To pass on the faith, live it

Along the lines of the Buckaroo Banzai Christians post, here's something Catholic blogger Amy Welborn said in a recent interview that bears repeating:

The problem is that when you look at Catholic history, the faith has never been passed on predominantly in classroom situations. The faith has been passed on in families and in parishes and in communities. You can have really nice catechetical materials in which you have kids learn about a saint each week and you introduce them to various devotions, but if all of that is absent from parish life, and if all of that is absent from the life of Catholics, which it is for the most part…It's something that any teacher of, particularly, the humanities can sympathize with. Think about the poor teacher trying to teach Shakespeare or Chaucer to kids who go home and are on the Internet for four hours and then are playing video games and doing all kinds of other things. It's not just a religious ed problem; it's a cultural problem. [Emphasis mine -- RD.]What we are trying to transmit in a classroom setting isn't reinforced culturally.

In the Catholic setting, that means it's not reinforced in most parishes. There's no Catholic life that continually reinforces the Catholic faith. Our churches are bare. Kids don't have the opportunity to study murals and pictures of stained glass and they get bored.

Catholic education is getting better in the classrooms but we haven't grappled with the bigger cultural issue of a community's responsibility to transmit the faith outside the classroom setting.

What's the broader message for people of faith? That passing on the faith to our children is not something we can or should rely entirely on the institutional church (sermons, Sunday school, Christian schools) to do. We have to do it in our homes and in our cultural lives -- and not in the sense of, "Tonight, children, we are going to discuss the doctrine of the Incarnation." The Christian faith (or any faith) has to be woven into the fabric of everyday life, has to be experienced not as an interesting add-on to normal life, but as normal life itself. This is particularly challenging in a culture like ours, where increasingly the only normative belief is that there is no normative belief. But what choice do serious religious believers have?

This is why I'm attracted to the idea of living in some sort of community with other families who share our faith. My kids need to see that it's not just our family that believes and lives by these things -- and they need to see that every day of the week, not just on Sunday.

UPDATE: An important combox post by reader Schultz:

I've been attracted to the idea of community as Rod is hinting at since my wife and I moved into a predominately Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Baltimore. I'm amazed and astounded at the sense of community my neighbors share with the co-religionists and, in some way, am jealous of it. The funny thing is, Mt. Washington sort of just became the Orthodox Jewish center of Baltimore over time, organically, and not as a planned community, at least at the start of it. Different pockets of families formed around the rabbis home or the synagogue, which brought more like minded families into the neighborhood as homes became available. I would love find a community of the Catholic or Orthodox persuasion like that someday, but the idea of a "planned community" or commune just doesn't work with me.

Orthodox Jews form these communities because the practice of their faith requires them to live within walking distance of synagogue for Sabbath services. The most important ritual of their individual and communal lives requires them to live in geographical community; they can't use their cars or public transportation. That's how those communities grew up organically. If Christians had to walk to church on Sunday, you'd see that too. (Actually, you'd probably see Christians founding the Afterglow Christian Community of Postambulatory Emergence, to accomodate the way the Spirit is moving in the churches to lead them away from their dead, anti-automobile Pharisaism. IOW, figure out what we want to do, and baptize it later.)