Elementary Education

The Eternal Spring of Faith

By Jane Schmitz

November brings with it a feel that we are closing in on winter. School is well underway and so are faith formation classes, but teachers and catechists are still spending time adjusting to different persons and personalities in their classes, so in some sense, life is still fresh and new, yet not quite so. Directors of parish faith formation programs have been instrumental in getting things started with fresh ideas, new insights, and a generous abundance of effort and planning, and are keeping their fingers crossed that parents and pastors alike will embrace the programs with the same enthusiasm in which those ideas were born. 

But November in faith formation land, is risky. The unexpected happens in both the likeliest and the unlikeliest of places. Perhaps the catechists that were trained so well by you in are sporadic in attendance or are showing signs of fatigue already, simply because they are busy people with generous hearts who are already thinking about the upcoming holiday season.  So it means one has to take a step back and look at the whole picture and put Plan B or C into practice. (We do have those alternative arrangements in our “bag of tricks,” don’t we?) Or maybe it’s the parent whose child is not in the class they had hoped for, since “all their friends” are in another grade level class. So we smile a bit, see what we can do, and try to come up with a scripture passage at least in our heads, that will somehow comfort us as we make unpopular decisions (And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another…Eph 4:32).

But we are on the way, in new year of growth, celebrating the “tried and true” methods of passing on the faith, on the way with a some new approaches (we’re using Take Out) that will bring us all a bit closer to the reign of God in our hearts and in the hearts of those we serve. Winter may be close at hand, but in some real ways it is an e, as we are still about the business of planting seeds, so (you know how this goes) others can do the watering, and the Divine Planner will invite the growth.