Once upon a time

As we celebrate Catechetical Sunday this weekend, I can’t help but think of the many teachers who have shared their faith with me by telling me stories over my lengthening life.

Most of them were not exalted professors or gurus, though I’ve been lucky enough to know more than a few of these too. Still, my best teachers were ordinary folks who shared what they knew with me, shared what they believed, most often and most convincingly by telling me stories. 

My dad told us about growing up dirt poor in southern Illinois, a child of Lithuanian immigrants. He had to take the family’s cow from the shed across the creek to the house of his red-headed, bootlegging Aunt, and then wait while the cow was milked and put to pasture, and then bring back the a can of milk for his brother and sisters. It was a pattern repeated each evening after school, bringing the cow home (and sometimes carrying a bottle of moonshine for his coal miner father). A pattern of hard work and service and devotion emerged.

A sweet but rather stern older lady named Effie Hughes taught me how to read as she looked after my sister and I while my mom worked to support us. Her efforts were more than heroic: she was a midwestern Presbyterian, who reluctantly read to me and taught me to read from a book I can still see in my imagination: “The Saints and Your Name.” The gory tales of intrepid Roman martyrs and Catholic battles with Lutherans enchanted me, though now I expect they made her Protestant sensibilities profoundly uncomfortable. My uncle told us about masses celebrated on the backs of open Jeeps during WWII, and my mom, who trained as a nurse at Mercy Hospital on J Street, related how she and the other nurses had to turn off oxygen before the arrival of the sister carrying a lit candle before the priest bringing the viaticum to the dying. My grandmother giving me a dime to light a candle before leaving church “so the candle can remember for you,” words and stories I remember shaping my mind and heart.

We heard stories of faith from the good women who came across the sea from Ireland, the well-named “Sisters of Mercy,” and in high school, sometimes the young Jesuits who taught us on Jacob Lane would share their stories of vocation. In college, I was lucky to have a quiet Jesuit poet who taught me Dante’s passage from Hell through Purgatory to the Celestial Rose in heaven, a journey every bit as challenging as the winding passages of St. Thomas Aquinas and Teilhard de Chardin a profoundly wise old philosopher took me through.

And so on, and so on: the adventures of Ignatius and his companions, the twisting and sometimes twisted history of the church, narrative fodder for the imagination. The sad stories I heard from poor Mexican women in the kitchen of a mission in Tijuana, and the testaments of God’s love I heard from the Franciscan Sisters who animated them, helped me hold onto my faith, and deepen it.

We learn how to be human from such stories we hear, more than from linear discourse. The world was literally not made in seven days, but Genesis captures meta-truths—about the creative goodness of God and our own weakness—that give us a way to the deepest truths. The story of Mary and Joseph and their child Jesus, refugees in Egypt, and the long road from the Jordan to Calvary to dawning Easter light are roadmaps for lives that seek meaning, beauty, and truth.

I gave up preaching about dogmas a long time ago. They are, of course, important, careful formulations of truths. But I have found that telling the stories, as our catechists will continue to tell them to our children, is more convincing, more moving, more useful.

Great stories usually begin “Once upon a time,” which is a poetic way of saying “Then, and Now, and Always…As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be.” I am so grateful for the stories shared with me by my family, my many teachers, my friends, all of you. And grateful to be able to share their retellings with you.