What we hand on to our children is not so much doctrines or practices as the capacity to love. Paul Andrews SJ has a sympathetic understanding of how parents hand on their faith to their children and what’s important.
To say that parents are important is not to say that they are to blame. Our national constitution insists that they are the primary educators – meaning what? That they teach us to read, choose a school for us, get to know the teachers, possibly work on boards of management? It goes way beyond that.
Education is what remains when we have forgotten everything we learned at school. And that is the mark left on us by parents. They taught us by what they were: fallible and faulty, well-meaning but inconsistent, but all the time passionate about us; the only people to whom we as children were unique and irreplaceable. That is what matters, and all the books about parenting are useful only in so far as they start with that.
The scriptures do not offer much advice on family problems, but we can pick up clues. In the father of the Prodigal Son we have Jesus’ model of what it is to be a parent: he is not overprotective; he allows his son the freedom to follow his own dream rather than his father’s, to take risks and to make mistakes.
He is still there for the son who has made a fool of himself and brought shame on the family. He absorbs the jealousy and anger of the older son but does not yield to him. He shows what it is to be a man: there when he is needed; faithful to wife and children; able for lifelong commitment; nurturant, forgiving, patient, and aware that children can learn from their mistakes.
He does not blame himself. When the boy is bursting with rehearsed self-reproaches (I have sinned against heaven, I am not worthy to be called your son…), the father has no time for them. Instead he blesses and heals.
Children shy away from parents who blame themselves for their children’s failures. We hate to be made to feel a disappointment to those we love. And we hate them to feel guilty over happenings that were not their fault. But we warm to the parent who, without any illusions about what has happened, is still ready to fall on our necks and kill the fatted calf.
Many mothers (fathers too, but less often) ask this question: how is it that the children we reared in the faith do not bother to get their children baptized? Religion was our lifeline. Why is it either irrelevant or an optional devotion for many of them? Parents of my generation realize that it is an illusion to blame themselves. They did the best job they could. They kept love flowing in the family, and see the futility of the question: What did I do wrong? Ireland itself is different.
They can remember a time when on most mornings, the front page of the Irish Independent reverently featured a bishop or priest making a speech or opening a school. That has changed; now almost any newspaper feels free to attack the majority religion and its representatives. Journalists are no longer safe targetting Jews, but they can feel comfortable bashing the Church and its clergy. As Yale professor Peter Viereck commented, Catholic-baiting is the anti-Semitism of the liberals.
That public hostility may impact on adults. A bigger influence on adolescents is the pressure of some peers who see Mass-going as something to be left behind in childhood. Moreover, religion and church are so absent from the most popular TV soaps that you can understand a girl or boy feeling that a godless life is normal. But that is not the whole picture.
In the Ireland of our times, our faith has had to depend more and more on inner strengths. We have seen religious values slowly eliminated from our laws. Society has become increasingly secular and multicultural. Good Christians maintain their faith without the props of an externally Christian society. We are pushed back to the smaller community of our parish or faith group; and also to our interior life, to the movements of our hearts. The same is true of our children.
When teenagers are asked if they pray (different from the question about attending church), it emerges that few of them – or of adults – have given up praying. Suppose they ask us: How do you pray? It is a question we have to be ready to hear. What is our honest answer? There is no right answer except the truth of our experience, and that will change as we grow older and our prayer reaches new depths, especially in times of crisis and distress. It is then that the compassionate heart of Christ, and the meaning that he gives to suffering, can strengthen us. It was from moments like these that we came to love the prayer: O Sacred Heart of Jesus, I place my trust in thee.
What we hand on to our children is not so much doctrine or practices, as the capacity to love. In a culture dominated by the philosophy of unrestricted choice (go for anything you want, as long as you have the money for it), the family is a stark exception. It exists because father, mother and children have restricted their choice, and commited themselves to one another for life. Without that model of unearned and faithful love, it makes little sense to talk of the love of God. We have no experience to give content to the words.
We have probably overdone the stress on practice in our religion. You cannot read far into the gospels without seeing the different emphasis of Jesus. He was constantly telling the Pharisees and scribes that they worried too much about regulations and practices, such as the washing of dishes and the detailed observance of the Sabbath. Instead he stressed: Look into your hearts. It is there that goodness or evil come into the world.
We do not want to sit in judgment on our children or grandchildren. But if we start to worry about them, let us use the criteria that Jesus gives us: the love of God (shown in prayer), and the love of others. Let us look to their hearts.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (December 2008), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
