The Antidote to DIY Catholicism (Part II of Guest Blog by Dave McClow, LMFT, LCSW)

(Read Part One Here)

The Catechism and Fatherhood

What gets in the way of knowing this love deeply?  The Catechism of the Catholic Church knows the power of parents.  In the section on the Our Father, it states:

2779 Before we make our own this first exclamation of the Lord’s Prayer, we must humbly cleanse our hearts of certain false images drawn “from this world.” … The purification of our hearts has to do with paternal or maternal images, stemming from our personal and cultural history, and influencing our relationship with God. God our Father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area “upon him” would be to fabricate idols to adore or pull down. To pray to the Father is to enter into his mystery as he is and as the Son has revealed him to us. (See also 239)

 

Purification must take place if our spiritual journey is going to deepen in knowing and being known by our loving Abba, our Papa.  And I have found that counseling facilitates this process of purifying our negative parental images that affect our relationship with others and God.  This process happens when I help clients challenge the lies (the idols) that they tell themselves.  It happens in the relationship I have with them, loving them in their unlovableness as a spiritual father.  It happens when I guide them through active contemplation (prayer and imagery) to Jesus and/or Mary to love them in their dark places.  And when we can get some rays of light in that darkness, I am continually amazed at their transformations!

Baptism

Of course Baptism kicks things off.  The efficacious nature of baptism literally makes us sons and daughters of the living and ever loving Abba (Gal. 4:4-6).  “See what love the Father has bestowed on us that we may be called the children of God. Yet so we are” (1Jn 3:1).  We are divinized, deified, made partakers of the divine nature; i.e., we are made into gods (See the CCC 460).  Here is how the Apostle of Love would say it:

We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us. God is love, and whoever remains in love remains in God and God in him. In this is love brought to perfection among us, that we have confidence on the day of judgment because as he is, so are we in this world.  There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love. We love because he first loved us (1 Jn 4:16-19).

When my clients “get” this they bloom.  They become who they are.  They lose the Lutheran/Calvinistic scatology of the human person, and their identity is restored.  They move from fear to trust, from working for love to working from love, from endlessly trying to know God on their own, to experiencing being known deeply by a good and loving Father.  And then living from love, we are called to love others, to obey his commandments, and to not sin; but these are done because of who is birthed in us and what we have received from Him.  Then the commandments are not burdensome! See 1 Jn 5:1, 3-4.  And just to finish off this thought, Jesus says, “Father, they are your gift to me” (Jn 17:24).  So you are a son or daughter, loved, and a gift!  Don’t we all need to hear this?

Conversion: “One thing I do know is that I was blind and now I see” (Jn. 9:25)

Fr. Robert Barron, of the Catholicism series fame, also wrote a book called, And Now I See.  In it he argues that conversion is really changing the way you see things and that the Catholic faith offers totally new vision with which to see the world.  He states that “repent and believe in the good news” is poorly translated: “repent” means more like “go beyond your mind or spirit”; and “believe” is less about knowing certain propositions and more about being known.  So we are to move from a mind of fear, which is the result of the fall, to a mind of trust.  This being known and then accepted, loved, cherished, and delighted in, is what is missing in the DIY Catholic’s life.  Without it, life and joy are suffocated.

In closing, babies teach us that life is not a DIY project.  Catholicism is not a DIY project either—it is never “me and Jesus” against the world.  It’s not good for man to be alone (Gen. 2:18).   We are created for communion with others and God.  Jesus has given us a new Father and a new Mother (Mary and the Church), creating a new family.  If you are a DIY Catholic, you don’t have to do it on your own!  Repent—go beyond your mind, and believe—be known.  You must purify those negative parental images to become who you truly are—a gift from our Father to Jesus that is called to love (working from love not for love)!  A final blessing: “The LORD let his face shine upon you, and be gracious to you!” (Num. 6: 25).  Read: God delights in his gifts!  If you need our assistance, call us at the Pastoral Solutions Institute.

Why Johnny Can’t Pray– Why Catholic Religious Education is Doomed to Fail.

Over at Egregious Twaddle, my fellow Patheosi, Joanne McPortland, has a provocative post about What’s Really Wrong with Catholic Religious Education?  You should go read it.  Chances are, it will do two things.  First, I suspect,  it will piss you off.  Then, I suspect, you’ll find yourself agreeing with it.  At least, that’s what happened to me.

Her argument is essentially that the academic model of the religious education of children is a completely wrongheaded approach that should be scrapped forthwith.  But really, you should go read what she says for yourself.  Go ahead.  I’ll wait.

Back now?  OK.  Let’s chat.

My first reaction to Joanne’s piece was, “That’s not right!  You can’t baptize babies and then not teach children to appreciate the gift they’ve been given!  Of COURSE we need religious education for kids.”  But see, that’s not what she’s saying (and I did confirm this with her directly).  Her point isn’t that kids shouldn’t be catechized.  It’s more that the Church shouldn’t be doing it.  The religious education (and formation) of children is the job of their well-formed parents.  It is the process by which children are discipled in the faith by their faithful mom and dad.  What’s that you say?  Parents aren’t well-formed?  Exactly.

And that’s the problem.  The Catholic Church is trying to make up for parents’ lousy faith-formation by teaching children the faith in the parent’s stead.  But there are several problems with this.

1.  Church-Based Religious Ed.  Fills Head with Facts, Not Hearts with Love.

The first problem with Church-based catechesis is that the Church, or more specifically, a parish school–or worse, CCD program (or whatever they call it now)–simply can’t create the kind of loving atmosphere that disciples a child’s heart and leads him or her to love Christ and his Church.  All it can do is (a) fill the kids head with faith-facts or (b) recognize that facts aren’t enough, so go in the other direction and produce a lot of tree-hugging, “you are special” twaddle that lacks authenticity or credibility much less content.

If it is true that education is not so much the filling of a bucket as it is the lighting of a fire, so much moreso is religious education.  Research actually convincingly demonstrates that religious education and formation of anyone–especially children–can only  be effectively done in the context of a loving, discipleship relationship.  It’s interesting that Joanne would have picked this past weekend to write her post, because this past weekend, the NYTimes did an article about a new book, Families and Faith:  How Religion is Passed Down Across Generation by USC Social Work Professor, Dr. Vern Bengtson.  The entire article is worth a read, but here is the piece that is most relevant to our reflection.

As to why some children follow their parents, spiritually speaking, Professor Bengtson’s research confirmed some common-sense assumptions. For example, it helps if parents model religiosity: if you talk about church but never go, children sense hypocrisy. And intermarriage doesn’t help. If you’re Jewish (or Mormon, Catholic, etc.), and want your child to share your religion, it helps to marry someone of the same faith.

But Professor Bengtson’s major conclusion is that family bonds matter. Displays of parental piety, like “teaching the right beliefs and practices” and “keeping strictly to the law,” can be for naught if the children don’t feel close to the parents. “Without emotional bonding,” these other factors are “not sufficient for transmission,” he writes.  (Incidentally, the article goes on to say that an emotional bond with a religiously involved FATHER is the. single. most. important. factor. in transmission of religious faith to the next generation–but that’s another blog post entirely).

The bottom line is that any institution, including church institutions, can’t bond with anyone and if bonding is essential for faith transmission to children–which it is–then Church-based catechesis is doomed to fail because if can’t provide the most important element of faith transmission; that is, the emotional bond that serves as the heart of the faith that beats behind the facts of the faith.

2. Church-Based Religious Ed. Can’t Stick.

In addition to the fact that an institution can’t provide bonding, even if the Church offers the best catechesis possible in the most supportive environment imaginable, it is still doomed to fail because catechizing children and then sending them home to poorly formed parents is the exact definition of sowing seeds in rocky soil–and Jesus had something to say about that.   It is extraordinarily difficult for a child to learn to cherish and develop what his own parents don’t appreciate, validate or practice themselves.  If you want a disturbing illustration of how true this really is, check out The Crescat’s powerful post.  Terrifying!

3.  Church-Based Ed. of Children is (potentially) Against Church Teaching (sort of).

In Gravissimum Educationem, Pope Paul VI says,

Since parents have given children their life, they are bound by the most serious obligation to educate their offspring and therefore must be recognized as the primary and principal educators.(11) This role in education is so important that only with difficulty can it be supplied where it is lacking.

Catch that?  Parents are primary and principal educators of their children in the faith.  That’s not to say that the Church doesn’t have an important role to play in religious education.  It absolutely does!  But it does an injustice–and in fact, defies its own teaching–if it in practice (if not in intention) ends up communicating to parents, “You don’t have to educate and form your kids in the faith!  That’s what religious ed. is for!”  That message–albeit unintentional– is not only wrong-headed, it is contrary to the Church’s explicit teaching about the nature of religious education.  Again, no one is suggesting the Church means to do this in its current approach to the religious education of children but in counseling there is a saying that, “the meaning of the message is the response you get.”   That is, it doesn’t matter what the intention is, if parents respond to the Church’s effort as if it is saying that parents don’t have to educate and form their kids in the faith because the Church will, then that’s as good as the Church actually saying it.  Obviously that is a serious problem.

4.  Knowing isn’t the Same As KNOWING

The fourth problem with the Church-based approach to the religious education of children is that this approach fails to consider the Christian context of knowing.  For the Christian, “knowing” doesn’t mean head knowledge.  It means “having a transformative encounter with.” Institutional religious education is not giving children an encounter with God that truly prepares them for receiving Jesus in the Eucharist or any of the sacraments. The current approach to catechesis is to teach kids fun facts (or, really, not-so-fun facts) about the faith and then “reward” their time in class with a pretty dress and a Jesus-cookie.  We have to do better. All we’re doing now is inoculating most kids against a real encounter with Jesus. The Church can’t catechize kids. Only parents can because faith is relational and kids have a relationship with the parents, not the church. Kids “catch” their relationship with the church from their parents.

So What Do We Do?

How do you fix the problem?  I believe that the short answer is that we need to do as Joanne at Egregious Twaddle suggests.  We need to stop focusing 99.9% of our effort on educating children–not because they don’t deserve a religious education, but because this approach to religious education doesn’t work.  In fact, in most cases it is an anti-education.  It is a faith inoculation.  Instead we need to make intentional disciples out of parents so that they can form their own children.  How do we do that? I’m sure there are lots of ways, and I don’t have a definitive answer to this question.  But the first step is to scale back on our effort to keep doing what doesn’t work (church-based religious ed of children) so that we can put our energy, thought, and effort into adult education and formation–almost any form of which would work infinitely better than what we’re doing.

For more information on raising faithful kids, check out the chapter titled SOUL FOOD in Parenting with Grace:  The Catholic Parents’ Guide to Raising (almost) Perfect Kids.

Are Your a Faithful Do It Yourself (DIY) Catholic? –Part 1 (Guest blog by Dave McClow, MA., LISW, LMFT)

When it comes to home improvement, there have always been do-it-yourselfers (DIYers).  And if you’re like me, that means it takes three times as long to complete the project than you expected, three to four more trips to the hardware or big box store than you planned, and a project or two that doesn’t quite get completed.  Just as there are DIYers in home improvement, there are DIY Catholics.  They come in a variety of flavors.  There are those who make up whatever they want to believe, ala cafeteria-Catholic style; or, taken to an extreme, they start their own schismatic group if things are too orthodox or too liberal for them.  On the positive side, one Jesuit advocates for a DIY Church where the laity steps up to the plate to do more of the work in the Church and not leave it up to the priests or religious anymore.  This is a necessity and exactly what Benedict XVI has called for: “They [the laity] must no longer be viewed as ‘collaborators’ of the clergy but truly recognized as ‘co-responsible’, for the Church’s being and action….” A strong challenge, to be sure!

I want to introduce another Catholic DIY flavor, the faithful DIYer.  These would be the faithful souls who actually assent to the Church’s teachings on matters of faith and morals and are concerned about living out the faith in their actions.  Obviously not every faithful Catholic is a DIYer.  But the DIYers are defined by their attempt to live their faith on their own steam.  In its simplest form, faithful DIY Catholics are working for love, not working from love.  They feel as if they must do things to be loved.  They become “human doings,” not human beings.  They feel acceptable only if they do the right thing.  They are often unaware of how they are living in terror of being rejected and abandoned by a significant person, or by God himself, if they make some stupid mistake!  They love so that they can be loved.  Soon-to-be-Saint John Paul II says, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it” Redeemer of Man, 10.  So we need to be loved, or life doesn’t make sense!  Experientially, the DIYers feel as if they have to run in front of a freight train all the time to keep from getting run over. They are constantly “trying,” and they are usually exhausted, which is when they call me.  I know about faithful DIY Catholics because this is the spiritual malaise that a majority of my clients experience.

The Source: Calvin, Luther, and Scatology?

What is the source of this fear and dread?  Of course there is the fall, or original sin.  But I think the Catholic DIYer has taken the Calvinist notion of total depravity (that there is nothing good in us) to a new extreme.  In Luther’s anthropology (what it means to be human), he developed what I would call the scatology (the study of feces) of the human person (not to be confused with eschatology—the study of the end times).  To not put too fine of a point on it, he saw humans as crap—as once good, but like food full of nutrients (pre-fall) that has gone through the stomach and bowels with nothing good left in it coming out the other end (post-fall): crap.  At least in Luther’s thinking, when Christ forgives us, we turn into snow-covered crap hills.  Christ does not see (or presumably, smell) the crap anymore, but we remain essentially…well, you guessed it, CRAP.  As I said, Catholic DIYers take Luther and Calvin to the next level—they simply leave off the snow.

By the way, this is not limited to Catholics; I’m a convert from Protestantism, and I’ve treated plenty of DIY non-Catholic Christians too.

Personhood vs. Behavior

Catholic anthropology would not have any of this.  We are created in the image and likeness of God, and this is not destroyed by the fall.  Marred?  Yes.  Destroyed?  No.  While I have never read this in any theology book, I might say that we are essentially good, just covered in crap from the fall and from our personal sin.  The good news is that the crap can be washed off!  So we have an inherent dignity, or even a lovability, that never goes away.  If my clients get this, then they are properly “anthropologized,” as Dr. Greg says.

So, sound Catholic anthropology would say our dignity is based not on our behavior, but on our being or personhood.  I often illustrate this with one of my more recent favorite stories of the New Testament, the Prodigal Son.  You remember the story:  “Dad, could you play dead for me and give me my inheritance?”  Then the son spends it all on lewd and sinful things and wakes up in a pig pen fighting the pigs for food.   At this point he decides to go home to be a servant of his father where he can at least eat better.  His father does a number of things to welcome him, including the big party which really ticks off the brother, who pouts and won’t participate.  If you were a father whose sons were acting like this, do you think you would respond as he did?  Probably not!  Typical responses would include a well placed boot in the behind. But if the Father’s focus were on behavior, these boys would have been dead meat—where are the consequences to teach them a lesson??

So why does the Prodigal Son’s father respond as he does?  Is he a naïve, clueless kind of father?  I don’t think so.  I think he sees past the behavior to the dignity of the human person—he still sees the goodness of both his sons.  I usually ask my clients, “Were you worse than the Prodigal Son?”  Typically they respond, “Oh no, not like that!”  And this is where they usually have their initial doubts about their unlovability, which starts to go down the drain…or the toilet, if you want to continue the other analogy.

Parents: Another Source of DIYism

Parents are another source of this working-for-love idea.  We are all fallen, and we can only give what we have received.  We are social creatures, and the field of interpersonal neurobiology suggests that our brains develop only in relationship.  We download what our parents teach us implicitly or explicitly.  And not all of it is bad; otherwise you would probably not be here.  Kids who are rejected or loved based only on their behavior end up knowing they have to work for their love.

STAY TUNED FOR PART II The Antidote for DIY Catholics—COMING SOON!

Dave McClow is a clinical pastoral counseling associate of the Pastoral Solutions Institute.  Learn more about Catholic tele-counseling services for couples, families, & individuals by visiting our website or calling 740-266-6461 to make an appointment.