co-authored with her daughter Elizabeth, and Why are Dandelions Weeds? (Sheed and Ward, 1993).

What should religious educators be telling parents?

I really believe we, as a church, have to tell parents that we can't give faith to their children. As long as we tell them we can do it, they'll let us. We're all busy. If you tell me you'll wash my car every week, I'll let you.

So we have to come right out and say the church is going to help you, but it cannot do the work for you. You have to learn to depend on your own faith. The church can help you raise moral children - people will come to a church that offers to help them do that. We will teach you how to be nonviolent and to cope with violence; we can teach you how to live a more happy family life. But it is up to you to take it all on and live it.

The church needs to put more into the hands of parents and live with the fact that parents are going to flounder for a while before they look for help. If we keep running in and picking them up, they're never going to realize that they didn't learn to swim. We have to stop convincing parents that we can pass on faith by simply sacramentalizing their kids.

Forming our kids' faith starts at home?

Passing on the faith is the role of parents, and the ability to talk about God starts in the family. The role of the church is to identify the language and stories of God and to share the stories of the larger faith community. But if the development of faith doesn't happen in the family first, I don't think it's going to happen when these kids come into church at 6 or 7 years old. By the ages of 2 to 4, a child's morality is already formed. Children have already developed whatever sense of storytelling they're probably ever going to have. If parents don't tell the story of their experiences through the eyes of faith, then children will not find God in their own experiences. It was Moses telling the story of Abraham to his people that helped his people to understand the call.

The only people who are telling stories to our children right now are on television. And the problem isn't just the kind of stories they're telling; it's the reasons they're telling them. We tell our kids stories so they'll grow in wisdom and courage and will know who they are. Television tells them stories to sell them. And if your child hasn't learned who he or she is yet and what the family stories are, how can he or she decipher the truths from the media and the importance of passing on these truths?

Are there problems in the church that hinder passing on the faith?

First, I think the church has a language problem that is not being confronted. When the church talks about "passing on the faith," it often fails to recognize that that means very different things to different people. For many parents, "passing on the faith" means sacramentalizing their children. So when the parish says to the parents, "We can't do this without you," the parents hear the church saying it cannot baptize their children or prepare First Communion services. Their reaction is: "Why not? It's the church's job; it's up to the director of religious education to plan all this. It's not my job."

If we are going to tell parents we need them, we are going to have to clarify that we are not talking about preparation for the sacraments but preparation for life and initiation into a Christian way of living.

Would adult-education classes work?

Parishes have trouble sponsoring adult education because they believe that adults won't come. Children have to come; parents make them. Adults only come if what we offer meets their needs, and if it is actually good.

I think adult religious education can work in fostering family values if we begin with people's perceived needs. Adults in a parish often have a better idea of what it is they need than the parish does. And they definitely know what they are willing to come to. Most people are looking for help with being family. We need to begin by teaching people how to be family; at that point, they may be willing to learn how to be families of faith and how faith can help them to be family.

How do we as a church teach people to be family?

There are many good programs for teaching parenting skills. If you want to start more simply, focus on some basics. Tell stories, it's a beginning. Tell your child the story of the night she was born or the story of why you chose his name. It's such a human thing to tell stories - there's something very dehumanizing about our loss of storytelling. My daughter just started a writing course in which her first assignment was to explain where her first name came from. Only 2 out of the 40 people in that class could even answer that. None of the others knew why they received the name they did. Don't you find that odd? How could parents give a child a name and not explain where that name came from?

It is also a very human thing to ritualize. We have to show people how what they already do every day is holy, such as their rituals at bedtime. You have to tuck the covers in just right or leave the door open and the hall light on to keep away the monsters.

By the time children are 4 years old they know very well that all these "precautions" don't keep the monsters away. It's not magic. But it reassures children that as long as somebody loves them, there won't be any monsters in their closet.

So children don't expect any surprises in religion?

What they expect is for the experience to be real. Children who participate in family rituals are ready to go toward the eucharistic meal because they're not expecting magic. They know that this is a ritual; therefore, it celebrates something we believe to be real - that God is present. But if children don't have ritual, children aren't given a chance to recognize and thus truly celebrate church and the sacraments.

Ritual has an enormous power to bind people. If you hear somebody in a restaurant singing "Happy Birthday," you go ahead and join in. And you feel perfectly free to say "Happy birthday" to that person as you leave - someone you would never have spoken to otherwise - just because you celebrated a ritual together. Think what ritual demonstrates about the possibilities of our experiences in Mass and parish groups.

The Wolins, a husband and wife team from George Washington University, did a study on alcoholic families, particularly those families that succeeded in not handing alcoholism on to the third generation. The one thing they found that the "successful" families all had in common was rituals - they called them ritual-protected families. The Wolins suggest that rituals made the families secure and gave them a sense of identity and belonging.

What were some rituals of these families?

They specifically mentioned bedtime, mealtime, and holiday rituals. A drunk spouse was not allowed to violate the family evening ritual - therefore, the families were able to create a sense of secure space.

There are so many "normal" things that encourage ritual: sitting in the same place at the table, a particular way you begin the meal, thanking God for the guests at your table. When my kids were growing up we always said a little prayer about remembering the unseen guest, Jesus, at our meals.

Recently we experienced a tragedy in our family and things went really black for us. I would be jarred awake at night from a fear that would clench my stomach. And the only thing that worked to ease this anguish for me was praying the Memorare. I began to ponder the fact that we have a whole generation of children who don't even know the Memorare. We need little prayers; they're an easy thing for parents to teach their children and to do with them.

The 19th-century founder of kindergarten, Friedrich Froebel, said that if you pray over a baby from the moment that baby is born, he or she will grow to be a person of prayer. Often the church gives people big complicated rituals that make them feel uncomfortable, but if you sit down for a meal, join hands, and say something simple and pertinent to each person's day, it doesn't make your kids feel weird - it's normal.

What exactly can parents do for their children's religious education?

Religious truth needs to be connected to lived experience, and that's where parents come in. We go to church on Sunday to celebrate a sacred meal, a meal that is to remind us that for the rest of the week there needs to be a time in our day when we gather and have a meal to remember Jesus.

We celebrate Reconciliation in church to remind us that we are in constant need of reconciling ourselves to one another, of living as people of mercy and peace. Without this carryover into everyday life, it is difficult for children to see either the meaning or the purpose of our rituals and beliefs. This carryover is only possible through the family.

Today, there are tremendously divergent views on what is actually happening in religious education. Some feel our children are learning all about self-esteem but none of the "fundamentals" of the faith - information and history, rote prayers, saints, and the meaning of holy days. Others believe children today have a far more committed faith. There are conflicting reports from the church hierarchy regarding the current state of our religious-education programs. Bishop Raymond Lucker of New Ulm, Minnesota has said we are in the middle of a great renewal in religious education. Whereas, Cardinal John O'Connor of New York has reported that the United States is experiencing a great crisis and nobody is learning anything.

It is time to stop arguing about what is or isn't happening and time to start thinking about what it is that we in the church are trying to accomplish and how we'll do it. Everything the church tries to teach parents about God and sharing their faith gets so "churchified." To be holy, a family thinks they have to do churchy things. The whole idea of making a family "the domestic church," which is a popular catchphrase among church leaders, is church language. It says to me that the origin of holiness is the church, and the family who wants to be holy must imitate that. But that's backwards. I don't think we need families to be domestic churches; I think we need churches to be families. As church, we keep inviting families to come to us to learn how to be church; maybe we need to go to them and learn how to be family. Maybe then we will better understand and communicate the meaning faith can have in their lives.

How did you learn to pass faith on in your religious-education classes?

I believe that people have within them the religious truths they need to know. What they lack is a religious language to talk about it. I try to help families develop that language and to use it with each other and their faith communities.

To do this, I helped develop FIRE - Family-Centered Intergenerational Religious Education - in our parish as a religious-educational process and a support system for families. In the early 1970s, when we in FIRE first decided to do this, I had read a book by the sociologist Peter Berger called The Noise of Solemn Assemblies (Doubleday, 1961). In it, Berger charges that we are inoculating our children with small doses of Christianoid topics so that by the time they reach maturity, we have effectively immunized them against any possibility of conversion. I was struck by the truth in that statement and decided we could no longer continue giving our children answers to questions they did not have. With FIRE, we wanted to encourage our kids (and our adults) to ask the questions we hoped to answer - questions about faith, scripture, morality.

One of our main objectives was to create an atmosphere that gave rise to the questions. We eventually found, through a lot of trial and error, that the best way to accomplish this was through games and simulations that initiate questions about individual experiences. We play games that teach specific religious truths and stress strong family values and how to deal with confrontation, conflict, and decision making.

People don't have enough faith in children. We see them as incomplete adults. But our kids have their own perceptions and their own understandings, and sometimes, if we listened more, we'd find that their perceptions are more insightful and logical than grown-ups' because they are not conditioned by society. I am convinced that children are mystics until they are about 6. My children have shown me that again and again. We're sacrificing a great deal by not spending a lot more time listening to what they have to say about faith.

In FIRE, we try to have families of all different ages in a group. We begin with a game that teaches a principle of faith and leads to a discussion that allows families to voice some of their issues. For example, lying is an issue for families, particularly with children at a certain age, and scripture is full of characters whose lives were complicated by untruths. The news media is another problem for parents of older kids. When we discuss how the different stories of scripture came to be written, we discuss the factors that influence the telling of all stories, particularly those in our media. Some of the most profound insights in our groups frequently come from young children, and the adults have to sit back and really listen and learn from them.

When these communities are formed, I find that people develop a tremendous sense of ownership for their church and their faith. They are not so willing to be told, "You must do it this way." When people do take on this sense of ownership, there needs to be a pastor who is reasonably self-confident and unthreatened. We had that kind of a pastor, and his personality enabled us to do something different.

And different for you was the formation of FIRE?

Yes. A group such as this is needed - even more today than when we started - because I believe that if society really took the problems of today's families seriously, one of the first things we would try to do is build better support systems.

Christianity, especially, is a good beginning because it is becoming more and more countercultural. What I mean by this is that Catholicism is moving away from those cultural values that over the years Catholics have incorporated into religion that really don't belong there. Puritanism and the work ethic are examples - they're not Catholic, we don't believe our worth is based on what we do.

Catholics have incorporated the prudishness of Victorianism, which denounces the goodness of the body, and we called that purity. But we are starting to disassociate from this cultural baggage. Many religions that have always understood themselves as countercultural, such as the Mormons and the conservative Jews, have relied on strong family support systems, and we have to start looking to them for help in laying our foundation.

Ultimately, the idea behind FIRE was to bring people to prayer, to quiet them down in their busy lives, to surprise them by opening them up to an experience of God. If you don't teach people to pray, I don't really see any point in teaching them religious education. Why walk around with a lot of religious information in your head if it doesn't work for you with prayer? Religious information doesn't necessarily lead to a relationship with God. When people learn about George Washington, educators don't expect them to have a relationship with George. But the church goes ahead and teaches them all about God as if that's going to lead to a relationship.

You don't think religious information alone will forge a relationship with God?

I think that when you develop a relationship with anybody, you become hungry for everything you could possibly know about that person. And religious education has to be about creating that hunger first, and then working at satisfying that need.

One of the things I've found over my years of teaching is that people want more - more about God, more about the church, more about support. And I worry about people the church isn't servicing. People are saying they're not getting the basics. I really suspect they feel they are missing much more. And that brings us to defining just what the basics of the Catholic Church are. The most basic point of our faith is a love relationship with God and Jesus that influences our whole lives. Everything else is secondary.

We are too focused on teaching our kids to memorize. Kids acquire the real basics of faith by living them in families. By supplying children with pat answers to faith questions, we rob them of the opportunity to ask their own questions, to use their own experiences and knowledge to find their own answers.

We ask the wrong questions. We don't take time to find out their real questions. We send out these god-awful tests and then decide the kids don't know anything because they can't answer the questions the way we ask them. Nobody sits down and talks with the kids to discover what they don't understand.

Does FIRE help lead to a relationship with God?

When FIRE first started in 1975, we would ask ourselves, How do we get people to take this faith concept home? In FIRE, we teach theology by asking how people experience this in everyday life, and then we recreate that experience. For example, when we teach the Resurrection, we discuss the possibility of a major family move. For the Eucharist, we celebrate a family reunion then examine what we have done in comparison to the Order of the Mass.

If we as a church want to educate our children to be grown-up members of the church, we need to do it in something that looks like a church. So a group of us spent a lot of time praying together and decided we wanted our church to look like a community, a community of families. And in FIRE, we designed a religious-education process that looked like what we hoped church could become - a community.

FIRE captures that innately theological bent in all of us and works to teach us all better ways of being family. By breaking people up into subgroups for discussions during our meetings, family members get a chance to see how other people parent and gain support from this community for their own parenting.

What are some of the other ways that the church could help people to recognize their own experience as sacred?

People generally underestimate their experiences of the sacred. An individual doesn't like to come forward and publicly say, "Here's a holy thing in my life." And many wouldn't want to label situations, conversations, or even prayer as sacred. It seems that we're consciously, or unconsciously, choosing to live a less full life just because we don't know how to recognize our riches. For example, the church has spent seven centuries arguing about whether or not people who are sexually intimate could pray. You know that is really scary. People pray better if they abstain from sex? Those of us who chose to marry have been led to believe this has made us less holy.

You don't have to be a parent in order to understand parenting - everybody comes out of a family. And you don't have to have a baby to be a good obstetrician, but I think it helps. We have to start preaching and teaching in a way that helps people to see the sacred in the ordinary. People who recognize the ordinary as sacred are the best equipped to do this. I have a wonderful pastor who's a wonderful preacher and who really tries to make the connection, but I really think he's an exception.

You have to know your history in order to ask, Where does it all fit in? You can't teach parents about sacraments without teaching them the why behind them, because the sacraments without history would just be magic. And if you attempt to revise those sacraments without realizing what a ritual grows out of, you are in danger of changing the whole point. Researching our religion and history is good, but we need to be more radical than that. We've got to start with the kinds of things that not only encourage people to become involved in the religion but also become involved as a family. For example, if a child is assigned to find out something about Abraham and the covenant he made with God, and her parents are not even sure how to look up Genesis 12 or his parents don't even have a Bible, those parents might feel threatened. And the response that child meets is one of anger. Instead, make it an assignment for children to go home and talk about God and Abraham with their parents by finding out when his or her parents decided to get married - that's a covenant, too. You're taking religion class into the home but getting it in the way that the parents feel absolutely comfortable with and in control.

What are some other ways parents can connect family ritual with religious lessons?

The church needs to begin to make some of those connections for people in teaching and preaching. When you talk about Eucharist, discuss decorating the Christmas tree. That's a ritual in almost every Christian family. Everybody saves decorations and tells the story of this or that decoration from kindergarten or nursery school. That's what we Catholics do in Eucharist, we come together with special symbols to celebrate and tell our story with special foods. Discuss what other families do, or suggest they take time out after a family group activity.

All this will work to allow parents to reinterpret the home in light of the religious story, which is no small task - it takes some thinking and support.

What is it about the US culture that shies away from seeing our lives as sacred?

It's not just the individualistic strain in the US, but it's also our self-sufficient, competitive attitude: "I not only can do it myself, I can do it better than you." We Americans don't like admitting our weaknesses or our vulnerabilities. But I don't think we can have true community without experiences of weakness.

We're a part of such a violent culture that there's this enormous protective instinct in all of us to want to screen out everybody that we don't know because nobody's to be trusted anymore.

That's what we're hearing and that's terrifying. The get-ahead mentality that makes us put materialism before family - people who get married want to really get ahead first in their careers - that's doing a real disservice to our children.

How do you apply a value system without making your kids look like nerds?

I don't think you should make kids feel really strange and out of it. For example, they need to wear the clothes that their peers are wearing. By the time my kids reached junior-high age, they desperately wanted name-brand clothes for school. I finally gave in because it was such a battle every year over school clothes. I gave each of them x-amount of money as a clothes allowance to last the entire year. I told them that if they wanted to spend the whole thing on one pair of jeans, to go for it, but don't ask me for anything else. So, of course, they each blew it the first year and lived with a very limited wardrobe. Now they've learned to be great bargain shoppers.

Kids need to know where their limits are and parents need to be very firm about those guidelines. We haven't taught people how to set limits, and kids need boundaries - that's how they learn. If there's nothing to push against, they fall on their faces.

As a parent and educator, what do you think about sex education?

I definitely think people are selling kids short. Sex education is necessary, but the idea that sex education is somehow going to slow down the sexual revolution is nuts. The more you can know about your body, the better off you are. As long as it's all done in a reasonable context.

As a society, we have made so much of sex that I think we have set our kids up for enormous disappointment. If a relationship doesn't turn out to be sexually wonderful, well, then we'll move on to another one. I don't believe in valueless education - things are right or wrong. And while there are certainly many degrees of right and wrong, there is no value-free point somewhere in the middle.

You know there's a normal progression the human being takes from hating people of the opposite sex, to kind of being interested in them, to wanting to be in groups with them, to wanting to be in smaller groups, to wanting to be alone and intimate with one person, to then becoming committed. The sooner you do the dating, the sooner you're reaching the end.

If we push 7-year-olds to have boyfriends and girlfriends, do we see where we're going? Probably the biggest fights my husband and I had with our kids was holding to the 16-year-old dating line. Of all the rules, that was the one that they felt really singled them out as odd. And yet by the time they reached 16, they didn't want to date, they went in groups. And when it was okay at 16, it didn't have the power and allure over them that it might have had at 14. As parents, we need to stand together to set some reasonable dating limits.

What would you say is the most important thing we as church, and as parents, can do to help our children live moral lives?

Kids are driven to be a part of society and to do what their peers are doing. One of the things we must do is teach our children to question everything, which is one of the reasons people are nervous with programs such as FIRE. But that's where learning comes from. It is important for children to question the values that parents have chosen and for parents to share the values they've opted for.

Ultimately, as parents, the greatest gift we give our children is the freedom to choose for themselves. You're a good parent if you've become a good person in the process of parenting. We have to let go and allow our kids to choose what they're going to become. And we need to let our children in on some of the choices we make in the name of family. When I was pregnant with my third child, a high-risk specialist told me that we should perform an abortion because there was the chance that my baby would not live nor lead a normal life and that my own life was threatened. My children were only 4 and 5 at the time, but we discussed this advice. We told our children what Mom and Dad believed about life and explained my difficult pregnancies with each of them and how they had struggled to survive. As a family, we decided that we were going to go through with this pregnancy - and Liz was born.

Years later I recall a dinnertime conversation when Liz told us all about a discussion her sixth-grade class had on abortion. She explained that although she didn't agree that abortion was right, if a doctor believed that the baby is probably not going to survive nor lead a "normal" life or that the mother could die, then abortion would be the right choice. And my other two kids just turned to her and in the same breath blurted out, "But that's exactly what the doctor told Mom about you." She just went absolutely gray. It changed her thinking radically.

I remember another family discussion about premarital sex. I needed to express myself in a way that 10-year-old Liz could understand, "You know when you have a secret with one person and how close you feel to that person?" (She understood that.) "But if you share that secret with a lot of people, it's still a good thing and nice to know, but you don't feel the closeness anymore? The intimacy of sex is supposed to give us that bond, and if you share it with too many people, it doesn't have any power anymore."

That sex is just not powerful was a good thing for her to hear - it's a real answer, she understood where I was coming from. My kids have understood that and carried it with them. And I think the fact that my husband and I are faithful to each other has to have a lot to do with their sense of values.

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