It’s the time of year when families pull out the Advent Wreath, grab chocolates from the calendar, deck out a tree, bake cookies and the list goes on. This is an especially exciting year for me because my oldest son is three years old, old enough to really understand and participate in traditions this year.
Having children has been an enormous gift to me as I am less going through the motions of this season of preparation and now have the chance to actively embody living it for both my sake and theirs.
And this is no accident: in families, we transmit an understanding of reality, of good and evil, of values and truth. It is so abstract sounding that words often fall short, but it is real. So the arrival of our children and the role of parenthood, which we inherit, are immensely transformative, and they should be for both us and our little ones. As parents, we will build the framework that forms their entire lives, even if we cannot always see it.
In the new book “The Choice of the Family,” which is an interview with Bishop Jean Laffitte, Secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Family, the interviewer quotes him a passage from Karl Wojtyla’s (who became Pope John Paul II) play The Jeweler Shop:
When they [children] grow up under our eyes, they seem to have become inaccessible, like impermeable soil, but they have already absorbed us. And though outwardly they shut themselves off, inwardly we remain in them and–a frightful thought–their lives somehow test our own creation, our own suffering (p. 167).
This captures it so well; because children first encounter the world through the lens of their families, it is true that they “absorb” us, in a sense. And their lives then become tests of us. It’s not that the outcome of our children is our fault or responsibility, it’s that the tools and habits we consciously or unconsciously teach them as they grow will come to manifest in their adult lives, just as the lessons from our parents came to manifest in ours. We will have to take responsibility for the tools we transmit, and they will have to reckon with the tools they receive.
Jean Laffitte takes this up in relation to the faith: “The more a child grows, the more his freedom seems to lead him
into journeys that are totally distant and autonomous, where he will not make reference to his parents. You know that a seed has been planted, but you will not necessarily see the seed sprout. This question makes us think a little sadly of the transmission of the faith” (167).
Somewhere, within our children, dwells the teaching they received about the faith from us, though so many do fall away. We must strive then to be conscious of what we are actually teaching them; it may not be what we think it is, and it may take some hard self-examination and prayer to arrive at the truth in this matter. That striving however is very worthwhile.
Laffitte smartly adds that little ones are also influenced by school teachers, professionals and spiritual directors and also that they will develop new tools of their own. It is always the case that we are the product of parental, social, and individual factors as well as the work of God. So this is not a call to blame ourselves or become controlling; it is a call to awareness and honesty.
The family and parents thus have a key task before them: to transmit as well as we can the values and traditions that will enable our children to live a meaningful, functional life, which we as Catholics know includes deference to God’s plan and grace.
Carl Anderson, Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbus, says in the Forward to The Choice of the Family,
Every family–believing and nonbelieving alike—is a unique expression of the universal experience of family life. Each family exists within a living ecology–a unique environment shaped by the dynamism of its members, who present a variety of age, health, maturity, responsibility….No institution in society can shape and, in so many ways, determine a person’s life to the same extent as the man and woman who give one life, and the family with which one shares one’s formative years.
It is in this context, aware of the immense weight of our role with the family and our task before God, that we come to Advent.
Advent is the time of preparation, of waiting for the coming of our Lord, of God made flesh who made the world and desires to draw us back to himself. It is this God who bestowed our life, who bestowed the lives of all children, who came into physical reality within a family himself. It is his introduction to this family that we await in Advent. He who authored all families, broken or whole, came like us, into a family himself in order to restore wholeness to us all, who are all at varying levels of brokenness without him. And he encounters us to the extent that we let him, for God forces no one. This is what we believe, and this is what we have the opportunity to joyfully share.
So as we light the candles this year and sing the carols, let us do it with sincerity, joy, peace and all the signs of a person who truly believes what he or she says. Let us strive to align our actions with our words and our words with our values. Let us attempt to provide the awe-inspiring context in which we find ourselves, and share that with our children, for it matters more than we can possibly know.
Stephanie Pacheco is a freelance writer and convert from Northern Virginia. She earned a M.A. in Theological Studies, summa cum laude, from Christendom College and holds a B.A. from the University of Virginia in Religious Studies with a minor in Government and Political Theory. Her work has been featured in America Magazine, Crisis Magazine, Soul Gardening Journal and syndicated by EWTN and Zenit. She blogs about making sense of the Catholic Faith in modern life at theoress.wordpress.com and lives with her husband and two young children.
- How abortion divides the feminist movement
- Top 6 Pro-Life Aims for Health Care Reform
- Pro-life Politics are not Fringe or Obsolete: The Hyde/Helms Amendments
- Being Catholic under a Trump Presidency
- Mrs. Clinton’s Religion Problem
