The Heart of the Matter

What's the impact 46 years after banning the Bible from public schools?

In 1963 the reading from the Bible was banned from public schools.  What’s the impact now 46 years later?

 

Well, last Saturday evening I attended a very fine local production of Godspell, a 1970 musical that in 1971 started a long running success as an Off Broadway production.  The structure of the musical is that a variety of Jesus’ parables (mostly from the Gospel according to Matthew) are interspersed with a variety of modern music set primarily to lyrics from traditional hymns, like “Day by Day.”.  In the 1970’s everyone who was educated knew well the parables of Jesus, even if they were not believers in Him.  For many in our culture the Bible was good literature.  Notables, who were never baptized, used the Bible frequently in their speeches and writings, like Abraham Lincoln, for instance.

 

This local production of Godspell was put on by a director and producer of a children’s acting troupe here in Boulder County.  The children and teens are from the general public and are not attached to any school or religious outlook.  I attended because the lead character in the play was one of our parish teenagers who had graduated from our school a few years ago.

 

During the intermission I got to visit with the director/producer.  She has worked with helping children and teens become grounded in acting for 40 years, so her experience is long and her protégés have reached some success in the acting world.

 

She told me that she was surprised that most of the children today had no frame of reference for any of the Bible stories or parables.  In fact, so many of the parables in Godspell made no sense to them at all and had to be explained.  It made me proud indeed that the one who did the explaining was the graduate from our school.

 

So, 46 years after the banning of the Bible from public schools it is now two generations of Americans who have grown up without the common grounding in the values and stories of the Bible.  Whether people believe or not, the memory is no longer within our society.  No more memory of Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Sarah, Moses, Joshua and the Battle of Jericho, King David and Bathsheba, Ahab and Jezebel, the prophets Samuel, Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Amos, the Babylonian Captivity, John the Baptist, Jesus and the Apostles, the parables, the crucifixion, death and resurrection of our Lord, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. Paul and the foundations of our Church.  It’s all gone!

 

Look then at what a gift our parish’s school has to bring to the future generations.  Not just a memory of all that has made us the people we are, but also a living faith that is sent to be yeast in the dough and a light shining on a hill.

 

Consider supporting our school, or any Catholic school, even if your children are already raised. Helping struggling families by supporting of scholarship fund would go a long way in helping spread the Gospel to another generation! 

Letting God be God for 8th Graders

Our 8th grade religion teacher asked me to teach our 8th graders about the 7 Capital Sins.  I had no idea the class would be as enjoyable as it was, at least for me.  Hopefully for them too.  In explaining the mother of all the deadly sins, pride, I told the story that I learned partly from Scripture and partly from the imagination of St. Ignatius of Loyola in his meditation on the Sin of the Angels (from the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius).  Succinctly put, the Trinity made the decision that something had to be done about the woeful state of human affairs.  So much suffering, so much using free will for evil purposes, so much woe.  Thus came the divine decision on the Incarnation: that God would become man in order to save man from all the woe. 

The reaction of some of the angels, led by an archangel, Lucifer, was to rebel against God's decision.  Thus began the great war in heaven described in the Book of Revelation.  The sin of the rebellious angels was pride: how can God go beneath us to become a lowly human?!  We will never accept this decision! 

The good angels, the ones who acquiesced to the divine decision, were led by Michael, the Archangel.  By the way, the very name Michael means, "Who is like God?"  (It's a question, not an attribute as if to say that Michael is like God.)  Letting God be God and not giving in to a spirit of rebellion against God is the virtue of humility, the antidote to pride.

So just who was San Juan of Capistrano?

Everyone knows about the swallows flying back to San Juan Capistrano Mission in California every year on St. Joseph's Day, March 19th.  But who knows the story of San Juan himself, born in Capistrano in Italy in the late 1300's and died in the mid 1440's?  Ah, this is a good opportunity to introduce you to a free daily newsletter, called Saint of the Day (www.americancatholic.org) that will arrive at your e-mail address: Click that link on and sign up (in the left hand column) for the daily "Saint of the Day" newsletter, add your e-mail address in the designated box.  You won't regret it!  As for San Juan himself, did you didn't know that he tried to patch up the break between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church. 

A fun way to introduce the Pope to kids

Sometimes we may think that kids have too much going on in their lives to pay attention to religion.  Well, try this as a way to introduce them to Pope Benedict XVI.

Tell me what kind of reaction you get.