Why is narrative an important part of religious education, of catechesis? Do we learn about God through the story of our own life and, if so, what else does this narrative teach us? How do we take the insights we gain from pondering our own experiences—and God’s presence with us throughout—back to our vocational task of passing on faith to others?
From the dawn of time, humans have told stories about who they are, where they come from, and what it all means. Story-telling is a peculiarly human trait. All peoples, all cultures, all epochs, have their own stories.[1] It was always thus and will be forever.
Stories enchant us, inspire us, comfort us, and ground us in ‘now’… a ‘now’ flavoured with past events and future dreams. My own life has been grounded in the Christian Story since I was little. My awareness of God came soon after my awareness of my parents, particularly my mother. I first leaned my mother’s version of the Great Story: how God so loved the world and all the people in it, that God sent his own and only Child to share our human life, and to show us the way to “happily ever after.”
Prologue and character
Dad was a chemistry professor at the University of Alberta and he loved teaching and research. That love cost him a lot, though, and I’ve only realized how much by trying to make faith-sense[2] of my parents. Why did God choose Bill and Dorothy to be my parents? What did God teach me through them that enriches my role as a Catholic religious educator?
Mom had me and then my brother, Steve, kneeling beside our beds to say prayers when I was very little… probably about aged three.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take. Amen.
I was told that my heavenly Father, God, would always look after me—no matter what. I could always talk to him and he would listen. I’m sure I was also told that angels watched over us always, too. I know we dressed up in our good clothes on Sundays and went to church. I went to Sunday school where people told stories with cut-outs and felt boards. I was always as close as I could get to the teacher and the felt board. I was so very excited to bring home the story handouts, so mom or dad could read the story to me again and, while I waited, I could look at the drawings on the front of those Bible people from long ago.
Stories have been a part of my life since I was very young. I love stories, because it meant cuddling with my parents, especially my daddy. I felt very special and well-loved sitting on his lap while he read to us. On reflection, I know I still look for feelings of love, comfort, and safety in my stories… because that was my early experience of hearing them. Those cuddly story times probably also laid the groundwork for my love of both romance novels and mysteries: always a happy ending after some trials and tribulations… rather like Bible stories.
Even now, I connect good feelings with books of all kinds. As I reflect on it, that’s probably one reason I read so hungrily as I—and the family—grew. As my parents added children to their family, their eldest child did not get the same level of personal attention anymore. My mom was simply too busy with the younger kids. Increasingly, I sought those feelings in my stories and books.
By Grade Four, the bookmobile from the Edmonton Public Library was both heaven and a haven… the bookmobile contained a never-ending supply of stories. More and more books would come home with me. Now there were five children in our family, and I was recruited/expected to be mom’s main helper, since I was the oldest and a girl. Years later, mom told a visitor that she did not know what she would have done without me but, at the time, I did not feel appreciated in the role. I resented it more and more as years went on.
Our family schedule had times to be in bed at different ages, and times until which to read. When you reached nine, your bedtime was nine o’clock but you had no reading time. I was proud to be becoming a ‘big’ girl. However, on my ninth birthday, my dad’s mom died. I had never seen my dad cry until that day. With no reading time in bed, there was no time or place to process the emotions provoked by a sad, then increasingly absent father. Though we didn’t hear it named until ten years later, my father began to experience bipolar depression in the mid-sixties. It was called ‘manic depression’ at the time. Although my father did not die until 2005, I believe now that I mourned the loss of him from when I was about ten.
My parents kept dad’s diagnosis a secret from their families and the community. Mental illness in a family still can bring shame and embarrassment. Consequently, many families suffer in silence as ours did. Those years from nine to eighteen when I moved away from home were very difficult years. Dad was either absent or angry. We children learned to walk on eggshells by suppressing any emotions that would upset either parent: stressed mom and depressed dad. As a teenager, when I talked to mom about things she always told dad… and I would be in trouble. I was trying to deal with the bubbling cauldron that is adolescence but found no safe place to process it at home. Although I felt emotions, I did not learn how to handle them in a healthy way. Neither parent could teach us children how. We learned to survive unscathed by keeping any emotion other than ‘okay’ buried deep inside. To let any escape would provoke dad’s unreasonable-for-the-offense anger.
As I developed and grew, visiting relatives fascinated me: my two grandmothers first. They told their family stories… extended family stories that my parents were very keen to hear. When my grandmothers visited, especially dad’s mother, my dad did not go back to the chemistry lab after supper. Having Dad home in the evenings became an increasingly rare occurrence. When Dad was manic, he wanted to be working. When Dad was depressed, I don’t think he wanted to be home with six children starved for his attention.
My grandmothers talked about other unknown people who were “family.” These family members didn’t yet belong to my definition of family: one always-working dad, one always-home mom, and ever-more children. I was tantalized by the idea of more family… perhaps I would fit in with them! The year I was six, we all went to New Brunswick to visit these family members. The year I was thirteen, my brother and I stayed in New Brunswick for three weeks while Dad was at a conference in England. The year I was eighteen I wandered around the ancestral graveyard (where we buried my parents’ ashes in November) with my father in his hometown. I was curious about the people with the same name who were resting there. Who were they? What were their stories? My father did not know. He had been born 29 years after his parents married—the after-thought child. Dad’s father then died when he was only six. He didn’t learn the stories and couldn’t pass them on to me.
Relatives’ stories have always captivated me. In fact, I still seek to understand my nuclear family and myself by conversing with my extended family, and by reflecting on what I learn in light of my faith. Over the years, I met grandparents, great-aunts and great-uncles who told wonderful tales about their childhoods and their parents. I have aunts and uncles who were like—but also not like—my parents. Cousins were almost like brothers and sisters… but they didn’t live with me full time. They knew you had baked beans and brown bread every Saturday night. Crisp gingerbread cookies every Christmas were Gram’s recipe. Big round sugar cookies in the cookie jar were from Grammie’s. Cousins thought overdone cookies were special because Grammie had liked to read while preparing meals for her ten children. Shared traditions knit us all together into either the Ayers or the Monteiths.
Listening to stories about family, where we came from, and about my parents growing up was one of my favourite pastimes. Hearing those stories helped me to reflect on—and begin to make sense of—what made people tick. One aunt said recently that I was always a child who hung around the edges of adult conversations. Maybe that’s why I have visited the Maritimes more than thirty times in 50 years: to learn my story. Hearing family stories revealed where I came from, gave me insight into my parents, and helped shape the woman I am today.
Making faith-sense of my story
My faith journey began within the Anglican tradition of my mother and her father’s ancestors, flavoured by the Baptist tradition of her mother’s line. Although my father was baptized Anglican before marrying my mother, his heritage was strict Baptist, which he had rejected at thirteen due to the hypocrisy he felt was exhibited by the people in the staunch Baptist community of Sackville,[3] NB. His spirituality (if you can call it that) was delving into the mysteries of organic chemistry, the chemistry of living things. The family faith stories I learned from my parents and my relatives were decidedly tinged with an unarticulated aversion to the Roman Catholic Church.
How then did I end up Catholic?
My awareness that God might really have a plan for me and my life began to unfold soon after I met Marc, the Roman Catholic man who is now my husband. Here was someone not much older than me who actually knew God. No one I had met before knew God, but Marc sure did. The certainty of his knowing shone from his eyes. I had an inchoate longing for all that seemed to mean. I know now that Marc was simply doing what all Christians are called to do: witnessing to his faith in Christ.[4]
From no previous person in my life had I ever sensed that they really knew the Lord, Jesus Christ. They knew about Jesus and taught me about Jesus, but they did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. However, Marc and the Catholics I met in the Newman community did know the Lord, and they talked about Jesus as if he was sitting right there with us. These people incarnated for me what it meant to be “in touch, but also in communion and intimacy, with Jesus Christ.[5]” Marc and the Newman students talked so confidently about Jesus and lived [as if they knew absolutely that] “only [Jesus] can lead us to the love of the Father in the Spirit and make us share in the life of the Holy Trinity.[6]”
My curiosity and interest in learning more about this personal God Marc spoke about was piqued. My evangelization had begun in earnest. I first felt I needed to re-explore my own faith tradition but I did not find abundant life there, nor anyone who spoke as if they really knew the Lord. However, I felt immediately at home when I went to Mass for the first time in the university’s Catholic college chapel. Here was life, youth, music, and joy… and the Story. Of course, I had heard the Story before, but now people talked as if it was really true! I had new insights into familiar tales, while homilies further uncovered layers and angles of richness and depth.
In the Story, I heard of a Father who answers prayers and keeps his promises. (Later Scott Hahn wrote a book with that title, which I bought because I had been searching for such a father since I was nine.) My poor dad had gotten lost on the road of mental illness, and my mom, too, since she had gotten entangled in supporting dad, keeping him functioning so he could provide for the family, and then having no energy left to meet her children’s emotional needs.
In Scripture, and in the Church, I found a Father who always loved and forgave me… no matter what I did. He did not yell at me or criticize me. I also came to know my Brother, Jesus, who understood everything I went through, still loved me, and even gave his life to keep me in the family! It took many more years for me to realize that I also had a Mother who would always be there for me, and never abandon me.
Suddenly, I could make new meaning from the too-bleak landscape of my inner life. Perhaps I could now hope that my sense of not fitting in my family, my suffering and loneliness actually had some meaning and purpose. Maybe I had found a place to belong, to blossom, and to be blessed for exactly who I was. Jerry Stone captures what new vision began to dawn in my heart in those early days:
My own life story is a recollection of happenings that I [now could] interpret within a story-frame of meaning, and through that interpretation these happenings carry a mythic power to change my life.[7]
Through Marc, the Newman community at the University of Alberta, and the Catholic friends I began to make, I learned how much God loves me and wants to be in relationship with me. I discovered that I had been trying to fill the “God-shaped hollow in my heart”[8] with many, many things: boyfriends, shopping, drinking, and romance novels, to name a few. God graced me with a new way to see my life, and I began to ponder the events in light of Scripture and of the faith I was beginning to learn about. Long conversations with Marc about all these topics became my favourite activity. I started a spiritual journal which is now at notebook sixteen. I discovered other Catholics also liked have faith-filled conversations, so I began to open up with more people about my faith life. All these exchanges with others allowed me to stumble into a practice of theological reflection, but it would be two more decades before I knew to call it this.
Theological reflection, making faith-sense of my life, was excellent formation for becoming a catechist. Some people have referred to me as an “old soul.” Hearing that label for me, and using it since for others, has meant the person is mature for their years, feels apart from most people, thinks deeply about life, and sees a bigger picture than most. I have always chewed situations over in my mind until I understand them, but trying to comprehend them from the divine perspective enriched the process exponentially. I am now able to see God’s hand at work in my whole life, even if just in retrospect. Theological reflection has been a balm to the wounds I brought into adulthood, allowing them to heal with scars that add character, not just disfigurement.
God’s great gift to me is a huge and grounded faith: a well full of ‘living water’ that never runs dry. Daily I thank him for it. It’s a grace that has made life’s storms bearable. As I have endured the storms, and talked with others about them, people have seen me as a witness of faith, steadfastness, trust, joy, and love. I have been truly evangelized: I listened to Catholics, accepted and assimilated what they told me, and have genuinely adhered to the truths the Lord has revealed. As Pope Paul VI said, the Gospel inaugurated a new world for me. I have a new manner of being, of living, and of living in community.[9] My life has been transformed and I have found a family in which I truly belong, am accepted, can blossom, and am blessed. I have also entered a community, the Church, that is (or should be) continually evangelized herself. It is this evangelizing dynamism that propels me into the realm of religious education and catechesis. Once your own life has been transformed, you are impelled to share that Good News with others. The joy bubbles over, and you want to share it with a world in desperate need of genuine joy.
The joy also makes one hungry for more: more knowledge, more community, more liturgy, more prayer, and more holiness. The inquiry course into the Catholic faith (before RCIA was implemented); theology courses at the Catholic college; parish retreats, missions, and workshops; and my own reading all opened my eyes and heart to the unending riches within the Catholic tradition. As I was informed, I was formed and transformed, while I continued to reflect on my journey with my fellow pilgrims. Through encounters with others along the journey of faith, we shared our convictions and insights, heard our own stories with ‘new’ ears, and grew as disciples of Christ “in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour” (Luke 2:52). Since my own cup was overflowing, wasting the bounty seemed stupid and ungrateful, so I continued to share it with others both at work, and at home. I did not want to be a righteous zealot shaking my finger at sinners, though. I wanted to invite them to discover the same joy and abundant life I had found. I wanted them to join my family of faith, too.
By grace, I have been gifted with some of the insight and humility required of catechists: to always feel inadequate to the task before us, and to know that we too are simply on the journey with those we catechize. Jesus Christ is the Teacher. Jesus continues the pedagogy of God by embodying holiness/perfection in his fully human person, and he calls each of his followers to do also.
In his words, signs and works during his brief but intense life, the disciples had direct experience of the fundamental traits of the “pedagogy of Jesus,” and recorded them in the Gospels:
- receiving others, especially the poor, the little ones and sinners, as persons loved and sought out by God
- the undiluted proclamation of the Kingdom of God as the good news of the truth and of the consolation of the Father
- a kind of delicate and strong love which liberates from evil and promotes life
- a pressing invitation to the manner of living sustained by faith in God, by hope in the Kingdom, and by charity to one’s neighbour
- the use of all the resources of interpersonal communication, such as word, silence, metaphor, image, example, and many diverse signs as was the case with the biblical prophets [the formatting is mine].[10]
As Groome says, “education at its best informs, forms, and transforms the very “being” of people and does so in ways that are powerfully life-giving for both themselves and their society.[11]” Our individual lives with all their tempests, tribulations, and triumphs shown us God’s “eternal wisdom… ineffable loving-kindness … [and we can] for ourselves the thought and care he has given to accommodating his language to our nature.”[12] Many years later, I now see that what seemed to be heart- and spirit-breaking events and encounters of my early years were still shot through with God’s glory… be it in laughter around family board games, summer vacations in the Rockies, or shared Sunday dinners.
God knew my personal story in full colour… as he knows each person he has created. God knows my ‘everything.’ He helped me see all my hurts, hopes, scars, and broken dreams in a new way. I continue to take my life experiences and try to make faith-sense of them, and I converse with fellow pilgrims as they make sense of theirs.
God designed us to receive his self-revelation,[13] so we naturally want to ponder what the happenings in our lives mean.
Mary, our Blessed Lady, reflected quietly in her heart on all the things that occurred with her and her son. Limited by her humanity, she could not possibly have understood everything as it was happening. However, she pondered all as we too must do. “Interpreting and illuminating experience with the data of faith is a constant task of catechetical pedagogy.”[14] Private experience alone cannot show us “the way, the truth, and the life.” Only an adequate account of the Christian Story and how it may be connected to the private experience can shed light on an experience’s meaning in our lives of faith. Theological reflection or seeking to make faith-sense through the lens of divine revelation is the key. Our Blessed Mother has become my model and mother… although it has taken me decades to shed the remnants of my own family’s anti-Catholic/anti-Mary prejudice.
Thankfully, God is always teaching us with great love and patience. God always finds a way to reach out to us and draw us to himself. God knew the best way to reach us was to become one of us. The Incarnation of Jesus and the Paschal Mystery bookend the Christian Story. Everything we need to know about who and whose we are is contained within the Story.
The unfolding of my own life story and my vocation as a catechist has humbled me. Who am I to try to tell anyone about this greatest happily-ever-after story? Yet my faith prods me with this: who am I not to?
As a catechist and religious educator, I am simply called to sow the seeds of the Story. I am to sow by casting seeds everywhere I travel, without regard to the soil conditions. Sometimes I can rest awhile with fertile soil. Oftener still, I am tangled in thistles and weeds. Still the call is to cast out all the seeds I receive. Paradoxically I am soil for others’ seeds. Sowers do not stay to ensure the seed will grow; they carry on sowing. Knowing you are not responsible for the growth is a profound relief when you first become a catechist! For it is “only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7).
God causes the person to grow progressively and patiently towards the maturity of a free [child], faithful and obedient to his word… He admonishes with reward and punishment, trials and sufferings, which become a formative influence. Truly, to help a person to encounter God which is the task of the catechist, means to emphasize above all the relationship that the person has with God so that [she] can make it [her] own and allow [herself] to be guided by God.[15]
My faith has matured and deepened as I have pondered my hard-won life wisdom in the light of Scripture and Tradition. God has graced me with becoming a better catechist, by showing me again and again that I am not the Saviour. He is. One of the sins of the creature is to think they are the Creator. Being a disciple is hard work—disciplining your own nature to allow the various persons of the Trinity to reign as God. Jesus Christ is my Brother and my Saviour. He is my Teacher, my Way, my Truth, and my Life. The Holy Spirit can only breathe through me to others when I open my own life and story to God’s Word.
Divine pedagogy and my personal narrative have entwined to become an identity that has as much integrity and authenticity as I can possibly manage. Parker Palmer calls this a hidden wholeness and living an undivided life. The concept he says that is crucial to thinking the world together (wholeness) is the concept of paradox.[16] My personal narrative has many paradoxes: anti-Catholic beginnings, childhood emotional turmoil and mental illness, and a non-traditional pathway to the field of religious education. Like Palmer, although I have years of theological reflection and study behind me, I face every new challenge is this field believing myself incapable of any real insight worth sharing. My inner identity becomes clear only in the mirror of encounter with another. My intellect and my emotions intertwine with everyone walking the same Catholic pilgrims’ way as I walk.[17]
Being a teacher and coach came naturally for me, but being a catechist—called by God to the task—can be daunting. Religious education brings people beyond comprehending information to being equipped to make sound life assessments and decisions.[18]
What does it mean to balance educating the mind with educating the heart? In terms of action in the world, it suggests that a tool is only as good as the hand that guides it, and the guiding hand is only as wise and compassionate as the mind and heart that direct it. [19]
In finding my way to God through reflection on my own life story, I am presuming that since God created humans in God’s image and likeness, God can be found within the events and unfolding of our lives. Teresa of Avila seems to have thought so also.[20] I’m looking forward to the unfolding of this Master’s program and to seeing God write my story from here on.
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