Generations of Faith
Thomas Howard on Giving God Grandchildren
My two “children” (now 37 and 35) both went away from home on the same day, about twenty years ago, one to Exeter Academy, the other to Harvard, neither of which institutions can be said to be a fountainhead of orthodox Christian zeal. The fly in that ointment is that our household was (and is) an orthodox Christian household. We were all Anglicans then; three of us have long since been received into the Roman Catholic Church.
Deo gratias, all four of us are still practicing Christians. This remark does not indicate where any one of us stands in the sanctity sweepstakes, but at least we go to Mass, and say our prayers—although I should in all candor say that my wife, the mother of this family, lives in the very presence of the Most High, and I suspect that the other three of us depend heavily on her faith, fortitude, wisdom, love for God, and prayers.
Discouraging People
There is a question implicit in this account of things, namely, “How will they do out in the big world?” Your children begin to arrive at some point after your marriage, and the enormous question looms as to exactly what you are going to do about family Christian nurture.
It is not a new question. I don’t know what Adam and Eve did by way of trying to get Cain and Abel to say their prayers (they had no law, no prophets, no psalms, no Gospels, no Pauline epistles, no Church). Back in that protohistoric silence, what do you say to “God,” whoever he may be? Anyway, as we all know to our discomfiture, somethingwent wrong with that family’s prayers.
As history cranked on, and a “people of God” began to be formed, the record was not a very encouraging one. Everyone’s children seemed to go off the rails at one point or another. Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David—whom shall we adduce as the model parents who “succeeded” with their children? Of course, the encouraging thing is that people’s children did, in many cases, return to the Faith, and, beyond that, this “people of God,” namely Israel, did last, in spite of all. And they are still with us, Sennacherib, Xerxes, Antiochus Epiphanes, Titus, Hitler, and a generally wicked world to the contrary notwithstanding.
The problem has been a conundrum for Christian parents also, from the beginning, it would appear. For one thing, the early Church was bedeviled before it got out of Square One with a luxuriance of heresies that would make the tropical rainforest look withered and sere, and we may with reasonable confidence assume that somebody’s children went capering after Eutychius, Marcion, Apollinarius, the Montanists, and the rest of them, not to mention those who went frolicking into the general Dionysian romp that was abroad in every city in those days of the Caesars.
Church history is not much more comforting. Like Israel, the Church lasted, thanks to our Lord’s promise about the very Gates of Hell; but as far as Christian families carrying on from one generation to the next, the record is spotty. Even the martyrology is blotted with the records of some saintly couple’s son going whoring after the pleasures of the world, the flesh, and the devil (often to return presently and himself to become a saintly abbot or hermit or wonderworker).
But none of this dash through religious history quite tells us what to do in our own families. I know mothers who have read the Bible and Bible storybooks to their babies while the latter were still in the womb. I don’t know whether it “works,” but it sounds like a good idea to me. (My daughter has her unborn tots listen to Mozart.)
No Guarantees
Thomas Howard taught for many years at St. John's Seminary College, the Roman Catholic seminary of the archdiocese of Boston. Among his many works are the books Christ the Tiger, Evangelical Is Not Enough, Lead Kindly Light, On Being Catholic, and The Secret of New York Revealed, and a videotape series of 13 lectures on "The Treasures of Catholicism" (all from Ignatius Press).
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