By Ryan LeBlanc
As the school year begins again, we all have a chance to reflect on what we are learning and how God teaches.
Who taught you faith?
Take a moment now, and call to mind a person who you remember learning faith from.
For so many of us, it is a parent or grandparent who spoke to us about God and his love for us. Others remember a teacher or other minister of the church.
What do you remember about them? How did they teach you faith? How did they approach you, introduce you to faith, journey with you?
Bring your experience to God in prayer, offering him what you feel and think and remember.
None of us received the Catholic faith from God directly, but each of us have a depth of fellow Christians who passed on tradition and scripture in many moments of encounter.
I hope your reflection above brought a smile to you, and it is also true that sometimes the passing on of faith brings challenges and difficulty with it.
Why does God choose this way to bring us to him? Why does he entrust Sacred Mysteries to lunkhead human beings to break open and share? Doesn’t it seem rather messy? Inefficient? Uncertain?
We are speaking here of a profound dimension of Christian life, of the identity of the Church and her members. God entrusts his very sacred presence to the Church, both the Mystical Body of Christ and a collection of fallen sinners. Where is he going with this?
We see that his plan of salvation, his overall program of goodness for the whole universe, pivots on humanity’s free response to his love, to participate in the delight he takes in his Creation. When we turn away from God and follow what we think is best, goodness collapses and stalls and descends into a darkness we cannot find our way out of.
If God’s plan is going to win, he needs to find a way to break through our narrow self-obsession and show us a way back to him which was not necessary in the beginning. Now that our world has fallen, learning a way back is necessary.
The way back is faith, and so we find ourselves asking, “How does God teach humanity to have faith in him?” In a word, the answer is Jesus.
He did different kinds of work on Earth, but the title the people gave Jesus was Rabbi, teacher.
We see from his intentional actions and words how God sets about teaching us faith.
It’s probably not the way I would choose. There’s a lot of freedom in the way Jesus, someone without money or a home, just approached people and invited them to believe. For parents and educators, we might be more used to laying down the law and expecting obedience and calculating consequences.
Jesus teaches all of us by approaching where we are, sharing a loving encounter, and inviting belief.
When we zoom out, we see this pattern throughout Salvation History. It starts with the person of Abraham and the nation of Israel, and it continues through to the last time you went to Mass.
This pattern deserves a fancy name, since we’re going to use it to understand our human experience as Christians. Some “churchy” people call this pattern the Divine Pedagogy.
Pedagogy means the method and practise of teaching. Divine means godly.
Think back to your person who taught you faith. Can you see aspects of the Divine Pedagogy in how they approached you as you were, shared an authentic loving encounter, and invited you to believe?
I hope so. Because this way of sharing God’s message of unconditional love is exactly what every baptized Christian is called to do. As we become more like Christ, we find ourselves transformed and equipped to teach like he did. Like he always has and is still doing.
As a career educator, this reflection on the Divine Pedagogy has always brought with it some pretty serious ramifications, but also a guide towards effective and responsive teaching.
As a baptized Christian, who also has a deep love for the tradition of the Church, the Divine Pedagogy guides my learning and teaching of faith.
The way God approaches humanity provides a model for how each of us are called to approach each other. Fellow citizens of the Kingdom of God, fully realized human beings, simply are not made for isolation, for ignoring the beauty and wonder of the other.
God the life-giving communion of persons imaged us to share and give and receive all goodness, from the material to the rational to the spiritual, with everyone we are in relationship with.
This is both the way back to God’s way of doing things, and also the way God does things!
When we are able to make the connection between living faith and sharing faith, we are able to see that a major component of Christian identity has to do with teaching and learning what God has revealed, so that we might believe it even more, believe it again, believe it deeper into our souls.
The fancy word for living out the Divine Pedagogy in the community of the Church is catechesis.
Catholics of a certain age often have a negative association with the word catechesis. My experience with Catholics younger than me suggests they have never really heard or understood the word.
But when we think about the questions we bring to faith, the challenges we face, and our needs as human believers, I do think many of us would agree that we need some kind of faith learning experience.
We all have questions that we cannot answer by ourselves. We all have problems in our lives, or gaps in our knowledge, that God’s revelation to the Church can shed new light on.
Catechesis is not one person, or one book, or one kind of person who has all the right answers.
Catechesis is persons approaching each other, sharing an encounter, and inviting belief.
The fancy words are not the important part. The important part is that you and I choose in freedom to participate in the learning and teaching of God’s amazing plan in action. We learn of Jesus through the Church so that we can learn Jesus himself and become more like him, our Rabbi.
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Ryan LeBlanc is a teacher at Bethlehem Catholic High School in Saskatoon and a parishioner at the Cathedral of the Holy Family. His writing is available on his blog at https://ryanleblanc.podia.com/