How can we build a culture of faith worth defending?

Happy Easter!

This year my husband and two oldest children went to the Easter Vigil for the first time. None of us had gone before. We were hoping to go as a family, but a feverish child made it impossible.

On Ash Wednesday, I cover the picture on
our mantel, and put up these three crosses.

For anyone unfamiliar with the Catholic Church's Easter Vigil, it is a nearly three-hour service starting after sundown the Saturday before Easter. New Catholics are welcomed into the Church, and there is much beautiful symbolism with the early part of the Mass in darkness, and with the lights coming on later. There also are many powerful readings from the Bible regarding our Lord's death and resurrection – the gift of our salvation! Everyone leaves singing, “Christ is risen! Indeed, He is risen!”

It was a bit difficult to get the three of them out the door, but my husband and I thought the experience would be very worthwhile. Usually when some faith-building activity suddenly seems impossible and not worth the effort, and we persevere and do it anyway, we're always glad we did.

Saturday night was no exception. Meghan, our 12-year-old, came home glowing. Literally. It was probably 11:20 p.m. when they got home, but she talked for at least a half hour about the bonfire, and walking into the dark church, and how my son huddled closely to my husband in the dark, and the candlelight, and the baptisms. (Meghan actually spoke on a first-name basis about one newly baptized girl, who we've never met, as though she was now her closest friend.)  She was sad I wasn't there, because she knew I would have loved it.

When Easter arrives, so do flowers
on the mantel.

I probably would have loved it, but what I loved more was how much SHE loved it! The only reason she stopped talking about the evening was that we told her she needed some sleep!

One reason I was so glad two of my children got to experience the Easter Vigil, is that I had spent a lot of time that week thinking about how we are passing our faith on to our children, and about what kind of culture we are building for them.  We normally try to watch religious-themed television during Holy Week. This year, with the excitement from our new pope fresh in our minds, we watched about the life of Pope John Paul II.

I love this movie. I love our pope's courage both before he became the Vicar of Christ, and as he humbly bore the weakness brought on by Parkinson's Disease. I also love how the pope – Karol Wojtyla when he was younger – struggled to come to terms with how to “fight” the Nazis who had invaded his Polish homeland. Should he take up arms? Or should he fight with something more? He chose something more – this actor and scholar worked by day in a quarry, but also continued to feed his mind with reading, and to act in an underground theater designed to thwart the Nazi's attempts to eradicate all forms of Polish culture. Eventually, he began his training for the priesthood, in secret, as this was not allowed under Nazi rule. Through it all, he lived with a contagious and pervading sense of joy.

Wojtyla knew, very clearly, there was something about being Polish that he could not allow the Nazis to destroy. He knew there was something about being Polish – and about being Catholic, or even Jewish (as some of his close friends were) – that the Nazis could not destroy, if the people refused to let go of what it meant to be those things.

Of course, there was something the people needed first, in order to hold on to these gifts of faith and national identity. They needed to understand what it meant to be Polish, to be Catholic, to be a Jew. They needed to know who they were, in order to know what they needed to defend from the Nazis' attempts to erase all pride in their faith and nationality. They needed a strong sense of culture to protect. They needed to know they did, indeed, possess something worth dying for.

As I watched the courage of Wojtyla and his friends, I wondered whether my children understand that they, too, possess something worth fighting for, and worth dying for. If my children were no longer allowed to practice their faith, would they notice it as something – the most important thing – missing from their lives?

How do we pass on the faith in a way that makes God so real to them, so close to them, that they continue to trust in Him, and to fight for their right to do so no matter what forces insist otherwise?

I hope experiences like the Easter Vigil, which involve all five senses, and which celebrate people saying “yes” to Christ in such a profound way, help.

I hope fighting frustrations and sick children as we do our best to get our family to Mass each week, helps.

I hope praying together, letting them see us repent when we fall, and showing them we turn toward the Lord in our times of need, helps.

I hope living with joy like our late Pope – or at least trying to – helps.

I'm so thankful this smile
is part of our family's story!

And I hope telling stories will help. A column by Tony Rossi reaffirms that the stories we hear shape what we see as our role in the world. According to a study conducted by the University of British Columbia, there is “a direct link between a person's exposure to media accounts of extraordinary virtue and their yearning to change the world.” The study's author concluded, “If more attention was devoted to recounting stories of uncommon acts of human virtue, the media could have a quantifiable positive effect on the moral behavior of a significant group of people.”

We cannot control mainstream media, but we can control the stories told, and retold, in our own homes. Stories of the saints.   Stories about people like Wojtyla, who had to fight for their faith; stories about people who had to die for their faith.  Stories of people, like those at the Easter Vigil, who sought – and found – God.  Stories of a God Who became man, who lived and died for us.  Stories of a God Who loves us.

Stories of a God Who wants to be in relationship with us. A relationship worth defending – a relationship worthy of our lives.