C
Cricket2
Guest
I believe that the texts used for teaching children the Catholic Faith need to be updated and should be more realistic in terms of what our Faith requires of us. I have always felt this way, even as a child when I had an opportunity to read any such document. This inclination was confirmed for me when I had the chance to teach first generation Catholics from the Hmong Community about Catholicism.
The basic problem I found, at all levels of instruction, was that there seemed to be an overly “sweet” or “rosy” presentation of who Jesus was, how much he suffered and why. This was especially true at the level of K-12. One of the most eye opening experiences I had concerning this was with my work with the Hmong children who had just arrived from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Most had lived their entire lives in POW camps or refugee camps.
To be brief: I had just done a lesson on creation and asked the children to draw pictures of things the thought God had made. I expected nice scenes of rivers and trees, flowers and fish and lambs. You know, the stuff you see in a lot of instruction materials. What they actually drew was the following: burning villages, people being mowed in half by machine guns, people hanging, “yellow rain” and dying forests. People with missing limbs and new born babies with no eyes or arms. That is just a few of the things I saw in their drawings.
At that point I knew that the texts I had been provided with the teach the children were essentially meaningless to them. They had seen all the horrors and experiences all the horrors of hell in their short lives. They needed to understand that suffering in the context of Jesus suffering and the texts we had did not accomplish that.
I think this may be a general weakness in most of our instructional materials. We tend to set the horrible aside in favor of some sweet over simplified version of “Jesus the Shepard” rather than deal with the terrible consequences and price of sin.
The basic problem I found, at all levels of instruction, was that there seemed to be an overly “sweet” or “rosy” presentation of who Jesus was, how much he suffered and why. This was especially true at the level of K-12. One of the most eye opening experiences I had concerning this was with my work with the Hmong children who had just arrived from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Most had lived their entire lives in POW camps or refugee camps.
To be brief: I had just done a lesson on creation and asked the children to draw pictures of things the thought God had made. I expected nice scenes of rivers and trees, flowers and fish and lambs. You know, the stuff you see in a lot of instruction materials. What they actually drew was the following: burning villages, people being mowed in half by machine guns, people hanging, “yellow rain” and dying forests. People with missing limbs and new born babies with no eyes or arms. That is just a few of the things I saw in their drawings.
At that point I knew that the texts I had been provided with the teach the children were essentially meaningless to them. They had seen all the horrors and experiences all the horrors of hell in their short lives. They needed to understand that suffering in the context of Jesus suffering and the texts we had did not accomplish that.
I think this may be a general weakness in most of our instructional materials. We tend to set the horrible aside in favor of some sweet over simplified version of “Jesus the Shepard” rather than deal with the terrible consequences and price of sin.