Let Personal Spiritual Journeys Inspire You
Summer is often a time when catechists and parish catechetical leaders plan for the upcoming school year. As this planning process unfolds, I would like to encourage those involved in religious education to spend some time reflecting on their own spiritual journeys for inspiration. Some of my most successful activities in the religious-ed. classroom have come from reflecting on my own deepest questions, darkest fears and brightest discoveries along the spiritual path.
One of my earliest religious memories is of myself as young child sitting in St. Wendel Catholic Church gazing up at the enormous windows. I wondered who had dared to color pictures all over them. They were pretty pictures; but in my young mind, the windows were ruined forever. After all, what was the use of a window if you couldn’t see through to the other side?
I have spent a lot of time in church buildings in the years since then, attending Masses, teaching religion classes and presenting programs. Although I have come to appreciate stained-glass windows as works of art, there is still something about them that bothers me. I think the main objection I have to stained-glass windows is the same one I had as a child. They make me uncomfortable because they completely obscure the outside world.
The glorious, jewel-colored panels in our churches depict symbols and saints and tell inspiring stories of the past. But when we are inside of our churches, we often cannot see the world outside which is where most of our life story happens. And when we are standing outside of our churches, we cannot see the serene and sacred world within.
For me, this is symbolic of a much more devastating problem. In my 25 years of being involved in faith formation, there is one formidable obstacle that I have come up against time and time again in people of all ages: They struggle to relate what they learn and experience in Church and religion programs to what they learn and experience in the rest of their lives. This is especially true of young people.
One of the most effective high school religious-education classes I ever taught included an activity where the students designed stained-glass windows with scenes from their own lives. They drew pictures of mentors and teachers they had learned valuable life lessons from, and illustrated scenes that depicted suffering, loss and resurrection in their own lives. Since the students were teenagers, the suffering and losses they experienced were mostly sports losses and relationship break-ups, but one student drew a scene depicting the death of a beloved grandparent and another drew the break-up of her parents’ marriage. When the students were finished with their illustrations and had colored them, we designed a church out of a large cardboard box and used their pictures as the stained-glass windows. We imagined what it might be like to be sitting in church surrounded by scenes of joys and sorrows from our own lives.
This activity inspired a very interesting discussion, and we ended the class by brainstorming ways that we could bring our lives into church with us. The next time the class met, we turned the activity inside-out. I had the students draw scenes from the life of Jesus or one of the prophets or saints. I had a large cardboard wall set up on which I had pasted enlarged photos of contemporary places and events – sports games, scenes from homes and classrooms and pictures of current news events. We then inserted the students’ religious art into these scenes. Another stimulating discussion ensued as we tried to imagine what our lives would be like if we were constantly living amongst images of Jesus, the saints and the prophets.
This is just one example of a classroom activity that was inspired by a personal experience. As catechists, I believe that one of the greatest gifts we can give our students is a way to connect their “real” life experiences with their experiences in church and religion classes. If we can find a way to open windows between the sacred and the ordinary in our classrooms, our students may discover that they can open windows to the sacred wherever they happen to find themselves in life.
