Faith is nourished with lessons of Grace

By Mary Regina Morrell
Catholic Online

"The gift of understanding renders the soul capable of seeing clearly the hidden sense of the divine truth, not with human reason, but with the help of the infused light of the Holy Ghost." An old prayer card

Forty-five years ago Paul sat in a child-packed classroom and listened to his Catholic school teacher tell him that not everyone receives God's grace.

Given his often unruly behavior, and the fact that the teacher's eyes were intent on his uneasy face, he was certain those words were meant for him.

Finally, at the age of 55 Paul admitted to me that those words had taken root in his young heart and soul, and that from that moment on he believed that Grace, and God, had passed him by.

Such is the power of a teacher - whether that teacher be an educator, parent, clergy or religious.

And, obviously, such power can be detrimental in the hands of someone who lacks a balanced formation in faith. -- most significantly for the child, but ultimately for our Catholic family, as well, if we consider our children as the future leaders of our Church.

For those of us growing up Catholic in the same generation as Paul, our formation experiences often consisted of being scared into faith for the sake of our own impoverished souls, or being indulged with the butterfly kisses of a faith resting on crayons and glue. The truth lays somewhere in the middle.

Today, as I visit classrooms and observe the many large and small lessons of faith that take place in any minute of a day, I am often reminded of Paul's teacher.

Would her lessons on Grace have been more life affirming if her formation had been different? Did she ever have the chance to read the beautiful truths of Grace left to us by St. Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologica? This treasure of Catholic teaching seems daunting, but taught well it may have deepened her understanding of Grace and, ultimately, diminished Paul's long-held belief that he was unworthy of God's love.

Once, I believed the Summa to be beyond my level of understanding, and so I made no effort to read it. But then, one day, in a small out of the way second hand book store I found a little, leather bound book entitled, My Way of Life, subtitled The Summa Simplified for Everyone. It smelled musty and was copyrighted in 1952, the year of my birth. Its pages continue to reveal gem after gem.

The mystery of Grace, wrote St. Thomas, is a part of the greater mystery that is God's love. Grace is God's perfect gift to us, a gift that makes us God's friends and adopted children. Grace leads to happiness and glory.

Certainly, I thought, this was something that all our children should grow up understanding.

But how do you teach children about the mystery of Grace?

Well, it was also in this little book that I read, "Since Grace is the effect of God's love in men, and since it is a share in God's own divine nature, we cannot find any exact parallel to grace in the world of nature. But it might be of some help . . . to try to compare the mystery of grace to something within the bounds of human experience."

Keeping this in mind, I imagined a classroom of children listening to the lyrics, "grace like rain falls down on me" as they are sung in a contemporary arrangement of the traditional hymn, Amazing Grace.

At the first sign of rain, they would be ushered outside to feel the rain on their faces, to catch the scent of it in the air and examine how it nourishes creation. Inevitably, as children are inclined to "take in" everything around them, they would throw back their heads and open their mouths, laughing as the life-giving water hit their tongues and teeth and eventually made its way to the back of their throats.

"That is Grace!" I would tell them. God's love as a free gift poured down on everyone. I would want them to understand that it is there for the receiving if we just open our hearts. Then, we would sing, "Hallelujah, Grace like rain falls down on me!"

Amen!

Contact

Diocese of Metuchen
http://www.diometuchen.org NJ, US
Mary Regina Morrell - Associate Director, Office of Religious Education, 732 562.1990

Email

mmorrell@diometuchen.org

Keywords

Grace, faith, Summa, teacher

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