July 2009 Catechist Know-How

A Teacher’s Prayer

By Mary Lou Rosien

 Isn’t it amazing how you can read or hear something in scripture a thousand times and then one day something new jumps out at you?  This was my experience recently at Mass.  The reading was around Pentacost and it was Christ’s prayer to God the Father.

 “I revealed your name to those whom you gave me out of the world. They belonged to you, and you gave them to me, and they have kept your word… … I pray for them. I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me, because they are yours, and everything of mine is yours and everything of yours is mine, and I have been glorified in them…. I protected them in your name that you gave me, and I guarded them, and none of them was lost…I gave them your word, and the world hated them, because they do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.  Consecrate them in the truth.  Your word is truth.  As you sent me into the world, so I sent them into the world.  And I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” John 17: 6-19

I was struck by how this prayer of the Lord’s could be mine or any other parent or teacher’s prayer.  Have we not consecrated ourselves to the Lord?  Do we not try to teach the Word?  These teachings are hard and I have witnessed my own children and students suffer much hatred because of them.  I have heard my children complain about a teacher’s reaction to their stand on life issues.  My daughter once challenged a history teacher who believed that abortion was only a woman’s issue.  “How does a woman get pregnant?”  My teenage daughter challenged.  “Would that young woman seek an abortion if her boyfriend was willing to support her in keeping the child?”  She finally convinced her teacher (and other students) that taking no position on this issue was a cop-out.

Other times my students have stood up on faith issues only to be knocked down, sometimes by members of their own families.  My husband likes to teasingly say to my catechism students, “If faith is that easy, and attaining heaven assured, then punch my ticket, I’m in.”  His point is that living faith is always harder than just professing it.

Scripture tells us that, “Faith without works is dead.” James 2:20  How hard it can be, however, to carry out the works that make us Christians.  We are challenged to say what is right, even when the world says we are wrong. 

To turn the other cheek when someone injures us, while the world says to seek revenge, or better yet a huge financial settlement!  We must be, as Christ said of the disciples, in the world, but not of it.

Praying Scripture and helping our students memorize important verses can strengthen them against the harshness of the world’s judgment and their resolve to remain a Christian in spite of it.  These passages can help us with that goal.  God bless.

Mary Lou Rosien is the author of Managing Stress with the Help of your Catholic Faith (OSV Publishing). Write to her at mrosien@rochester.rr.com.