What Are We All Doing Here? | MUORYM

[The first in a new & probably ongoing series of blog posts, which feature My Unsolicited Opinions Regarding Youth Ministry, or MUORYM for typing convenience. The sentiments contained herein are my thoughts, feelings, and sometimes reactionary opinions to the operational duties of youth ministry, its limits, and the most fundamental challenges it faces. If the issues are not fundamental, they will, at least, at least, be the issues that are most distressing to me, myself, and I. In other words, I'm getting on my soapbox. You've been warned.]

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Dear Candidates, Sponsors, and Parents,

What are we all doing here?

This meeting is part of the parish's attempt to prepare all of us for the Rite of Confirmation, in whatever capacity we shall be participating in it. Approximately a third the people in this room will be receiving the Sacrament directly. For you, Confirmation marks, quite literally, the beginning of a new phase of your life. The rest of us in this room have already received this Sacrament. Our role - especially you, parents and sponsors - is to be models and guides fot those preparing and beginning their lives as confirmed - in other words, mature - Catholics. The school of experience cannot be overvalued; your duty, then, is to share that experience of your own real life lived in you own real faith. But all of us in this room, whether we are preparing to receive the Sacrament or striving to live a life of example as a confirmed Catholic, must have an answer to this fundamental question:

What is Confirmation?

Confirmation is one of the Church's "Sacraments of Initiation." These three sacraments - Baptism, Confirmation, and the Holy Eucharist - are what most Catholics, even those without knowledge of grand Theological complexities, seek from the Church. On a sociological level, they are regarded as rites of passage. Many couples who present their babies to be Baptized in the Church, many children who prepare to receive their First Holy Communion, as well any number of teens attending a Confirmation program have never attended Sunday Mass with any consistency or regularity. Nevertheless, these three Sacraments are valued as milestones in the life of a growing child.

This sociological significance is directly tied to the Sacramental significance, and could even be regarded as being an effect of its Sacramental reality. St. Thomas Aquinas, when discussing these three Sacraments, draws our attention to the fact these three Sacraments are proportioned to the three things that are per se necessary for natural life, namely, birth, growth, and nutrition. The three processes that must occur for one to live, and live well, naturally are paralleled in these three Sacraments of Initiation, which allow us to live, and live well, spiritually. 

Birth

Jesus illustrates this parallel with unmistakeable clarity in His Gospel (John 3:3-7, RSV)

Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.” Nicode′mus said to him, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.  Do not marvel that I said to you, ‘You must be born anew.’

For every created thing, there is a beginning of existence. Every being that comes into existence has a moment of birth. That moment marks the beginning of that creature's life, existing in a new manner; birth is the moment where a creature is granted a certain independent identity. When a baby is born, the intense intimacy with the mother is ended; the baby has a separate, outside-of-any-other-person, existence. When a seed sprouts, when a chicken hatches from an egg, when a baby is born, a new natural thing is taking up its place in the natural order. It is an entity in the world.

Baptism is the birth of spirit through the Spirit. Baptism is what grants us life, and removes from us our participation in humanity's inherited death. It allows us to be reunited to God so that our natural life might be able to ascend to the glory of supernatural life with God. Each one of us in this room have been Baptized and have, thereby, been born into the Church. We have been granted existence as individuals in the unity of Christ's mystical body. We are an entity in the Church.

Nutrition

(You may have noticed that I've switched the order as initially stated, placing nutrition before growth. There are reasons for the order given by St. Thomas and reasons for the revised order of Sacramental administration, but I won't get into them here. Another topic for another day and the finesse of philosophical distinctions to make sense of the superiority of one order over the other is not our business currently. I also doubt anyone else would find them very interesting.)

While birth has a certain primacy in respect to necessity, -- its the condition on which all other conditions are dependent (you can't live life in any way, good or bad, if you aren't born to live -- nutrition has the unique quality of being a recurring event, rather than a one-time occurrence. While one is only born once, one must eat consistently throughout one's life if one is to remain alive. A life without nutrition would end rather soon after having begun.

So God, in His goodness, has also appointed a Sacrament to nourish us spiritually. This spiritual nourishment, the life-sustaining food gifted to us by God, is the Holy Eucharist. God has gifted God to us. In order that we might be united with Him spiritually, He becomes present to us substantially in the Eucharist. He doesn't just give us food that gives us His grace. He is our food. And just as we couldn't have a sustained or good natural life without nourishing food, we could not have a sustained or good spiritual life without the nourishing food of the Eucharist.

I could get much more comprehension in my treatment of this subject, but the question here isn't "What is the Eucharist?", so I won't. I'll leave it at that. But there is so much more that could be said. I hope you appreciate my self-control.

Growth

So now, finally, I'll get to answering the question I said we all needed to answer: what is Confirmation?

To begin with the parallel found in nature: every being with a soul - that is alive - has a process of development. When a baby boy is born, he is male, but yet he is not a man. He must grow into to being a man, in physical stature and capacity, as well as mental and emotional maturity. We have a colloquial expression for this change. We refer to it as "growing up", and one who has undergone this change has "grown up." This change doesn't happen overnight, or at a consistent rate or stage of an individual child's development. Yet we recognize that a man is the same person as the boy we met ten years ago; he has simply grown. He doesn't change from being less human to more human. None of us can acquire more human nature than that which we have from our beginning. The change is a growth in his ability to exercise the fullness of that nature.

So this aspect that is per se necessary for life to be is what we see paralleled sacramentally in Confirmation. A person, born into the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ at Baptism, must grow in that identity. Confirmation is that growth, that grace, which changes a soul. Just as we expect a boy to change into a man, we should also expect a person to mature in their spirituality. This growth doesn't mean we have more of a soul, it doesn't mean we have a different soul than we did at Baptism. It means that we have grown in our ability to live in, and thus act in, God's love. We are sealed by the Holy Spirit - not like a room sealed off from contaminants, but sealed by His mark. We are designated as belonging to God in a more mature, deliberate, and active way.

Catholic is not a quality, it's a state of being. We are called to be Catholic. Confirmation is what signifies and causes a growth in us. It changes our faith, not so that it's a different kind of faith than that which we received at Baptism, but so that it's matured in its development. Jesus tells us repeatedly in His Gospel that faith always bears fruit. He even goes as far as to say that faith as small as a mustard seed will bear great fruit. If there is no fruit, that can only be because there is not even a little seed of faith from which it could grow.

Confirmation gifts us a greater union with Christ in his Body, the Church. It grants us the grace to will that unity with the totality of our beings, with a deliberate and constant choice to Love and Be Loved. It is the grace to live Catholic.

So you, Candidates, are preparing to receive the gift of maturity in your faith. God will gift you the grace of growth from that seed, so that you might bear His fruit to the world. You will be entrusted with His Love, not only for yourself, but for others. That is the gift God is giving you. He is causing and marking your growth. That is Confirmation.

And you, parents and sponsors, are guardians of that growing faith. You were entrusted with that same fruitful love at your own Confirmation. Now, as part of your duty to live Catholic, you must help these young people as they begin their own journey of living Catholic. You are to be an example of this growth and maturity, an example of humility in gratitude, and example of God's love to the world. You must also tend to the growth the faith in these teens, always aiming to help and never hinder its development.

In all of this, remember to lean on Christ. That applies equally to every single one of us in this room. Whether yours is a baby faith, a tired faith, a scared faith, a happy faith, a big faith - label your faith as you will - it is a gift. It comes from Christ, it grows in Christ, and it is all for Christ.

So lean on Him. He is why we're here.