No one likes a bragger. On less creative days, we may tell our kids caught in the act to try humility on for size. On all-star parenting days, we tell them that everything they have is a pure gift from God. How often in our lives do we all need the reminder that we are no different from kids on a joyride in daddy’s car with his credit card?
So what is the remedy to the sense of entitlement and bored accumulation that we all experience at different moments? It is quite simple. The sacraments are the answer. In the sacraments are found everything we need to sustain us on this earthly pilgrimage.
When we hunger for best of everything, we let Jesus feed us in the Eucharist wherein he gives himself to the last drop and teaches us how to be satisfied by him alone. When we desire to be proven right and seek honour through vain ambition, we experience Christ’s mercy in the sacrament of confession, a mercy that goes further than justice and restores the proper hierarchy. When we desire to live for ourselves and to satisfy our own whims at all costs, we are given the graces of the sacrament of marriage wherein we promise fidelity and the ultimate good of the other before our own happiness. By his death on the cross, Jesus won for all of us a lifetime membership to the heavenly banquet. He gives until we are all filled to overflowing. What has he not given to us?
In her song What if, Christian singer/songwriter Jess Ray writes, “What are you so afraid you’ll lose? If all of the love that you’ve ever dreamed of already belongs to you... The door you’re knocking on is open and you have been welcomed in. The gate, the way, is standing wide never to be closed again.”
The poet William Wordsworth writes, “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.” We forget reality so easily. Our nature is fickle and quick to forget. But forgetting something does not make it less true nor does experiencing lethargy make something less important. We forget many things as we get older including the call of our baptism and our confirmation.
We need to tell everyone that we have every grace and all help at our disposal and that we Catholics are rich beyond imagining! Daddy is rich indeed and our children need to know about their inherited fortune. “Teach them to your children, talking about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up” (Dt 11:19).
Our Lady of Champion (the first approved North American apparition) told visionary Adele Brise to “teach [the children] their catechism, how to sign themselves with the sign of the Cross, and how to approach the sacraments; that is what I wish you to do. Go and fear nothing, I will help you.”
They won’t know if we don’t teach them! How many of us live like paupers in the world without knowing the dignity of our baptism. In her wisdom, the church gives adults the chance to revisit and re-educate themselves as they prepare their children for the sacraments. So, the effects of confirmation are two-fold: activation and ownership of faith in youth and a re-ignition and deeper catechesis for parents. Thank goodness for the opportunity to circle back on eternal truths.
In Proverbs 22, we read, “train the young in the way they should go; even when old, they will not swerve from it.” Once we have heard something true and beautiful from the lips of someone who believes wholeheartedly in what they are saying, we can never forget it. Our minds may not recall the exact teachings or definitions, but our hearts remember how an authentic encounter with truth, goodness, and beauty made us feel and we seek after that encounter, sometimes unknowingly, our whole life long.
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