Narrative or story-telling is an important part of religious education and catechesis. We learn about God through both the story of our own lives and coming to realize God’s presence with us throughout. When we have tied our mundane story to a sacred story,[1] we adopt the symbols of the sacred story into our personal life story. Sacred stories form our consciousness… and mundane stories help us clarify our sense of the world.[2]
“Stephen Crites also suggests that action through time has an inherently musical style… The earliest narratives are thought to have been sung, and the song is even thought to have preceded its words.”[3]
When I hear music, I want to dance. In Scripture, the Psalms were certainly sung, and in some cases, sacred stories were also danced (Miriam and the tambourines in Exodus 15:20). The type of dance I imagine with music and two partners is a waltz. So my metaphor for this blog becomes two types of catechesis dancing/waltzing together.
Narrative and story-telling are cultural expressions. In 2016, our Canadian culture has moved beyond a primarily Judeo-Christian culture, but many threads of the Judeo-Christian sacred story still permeate what is now known as “post-modern culture.” The Judeo-Christian symbols first formed Canadian culture, even though the Christian sacred story may not be known in its entirety, nor understood, as Canada absorbs more non-Christian immigrants and becomes more secularized.
The Christian sacred (Crites) or canonical (Stone) story is a love story. This story is told in words, or more precisely, in the Word. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God… What came into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people” (John 1: 1, 3b). Our sacred story, which we call Scripture, tells how God created human beings in God’s own image and likeness. God’s image and likeness is a communion of Persons: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—or Love, Beloved, and Loving.[4] God the Father creates and sustains all life out of infinite love. But God’s most beloved creatures are human beings, especially the Chosen People, with whom he stands in covenant relationship.
Our God is steadfast in his love for us, despite our waywardness: our sins, failures, self-centered triumphs, joys, sorrows, hopes and despairs. Many people have never discovered the ability to see, hear, or sense God’s presence anywhere… or they have left it unused for so long that they have forgotten how. Many have never even heard the Christian sacred story, or they have heard incomplete or uninspiring versions of it. Many have never been shown the joys that come through walking in Jesus’ Way. They are imprisoned by their own decidedly unsacred world views. Longing for liberation from a prison they sense but cannot define, they yearn for someone to unlock their cell doors.
Our lives are unfolded within time. We live only in the present, the now, but we carry within us “the chronicle of memory.”[5] Stephen Crites says our sense of consciousness awakens within a sacred story (a big story or meganarrative) which gives it context. Our experiencing—our way of making sense of our lives and the contexts within which we find ourselves—is apprehended in narrative form as well. Our only way to make sense of the life events unfolding over the linear course of time is to place our little stories within a bigger, sacred story (in our context in Canada, it is still predominantly Judeo-Christian). Dwayne Huebner quotes Alfred North Whitehead when describing the language of religious metaphors used in religious education, in that “the foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, the whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.”[6]
“Catechesis must take account of the historicity of all human existing. Since narratives are the central access to this historicity, catechesis must be inherently narrative. Interestingly, the main source for catechesis is also narrative. The dominant literary genre of the Scriptures is narrative… [and] is central to a narrative catechesis… The narratives remind us that the doctrines found in our traditions have had their origins in these biblical narratives… Catechesis that is Scripture-based will honour the very pedagogy of God found in the Scriptures.”[7]
One symbol our faith offers us is the rhythm of the liturgical year, with its cycle of seasons and readings. We have a three-year cycle of Scripture readings, so the sacred story is proclaimed anew about every thousand days. The liturgical year contains two penitential seasons of waiting, two seasons of celebration and joy, and lots of ordinary days—much like life. To each Sunday Mass, persons come with new needs, wounds, and insights to hear again the familiar ritual and the living Word. “In Christian liturgy the whole church proclaims and celebrates the mystery of Christ, the mystery… which we call the Paschal Mystery.”[8] The liturgy celebrates Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension to glory in chronos time, and in kairos time in union with Christ. The liturgy is scripted drama, in which speech, space, silence, art, architecture, music, and song are choreographed. Each person present has both a place and a purpose; there are no spectators.
“Sacramental celebration is woven from signs and symbols… As a being at once body and spirit, man (sic) expresses and perceives spiritual realities through physical signs and symbols. As a social being, man (sic) needs signs and symbols to communicate with others, through language, gestures, and actions. The same holds true for his relationship with God.”[9]
The liturgical ritual is full of symbols which catechize participants.
“Our faith commitment brings us together to celebrate, and every time we come together to worship, our faith is renewed… Through its liturgical celebrations the church continues to be disciples of the Lord, a community of believers, a pilgrim people… The liturgy is a ritual… a repeated pattern of behaviour that expresses meaning. ”[10]
Within the liturgy, a primary symbol is the People of God: a motley crew of unlikely companions of varying appearances, backgrounds, and characters gathered together by one God for worship and pilgrimage.
Evangelization and catechesis pass on or echo the Word which is God. Our baptism gives us the capacity and the responsibility to pass our faith on to others. Doing so in a post-modern culture is challenging. However, if people encounter the kerygma, they become hungry for rich, solid catechesis. My premise is that, if both narrative and symbolic catechesis are carried out together, the catechesis that follows the kerygma has the best chance of bringing about a deepening faith in adults. Good catechesis offers adults “the lure of the transcendent—that which we seem is not what we are for we could always be other.”[11] Catechesis leads us out from where we stand now into something new.
Underlying all Christian catechesis is one primary symbol: the true Teacher is Jesus Christ. The catechist is a person who uses her own mundane story of being led to a deeper relationship with Christ, and of her increasingly more authentic missionary discipleship, to facilitate an encounter between the adults being catechized and our Teacher and Lord. The differences between the catechist and the catechized “are manifestations of Otherness. They are openings in the fabric of everydayness. They are invitations [to those adults being catechized] to be led out, to be educated.”[12]
Part of growing to adulthood means beginning to define who you are. A person’s childhood and youth gives them the opening chapters and are set within the context of the “sacred story” of the family of origin and the surrounding culture. But the rest of the person’s story is largely theirs to write. As young people reach the age of majority, they begin to choose for themselves: they choose their education, their work, their partners in life, their world view, their meaning systems or faith. This process of choosing, correcting, realigning, and re-choosing lasts a lifetime. The predominant world culture seduces young people into believing that either lives of power or pleasure will fulfill them. These early adult years are where we often spend much of our time distracted and diverted from God. Fr. Robert Barron summarizes these diversions that take us away from putting God in the centre of our life as three: sensual pleasures and materialism, worldly power and glory, and the aggrandizement of ego or making ourselves into gods.[13]
It’s usually in the desert experiences of life that the clamouring of the distractions and diversions dies down, and we face again the big questions of life: “Who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose?” If people never encounter an intentional catechist-disciple of Jesus Christ, they may never get the answers to these questions. They may never acquire the symbols to interpret their experiences as invitations to turn/return to God. However, if they encounter a disciple of Christ on their journey through the desert—of their ordinary lives—they will be invited to “leave their nets, their boats,” their lives of ‘dissolute living’ to return to the tender mercy (the hesed) of God.
As I have said before, my first encounter with someone who actually knew Jesus Christ was when I met my now-husband, Marc. He was connected with a whole community of people who knew the Lord. My mother and her Anglican parish 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. Those people incarnated for me what it meant to be “in touch, but also in communion and intimacy, with Jesus Christ.”[14] 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.[15]”
I was twenty years old when I encountered those Catholic intentional disciples. My personal story to that point had seen me leave behind my parents and their way of life (academia), and much like the Prodigal Son, I moved to a distant country (Calgary!) and took up “dissolute living” (see Luke 15:13). When I had “spent everything” through an aborted university attendance, two intimate unmarried relationships, and several unsatisfying and unfulfilling jobs, I returned home to Edmonton and my parents’ home to attend university for real. On my first day of classes, I encountered Marc.
In the unfolding of our relationship, and my closer encounters with Jesus Christ, I began to rewrite my personal narrative in light of what I was coming to understand about Catholic Christianity. Although I had returned to my childhood home, I had returned to clearly apparent disappointment and loss of regard.
One day that first fall of 1975 at Mass with Marc, I heard proclaimed the Gospel story of the woman caught in adultery. I heard that Jesus did not condemn her as the others had, but rather he told her to go and sin no more. Jesus spoke to me in that Scripture passage that afternoon and, as a result, I “left my nets” (my previous way of life and all the guilt and shame that had accumulated) to start to follow Jesus.
“The narrative quality of experience has three dimensions, the sacred story, the mundane stories, and the temporal form of experience itself… Sometimes the tracks cross, causing a burst of light like a comet entering our atmosphere. Such a luminous moment, in which sacred, mundane, and personal are inseparably conjoined, we call symbolic in a special sense… The cross, or a holy mountain, receive their meaning from the stories in which they appear… For a religious symbol becomes fully alive to consciousness when sacred story dramatically intersects both an explicit narrative and the course of a [person’s] personal experience. The symbol is precisely that double intersection.”[16]
That writing in the dirt, those stones dropping, and Jesus saying he did not condemn that woman, happened to me that afternoon. And it was exactly like a burst of light. I remember it as if it were an hour ago, and it has been almost 40 years now. I believe each conversion story begins with an inbursting of Light just like mine. The persons need someone to explain the experience in relation to Christian symbols, as Marc did that day.
Many adult Catholics have a “low regard for their own experience when it comes to matters of theology or, for that matter, of faith.”[17] However, we also know that when adults’ experiences are respected and valued—plus when they are shown how to value and derive meaning from their experiences in light of our faith—grace quickly enters in. Our challenge is to invite people to the dance between the stories of their own lives and the lives of others within the community—all woven together in the symbolic mystery of our God.
The process of symbolic catechesis laid out by Anne Marie Mongoven starts with reflecting on a common human experience. How would you identify a common human experience? A catechist would first listen to people’s everyday stories. When narrative catechesis and symbolic catechesis dance together, one moves from hearing common experiences through stories into probing deeply into how the common experience affects people’s lives.
Dancing with the “I Am Who I Am” who is God helps us discover the “I am” of who we are. As we begin to see “in the mirror dimly” who we are both created to be and becoming, we not only discover Who partners us, but also we begin to see God and bits of our self in the other dancers around us. We hear God tell us that we are his beloved children, and that He is well pleased with us… despite how much we don’t deserve it. I see us in a magnificent mirrored ballroom, listening to choirs of angels, twirling with God to our own song narratives, all blending into beautiful and harmonious music,[18] a real jubilation.
“To argue for the musical quality of experience is to say that the principle of organization is music, which consists not only of time (rhythm), and space (the shape of the melodic line), but also beauty (the evaluation of our perception).”[19]
“There is nothing more beautiful than to know Him and to speak to others of our friendship with Him.”[20] Beauty attracts people. Beautiful scenery, beautiful music, beautiful art… all draw us in and at the same time beyond ourselves.
When I am confronted with beauty, I feel it as a leap of the heart, an indrawn breath, and a sense of rising beyond where I stand to something more. As I wrote this blog, Marc was listening to TED talks of piano competitions: two Rachmaninoff and one Tchaikovsky piano concerto. As I listened from upstairs, I was distracted from my writing task and drawn to go downstairs for the climactic endings of each of the three pieces played. I was drawn out of my mundane work into a transcendent experience of music that had my heart and spirit soaring with the musical notes.
From April 2013 to September 2014, I had the privilege of journeying with my mother, Dorothy, through her final illness and death. It was an exhausting vigil, yet at the same time, graced. I am a photographer and, though amateur, I have been gifted with an eye for composition and for a striking photo. God’s grace reached me through many evening sunsets as I left the hospitals where Mom spent her last months. At one point, when my exhaustion was deep, and my sense of helplessness was almost overwhelming, I stood on a cliff above the river near our home to watch the sunset. It was unusual because I was all alone that evening. Most nights there were at least a half dozen other people standing there gazing west.
As I stood there breathing in the autumn air, I took a series of 24 photos of the sunset. At about photo 16, I noticed a dove shape in the clouds. The shape had head, wings, tail, and feet. I remember lowering my camera and placing my hand on my chest as I breathed a sigh of thanks to God. The symbol of the dove appearing in the clouds was a sign. I heard in my heart, “You are my beloved daughter and with you, I am well pleased.” I remembered getting tears in my eyes, that God would create such a beautiful sign just for me. That sign (faith symbol) helped me to carry on being Mom’s companion on that last journey. I had always known that I would do no differently, but now it became truly holy work. Although I was deeply tired throughout the eighteen months, from then on my heart and step were lighter because I felt God with me every day. Somehow it all became much easier knowing God was pleased. Once again, I learned that the Lord’s “yoke was easy, and the burden light” (Matt. 11:30).
Stephen Crites writes that cultural myths or sacred stories help people create their sense of self and sense of the world.[21] Both ordinary evangelizing and ‘new’ evangelizing, indeed all catechesis, must find ways to weave people’s commonplace personal stories into the Christian sacred story. Doing so lays the groundwork—prepares the way—for an encounter with the risen Christ. From that encounter, people can first choose to “leave their nets” and follow Christ or choose to stay with their boat on the shore. Jesus looks with love upon everyone, whether they follow him or stay where they are. Once people have become followers of Christ, challenges arise along with temptations to focus on the stormy waves instead of looking steadfastly at the Lord. “Faith symbols enable us to interpret life, and conversely, life symbols help us to understand faith.”[22]
Symbolic catechesis works with adults of small or big faith, and with everyone in between. It works for all races and cultures; for young, middle-aged, and elderly; for rich and poor; for high school drop-outs, tradespeople, and university graduates. Symbolic catechesis integrates life and faith in a culture that wants to keep them separate. It focusses on the diversity within unity: “Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many… As it is, there are many members but one body” (1 Cor. 12: 14, 20). Symbolic catechesis also models exactly what it teaches: the Christian way of life. “It has a natural appeal for most adults because it presumes their questions, concerns, and experiences are significant sources for developing a living faith.”[23]
Adults are capable of learning throughout their lives[24] and, in general, have very definite preferences about how they choose to do that learning. Unlike children, they are free to choose not to undertake additional intentional education of any type after they reach the age of majority. Adults must see a value for themselves in dedicating their time to adult learning, which includes learning more about their faith. If they do not see a benefit for their lives as being lived right now, they will not bother to take time from their already busy schedules. The appeal of symbolic catechesis is that it helps Christian adults to draw meaning from common human experiences or “signs of the times.”
Adults who gather together for any event bring hard-won wisdom with them. Whatever the topic, there will be at least one person who has experienced it from some angle. Inviting the story to be shared and then bringing a faith symbol to the dialogue allows those listening to appropriate what God has wanted them to know: that He is always with us. Adults learn through trial and error, and their very diversity of age, culture, and economic background brings a treasure chest of insight to the discussion.
Catechists who wish to conduct symbolic catechesis pay attention to the “signs of the times,” and build catechesis to help people make sense of what’s happening to them. People tell mundane stories all the time, to relate what happened at work or school, to explain their relationships with others in the family or community, and to interpret what’s happening in the world around them. “The mundane stories are also among the most important means by which people articulate and clarify their sense of the world.”[25] Symbolic catechesis starts with common human experience, and then partners the story of the experience with a faith symbol to help shed light on the experience. The catechetical dance ponders and probes story and symbol to yield meaning and reveal a pathway forward.
The symbols used in the Church’s sacraments, beginning with baptism are incarnate signs of invisible realities. Water symbolizes both dying with Christ and rising to new life. Oil symbolizes being received into God’s royal family. The candle flame symbolizes new sight and a new way of seeing our life and the world. The white garment symbolizes our liberation from sin and evil, and our innate dignity as God’s children. Baptism disposes us to live a life of faith. But as we are more and more aware today, it does not ensure that we will live that life. In the Church, the virtue (or grace) of faith is transmitted in the sacraments, beginning with baptism.
A person who has been baptized does not automatically choose to live a life of faith. Baptism gives the capacity or power to believe. It gives us the virtue of faith. The Church distinguishes between the virtue of faith and the act of faith (CCC 153-155). The act of faith is the explicit free choice of a person (older than the age of reason or seven years) to respond to God’s grace with belief and discipleship.[26]
“Symbolic catechesis associates or correlates the symbols of human events and experiences, the ‘signs of the times,’ with the symbols of faith: the Bible, and the teaching, life, and worship of the Church.”[27] It starts with a common experience, connects it to symbols within the faith tradition, and honours people’s experience as “the holy ground” on which they have encountered God. Symbolic catechesis is the work of community. It invites reflection and sharing, not of superficial matters but of events that have broken hearts. Whether the hearts are broken apart or broken open[28] can depend on how smoothly the dance between narrative and symbolic catechesis flows. If people are “able to enter into and consciously engage hard experiences… [their] hearts will get the kind of exercise that makes them supple.”[29] The catechist and the community dance together searching for ways to interpret and make sense of the signs of the times. “Since God created humans in God’s image and likeness, God can be found within the events and unfolding of our lives.”[30]
Narrative catechesis consists of helping people find the connections to God and the wisdom in tying their own life stories into the Christian story. 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.[31]” Our individual lives with all their tempests, tribulations, and triumphs shown us God’s “eternal wisdom… ineffable loving-kindness … [and we can] see for ourselves the thought and care he has given to accommodating his language to our nature.”[32]
“Faith is not a light which scatters all our darkness, but a lamp which guides our steps in the night and suffices for the journey.”[33] A catechist brings her own small light to shine on the dance floor where she and other adults will twirl around common human experiences, jostling them and observing them until they can incorporate the new steps into their dance. Then the music, the dance, the discovery, and the joy will help them soar and “touch the face of God.”
High Flight
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I’ve climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, — and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of — wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov’ring there,
I’ve chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air. . . .
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I’ve topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew —
And, while with silent, lifting mind I’ve trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
— John Gillespie Magee, Jr[34]
Bibliography
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Mongoven OP, Anne Marie. The Prophetic Spirit of Catechesis: How We Share the Fire in Our Hearts. (Paulist Press, New York, 2000).
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Palmer, Parker J. Healing the Heart of Democracy: the Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit. (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, San Franciso, 2011.)
Palmer, Parker J. A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life. (Jossey-Bass, a Wiley Imprint, San Francisco, 2004.)
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Power, M. Myrtle, and John Van Den Hengel, SCJ. “Catechesis in an Age of Secularity” in Theoforum, Vol. 41, No. 1 (2010): 53-76.
Regan, Jane. Forming a Community of Faith: A guide to success in adult faith formation today. (Twenty-Third Publications, New London, CT, 2014).
Regan, Jane. Toward an Adult Church: A Vision of Faith Formation. (Loyola Press, Chicago, 2002).
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