Earlier this year while shopping for a suitable gift for my Confirmation sponsee, I stumbled across a patch for the band “Bad Religion” in a record store, which I wound up including in my card to him. Since then, I’ve sort of taken this up as my professional mantra. I’m convinced this is what the culture of Catholicism needs: a religious imagination that is anything but tame, complacent, or nice. Catholicism, when truly lived out, as exemplified by the lives of the saints, produces people on fire. Fire! So, the following reflects upon my approach to fostering “bad” (read: not tame, complacent, or nice) religion within my students.
Save for a few bits about Chinese philosophy and the theology of C.S. Lewis, I cannot remember a single thing I ever learned in any of my high school theology classes. The irony brings me to giggle a little bit, given that I am a professional catechist.
As an undergraduate, I abandoned my biochemistry major when my required philosophy and theology courses grabbed my heart full-force. Lectures on Plato and Scripture brought me to the realization that I wanted to spend my studies focused on those things considered most impractical by 21st century standards. I simply remember thinking “Well, crap, if all this stuff about God and Jesus is true, then what else matters?” Those years of high school theology classes, though their contents escape my memory, thus proved entirely necessary, as they disposed me to seek the truth regarding the Reality that undergirds all things.
Considering my own experience of learning about Catholicism as a teenager, I have one (hopefully humble) thing in mind above all else when teaching: I take some small part in disposing my students to healthfully engage God and religion. I am planting seeds, the fruits of which I may never see. More often than not, this process of theological dialogue that disposes a class doesn’t look pretty. My approach to pedagogy of a theological nature is not warm and fuzzy. Simply put, it lacks rainbows and glitter and butterflies.
I recently watched a televised sermon in which Joel Osteen, the mega-church evangelical preacher, informed his audience of several thousand Christians that God wanted to offer them financial success and bodily well-being. This fellow strikes me as the epitome of warm and fuzzy Christianity. It literally nauseated me, making my stomach turn a little bit. I found myself wondering if Osteen had ever even read the Gospels, in which the Christ promises his followers persecution, in which God incarnate preaches an earth-shattering message of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. If I take Osteen to heart, then I make myself the center of the universe; he presents the worst form of narcissism, the kind of navel-gazing wherein not only the universe, but God Himself, cares for nothing more than my worldly success.
I constantly remind my students of Matthew 25, that passage wherein Jesus presents the clearest criteria for salvation and damnation in the entirety of the Gospels. What catches my students off-guard, and what catches me off-guard, is that those who go to Heaven do not expect to go to Heaven and that those who go to hell expect to go to Heaven! Moreover, Jesus clearly states that the way in which a person prepares themselves for the offering of salvation is by means of concretely loving those unloved: the naked, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned. When loving charity is true, it does not take action for the sake of Heaven, but for the sake of the person whose eyes it looks into.
In other words, what Jesus says about salvation directly contradicts what Osteen has to say about salvation! One is not “saved” because one believes one is “saved,” as if a mere intellectual acceptance of God’s existence staves off perdition. Matthew 25 starkly opposes evangelical Christianity’s approach to salvation, as those who expect salvation must ask why they are damned, whereas those who simply loved for the sake of loving must ask why they receive salvation. God does not save those who make themselves the center of their universes (as Osteen would have us do), but precisely those who de-center themselves within their existences (as Christ would have us do).
Neither holiness nor repentance nor the process of having our hearts set aflame with love of God bring money or fame or influence; simply believing that Jesus was God incarnate does not mean that all will be made better in my life. The process of encountering Jesus Christ writes moments of the Cross and Resurrection into our lives. It brings about a radical transformation of our hearts such that we might love those on the margins who have been cast aside by the pursuit of worldly power of which Osteen is so fond. It de-stabilizes us. It re-directs our priorities. Methinks that truly absorbing Christ’s preaching thus ought to make my blood run cold. It also ought to bring me to rejoice in light of the fact that although I am a sinner, I am beloved by the One against Whom I sin. This tension cannot be anything but discomforting, but this is the very tension in which Catholicism asks us to dwell, and is therefore the tension I ask my students to enter.
Jesus was not “nice”: he was radically compassionate, relentlessly loving, and frighteningly authentic. He was unafraid to call out friends, followers, opponents for their shortsightedness and hypocrisies, and he remains unafraid to do the same for us. Lukewarmth was just not his thing. Encountering the person of Christ, the Paschal Mystery and all that it entails, and fostering the consequent interior transformation that results from this encounter – all of which remain central to my identity as an evangelist – are not warm and fuzzy. They do, however, present a deep beauty.
My teaching, at least so far as I can tell, revolves around the principle that the human heart and mind are inherently drawn toward beauty, truth, and goodness; as such, I view my responsibility to primarily consist of revealing the beauty, truth, and goodness of the Catholic tradition as a means of establishing a relationship with God. If my students are not drawn toward Catholicism by the end of the year, then I have failed. Boy, oh boy, have I failed. I have turned kids off from Christianity, which pains me. Students have emerged from my classroom dismissive of religion and God and Catholicism, but I can at least find some comfort in knowing that I gave them the tools and vocabulary and disposition to engage these topics with a little bit less ignorance.
On the upside, however, I occasionally catch glimpses of my students growing uncomfortable as they sincerely encounter bits and pieces of legitimate theology. My atheist students question their beliefs as they meet Thomas Aquinas and his Five Ways of proving God’s existence. My religiously inclined students come to see that the natures of Christ and his Church run far deeper than memorizing Biblical history. All around, wounds of ignorance slowly heal. Preconceptions turn out to be misconceptions. The image of God we previously held turns out to be a distorted shadow of Who God actually is. Some of this happens, I suspect, even in our unawareness of its occurrence.
I expect that many of my students will forget 99.99% of what I teach them, of what they read and write, and of what we talk about. Doesn’t it all seem a futile waste? The bottom line of teaching – and I feel that this age-worn truism pertains especially well to my role as a theology teacher – is that teachers do not teach the material so much as they teach themselves. I think this might be the area in which I might hold the greatest sway in the lives of my students: I am a young dude who remains firmly dedicated to the Church, who dorks out on theology, who goofs off, who laughs with them constantly, who talks about Jesus a lot, who expresses and shares their same struggles and doubts. I’m a guy who seeks meaning in his life, just as they seek meaning in theirs, and in the midst of all this, I’ve concluded that Catholicism is the most true, good, and beautiful path to find my meaning.
Above all, I am indescribably grateful that my vocation is one in which I simply get to love my kids. My ministry as a teacher is the way in and through which I exercise that love. Because these students are my vocation, they are my salvation. Because they are in my life, I fall more deeply in love with Him. I am grateful that in helping them to encounter Jesus, I fall in with them.
(Editor's Note: This bio was lovingly and autobiographically written.)
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