11/30/2018 0 Comments The Ties That Bind As a person whose job it is to coordinate a faith formation program, I spend a fair amount of time reflecting on my own experiences of religious education growing up. As some of you may recall, I was a fairly quiet and introverted child (it's a shock now, I know, but it's true!) and while I feel a certain vague fondness for Sunday school classes, there isn't a whole lot that I remember from them (as I spent a good deal of time lost inside my own head). As far as theology or faith practices go, this is true for my teen years as well. If you asked me to tell you what I learned in Sunday school or youth group concerning theology or faith tradition, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell you.
As a side note, once I went to undergrad (at a Christian -not Catholic- college) I would discover that there was a lot of theology kicking around in the back of my mind. I'd discover that I knew the Bible way better than a lot of my peers (even if I couldn't quote the reference of the book, chapter, and verse, the stories were still there). I found a lot of things that I had just taken for granted and it had never occurred to me that other Christians might not agree with (like our teachings about Saints and Mary, or the Eucharist) but these things aren't the point of this blog. The point is, if you'd asked me as a high school what I'd learned at Sunday school and in Youth Group, or at the conventions and retreats my parents sent me to, I probably would have said something like this: We are supposed to love and serve people like Jesus loved and served people. Here's why. I had a profound encounter with the Holy Spirit on the first retreat I ever went on as a teen. On this retreat, my heart was blown wide open and filled with the love and peace of God. I've never cried as much as I cried that weekend (and I cry a lot) I wept for sadness, I wept for joy, I wept because people around me were feeling emotions too big to contain themselves. The retreat was a "Paschal Mystery Retreat" which basically means it focuses on Jesus' passion, death, and resurrection as a means of breaking open your own life. I didn't really remember that this was true until several months later on Holy Thursday. I distinctly remember sitting in the choir loft at my home parish and hearing the story of Jesus washing the disciples' feet (which I'd literally heard dozens of times by this point) and just being completely overwhelmed by it as though it was the first time I'd ever heard it. I wept as I listened to the story and was again overwhelmed by God's love for us. I remember that our priest gave a particularly uninspiring homily after that reading, but it didn't matter because Jesus had spoken to me that day. It changed my life. Suddenly I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. I knew exactly who I was supposed to be. Maybe not in terms of a career or in terms of who I would become, but those things didn't seem to matter anymore either, because Jesus was real and he was present in me. I knew then that I had to just go out and love people everywhere I went. And that was the theology I stuck with. That was the scripture I based my entire teenage life around. I was not perfect at it, far from it in fact, but it grounded me in a profound way as a teen. I was (and am) a very emotional being and it's easy for me to get swept up in other people's emotions and swept up in my own. For me, this concept was a way to check myself. It was (and sometimes still is) a way for me to bring my emotions up short and focus on what really matters. For me, this scripture represented who Jesus really was and who I was called to be. So, what does this have to do with our Family Night that focused on the Theological virtues? And why am I telling you that what I took away from my "faith formation" had little to do with the classes my parents sent me to? For two reasons, first because I hope you can see the ties between this story and the virtue of love and charity but more importantly, to say that we never really know what is going to speak to teens (or to any of us). The Lord works in all sorts of ways, through all sorts of means, which is why Edge is formatted the way it is. I hope you noticed on Wednesday night that Edge isn't structured like a class with lecturing; Edge is games and fellowship, it's the sharing of stories (along with theology), and it's giving teens a chance to talk to each other (and the Core Team) about what those principles actually mean in everyday life. My hope is not only that we are teaching lofty theology (which I believe we are) but that we are teaching grounding theology that will help your teens be rooted in faith, rooted in virtues. It's hard to be a Catholic. It's hard as an adult and I think it's even harder as a teenager, but I hope in sharing faith the way the Edge Core Team does, we are able to make it a little easier. Or, at the very least, show that it is worthwhile. At the beginning of the year, I met with the Edge Core Team members individually and asked them questions about their personal "theology" so to speak. Then we met as a group and I asked each person to share a story about their faith journey, a place where God met them. I was struck in meetings and as we went around the table by how different each of our journeys have been, and yet how similar. The ties that bind this Core Team to their belief in God are faith, hope, and charity in some of the darkest, most desperate moments of our lives. Each one of us has different grounding principles. Each one of us has more to learn about theology and about God. But each one of us has met God in a tangible way, and each of us longs for your teens to encounter Him too. We pray that they are meeting Him here and that they come away with ties that bind them to Christ. Thank you for joining us for an Edge session! May the virtues bestowed on you in your baptism have cause to flourish this week. Peace, Michaela
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