I coordinate the youth faith formation efforts in my parish, among other responsibilities. This Sunday was our first full PSR (Parish School of Religion) class of the school year. As program coordinator and one of the catechists for the high school students, I had a lot on my mind yesterday and was moving pretty quickly from one thing to the next. When PSR was over, I had just enough time to get down to church and join my family for 11am Mass. After Mass, I had two people I needed to speak with and was stopped by a few more. Once finished with those folks, I still needed to head back down to the gym and clean up from the high school class.
While my head was spinning a bit from all of these things happening at once, I had a PSR dad stop me and ask if he could have a few extra PSR registration forms so he could try and convince more of his family members to send their kids to PSR. So, he and I and his boy headed down to my classroom to get what he needed. While in the classroom, I asked the boy how he liked PSR. The boy didn’t say much, but the dad chimed in. “I think he likes it a lot. He was just telling me something new he learned today that I had never heard of before” The dad tried to get the boy to repeat what he had said earlier, but the boy was a little shy. Eventually, though, he said, “the Trinity”. With excitement, the dad responded, “Yeah! That was it. I guess I never knew that Jesus and the Holy Spirit are God, too.”
Now, lest some of you get on your soap box and point to this episode as further evidence of the deficiencies of Catholic catechesis over the past few decades, neither the dad nor the son is Catholic. They will be soon, but they are still in process. Still, belief in God as three persons in one is not uniquely Catholic. I was genuinely surprised that this was new information to the dad.
The reason I wanted to share this with you today, and the reason I’m listing it under “joy“, is because it was for me a nice and simple reminder of what and who we are called to be as Catholics. This Church exists to help all people “know, love, and serve the Lord”. Lately, though, news of the Catholic Church has highlighted what happens when sin, lust for power, and self-centeredness displace God at the center of our lives. I can’t do much about the current scandals. I am not a perpetrator. I did not enable this bad behavior. No one is asking for my opinion or my guidance. The best I can do is focus on God, pray hard, and faithfully represent the best of the Church to whomever I have a chance to influence.
That conversation with the dad and son reminded me that the work of building the Kingdom doesn’t stop because I feel anger, hurt, and betrayal at the actions of a group of people who should absolutely have known better. No, I still have work to do. To paraphrase the final two lines of “Prophets of a Future Not Our Own”,
I am a worker, not a master builder; a minister, not a messiah.
I am a prophet of a future not my own.
-Shannon