I am not a saint. Sometimes I need a saint’s patience staying home to raise four-year-old Rebecca, two-year-old Angela, and eight-week-old Lucy. Like yesterday. At four in the afternoon, I parked the minivan in the garage after taking all three girls to Rebecca’s dance class. Before I’d gotten the kitchen door open, baby Lucy scrunched up her face like a beet-red fist and started squalling. Angela waved her empty bottle in my face. “Mo bobbo, mo bobbo,” she whined.
Rebecca tugged at her pink leotard and tights. “Mom, please help me take my clothes off. I need to go to the bathroom very badly.” While I peeled off Rebecca’s clothes and refilled Angela’s bottle, Lucy’s insistent wail filled the room. I finally unbuckled Lucy from her car seat and lifted her out. Her arms flailed angrily until I nestled her against my shoulder. As I walked toward the living room, I felt Lucy’s soft, warm body relax against me. Her wailing quieted.
“Thank you, God,” I said, sinking onto the couch to nurse Lucy. “And thank you guardian angels for getting us home safely.”
Six years ago I would not have thought to thank God for a moment of peace. I would not have imagined myself married to my husband. I would not have imagined Rebecca’s strawberry blond curls or Angela’s enormous brown eyes or Lucy’s crooked first smiles. Six years ago I was a lawyer working for a large law firm in San Diego. I wore a suit everyday. I had a secretary and a bay view office on the twenty-sixth floor.
I had long since ditched my Catholic upbringing and adopted an eclectic collection of New Age beliefs. I believed in reincarnation and past lives. I believed in heaven, but I didn’t think you had to work very hard to get in. I believed in God, but thought I could communicate with him just fine without any sort of organized religion. My belief system worked so long as my life went well.
When I was twenty-seven, I met a young man at a friend’s wedding. Steve lived in Los Angeles, but we started seeing each other on weekends and holidays. We fell in love. Six months after we met, Steve asked me to marry him. I said, “Yes.”
Like me, Steve didn’t believe in much of anything. Two weeks after our engagement, Steve committed suicide by jumping off a bridge near his parents’ home in Pasadena. I later learned that Steve had suffered from undiagnosed clinical depression that he’d hidden from the people he worked with, from his parents, from me.
In the days and weeks following Steve’s death, I found my little set of beliefs too insubstantial to sustain me. I felt like I’d been shipwrecked and clung to my pieces of spiritual flotsam in an ocean of grief. Feeling like I was about to go under, I found myself drawn back toward the Church.
Steve died in February of 1990. During Holy Week that year, I walked back into the Catholic Church. At a small church a few blocks from my house, the once familiar smells of incense and burning candles soothed my heart. The prayers resonated with compassion. Listening to the story of Jesus’ death and Resurrection, I saw hope for my own healing. At first I thought, “What a wonderful symbol for the ability of man to withstand tremendous suffering and emerge stronger.”
The more I went to Mass, the more God revealed his truth. Within a few months, I knew Jesus’ death and Resurrection weren’t just symbols. The Passion wasn’t just a nice story to help people survive hardship. Jesus actually died on the cross and rose from the dead. The very Jesus who died at Calvary offered himself to me in Communion.
A year after I returned to the Church, I received the sacrament of confirmation. I chose my mom to be my sponsor. Facing me in front of the altar, my mother reached out and traced the sign of the cross on my forehead just as she had done twenty-nine years earlier at my baptism. Later, I thanked my mom for giving me a foundation in the faith. Although I had abandoned that foundation like many young adults, I came back and stayed when faced with a true challenge.
Around the time of my confirmation, I met the man who would become my husband. We met through the young adult group at church. Now that Tim and I have three daughters of our own, we want to give them the foundation our parents gave us. We want them to know God calls us all to be saints. Where to begin? What does the Church tell us about our obligation as parents to transmit the faith to our children?
Pope John Paul II tells us, “Raising children can be considered a genuine apostolate” (Letter to Families, 54), and that parents are the “first and foremost educators of their children” (Familiaris Consortio, 36). John Paul emphasizes parents’ responsibility for their children’s religious education as well as the need to educate children regarding the vocation of marriage (Letter to Families, 59).
The Catechism of the Catholic Church confirms parents’ responsibility to educate their children in the faith. Parents must create a home where “tenderness, forgiveness, respect, fidelity, and disinterested service are the rule” (CCC 2223). Parents bear the responsibility of initiating their children at an early age into the mysteries of the faith (CCC 2225) and of teaching their children to pray and to discover their vocation as children of God (CCC 2226). The family has the greatest part to play in teaching the human and Christian values involved in Eucharistic celebration, namely, “acting together as a community, exchanging greetings, the capacity to listen, to forgive and to ask for forgiveness, the expression of gratitude, the experience of symbolic actions, conviviality, and festive celebration” (Directory on Children’s Masses, 9–10).
Thus, the Church calls us to create a home steeped in Christian values, to live the faith through family prayer, attending Mass, and exposing our children to the Eucharistic mysteries. Through our family apostolate, we must help each of our children find the vocation God intends. While this task seems straightforward enough, living our faith everyday within our families sometimes poses the toughest challenge of all. How do we observe the liturgical year in a world so hostile to religious celebration? Can we observe Advent and still attend friends’ pre-Christmas “holiday” parties? How do we honor Holy Week when the world around us celebrates Spring Break? Do we let our children dress up for Halloween and go trick-or-treating? In the months ahead, I’ll talk to Church experts and to families who have faced these challenges.
Do cry rooms teach your small children proper respect for the Mass? How can you help your young adult children find their way back to the Church? Where can you find sex education materials that teach the Church’s truth about chastity and the gift of marital love? What are the merits of home schooling? Is home schooling the only way to raise children faithful to the Church? Do you have to throw your TV away? If you fell away from the faith as a young adult, how can you help your children avoid the same mistake?
As I sat on the couch nursing Lucy, I thought about how hard it is to be a parent. Sometimes, when I’ve been up all night with one of the girls, and Rebecca and Angela spend the morning fighting over toys, and the baby won’t take a nap, and I haven’t gotten the beds made, and the dirty clothes are spilling out of the hamper, I wonder how I’ll ever get everything done. I forget that nothing I do is more important than caring for my children’s souls. Amid the chaos of family life, we must always remember that we are raising saints.