Good catechesis provides us with a good father tongue.

In an article which appeared in The Conversation, a website that carries analysis by academics and researchers in Australia and Britain, it was reported that memorization and rote learning are important classroom strategies which all teachers should be familiar with.  Apparently, seventy teachers from Britain studied the teaching ways of Chinese students (in China) and made comparative studies against the teaching methods which Britain had been veering away from for the past 40 years, emphasizing instead inquiry or discovery learning, as opposed to direct instruction.  The latter is known in academic circles as the “chalk and talk” approach, which includes the need to memorise things like multiplication tables and poems and ballads, enabling the child to recall them automatically and easily. 

I was rather intrigued by this article, which was reprinted in our daily local paper, because I couldn’t help but make this comparison to the ways in which the Catechism is taught to our children.  Walk into any Catechism class these days in any parish, and one would find not one way of teaching, but such a smorgasbord of methods intending to impart the topic of the day.  Affected and influenced by the current trends of education which encourage ‘experiential’ learning, where the result should be that the student studies less but learns more, the Catechist appears to need to be creative enough to use tools that will entice and hold the attention of the minds of their charges which seem to be as fleeting as ephemeral and transient as steam rising from the spout of a boiling kettle of water.

One of the drawbacks of such ‘creative’ teaching, especially for things as fundamental and basic as the tenets of our faith, is that we can sometimes be so creative and veer so far from the teaching point that the student ends up appreciating the analogy or method, leaving the main topic at hand behind in the classroom.  The result is that the foundations of the faith, which are fundamental, are only implicitly known in some amorphous or dim way, resulting in a sad inability for many to say off-hand anything succinct, sharp and precise about our faith.  Perhaps this is the reason why so many now fight shy about direct evangelization. 

In the days of the penny or Baltimore catechism, the three branches of the faith were imparted in a very systematic way.  Firstly, one was taught The Creed and its tenets.  This then paved the way for the teaching of the Commandments.  Thirdly, one was given the means to attain the aims of the spiritual life, which is mainly through prayer and the Sacraments. 

To be sure, there will probably be a strong disdain for such systematic teaching, as it also seems to imply that all students have (more or less) the same levels of intelligence, and that this “one size fits all” seems to ignore or put aside the fact that all children have their own unique learning styles.  The truth that education is about curiosity and innovation also seems to be put aside in favour of a rote and stiff learning.  I can almost hear the chorus of the lament that rote learning of any kind is “boring”.  The multiplication tables were hardly exciting by any means, but look at where it has led us.

In truth, education is indeed a very complex thing.  But there is no mistaking that we all came from some sort of rote learning as a foundation in our basic education.  Which child has never benefitted from memorizing the multiplication tables?  The result is that we can now without much thought about the fundamentals, endeavor to handle the more complex and difficult math problems.  Till this day, I can attribute my deep appreciation of the English language through the rote memorization of stanzas of poems like Robert Southey’s “Inchcape Rock” and certain sonnets and soliloquies of Shakespeare.  I don’t think we liked doing this at the time, but those drills certainly served us well.

I’m afraid that by the dispensing of the rote learning of our catechism and its basic fundaments, we may have spared the rod and spoiled the child.  Many cannot say with confidence why God made us, what grace is, the difference between sanctifying and actual grace, and what the marks of the Church are.  Not that these need to be rehashed to anyone when sharing of our faith, but when these are firmly set in our hearts, perhaps like the multiplication tables, it gives us a grounding to be as creative as we can to cull from our own experiences of these truths.  Without these well set in us, the result is often that we will waver and hem and haw and resort to the very toxic phrase “but this is how I feel” or “this is for me” or even the very commonly heard “this is how I see it” when it comes to talking about God.  Without disrespect to anyone, the Church and the truths of our faith does not depend on how we personally “feel” about truth. 

It is said of people with no feelings for anything that it is not that they are devoid of feelings, but that they are inept and handicapped when talking about their feelings, and have not been armed with the right vocabulary.  In a way, I am wondering if this also applies to God, spirituality and theology.  When we have the right vocabulary for God, based on good and sound theology, our later experiences in life become the canvas of life on which our portrait of God and life is depicted.  We take the paints made up of the well-grounded principle colours of a solid catechism which we had in our formative years and slowly paint the portrait of God working in and through our lives.  But if our basic palette of this is instead an inchoate admixture that is not lucid and coherent but instead something that is made up of a hodge-podge of vague allusions and implicit hints of a deeper reality, we can very well end up being invalid and even incapacitated later in life when we need to speak in words that convey our God experiences that confirm our faith, giving the impression that our faith is something vapid, trite, insipid and worst of all, subjective.  How can we then speak rationally and objectively when confronted by a world that is fast becoming allergic and oftentimes truculent when the topic of God or religion is brought up?

Perhaps I am a bit more passionate about this than the next man because I was on my way to becoming a lecturer in theology but got waylaid by my illness.  But because I had a firm grounding of my faith, was I able to enter into the more challenging ways of thinking about my faith later on in life, enabling me to wade through the different crises that I had to face in the landscape of my life.  It gave me a much needed vocabulary to articulate my experiences.

How much is our God-talk influenced by being familiar with our mother tongue, or in this case, a father tongue?