(The Nationalist, 16 February 2001)
You can read Part 1 here.
Loving one’s neighbour starts at home (though it doesn’t end there). If children see good neighbourliness, they will come to see that religion is not just about the faith but also about the faithful. If they see mother and father treat each other with respect and love they will grow to see that God respects and loves them. That makes it possible for them to have a healthy self-respect and self-love. And that, in turn, makes it possible for them to love their neighbour as themselves. If they are shown discipline (and by that I don’t mean beating) they will learn self-discipline and that, in turn, creates self-respect.
Start teaching them the faith when they are young. One side-effect of this is that we learn to communicate with our children, to create an atmosphere of trust between us and them, and this has great benefits for the future, especially in preventing small problems from becoming big ones, and in making it possible for us and them to be happy with each other.
Another is that we begin to learn and discover our own faith, perhaps for the first time. We learn by teaching. In our effort to explain things to children we come to understand those things better ourselves. If we leave the religious education of children to the school or the parish we miss out on the opportunity of a lifetime to build close bonds with the children, to be young with them and to grow with them, as well as to learn and discover again what our own faith is about.
We communicate best by doing things with the children. We pass on faith by sharing it. That’s not the same thing as sharing the faith; the only faith we can share is the faith that we’ve got. What does the faith mean to you? Tell your children in your own words, in your own way. Instead of saying ‘Go to bed, and don’t forget your night prayers’ why not say, ‘Let’s pray together’? That would involve turning the TV off for a while…. and why not? We are in charge in our own house. If we tell our children to pray, but don’t do it ourselves, they will see us, and religion, as hypocritical. But a home with shared prayer creates a family close to God, and to each other.
Try to wind things down in the home at the week-end, especially on Sunday. Make it a family day, a day of rest, relaxation and celebration, a day of doing things together, simple things like going for a walk or having a game of cards on a wet evening.
This is a task for father and mother together. If it is left to one parent alone, it is not twice as hard; it is many times as hard. Try working on this with other parents. We can help each other, learn from and support each other. Together we can make it work… for the sake of our children and for our own sakes, too.
(This article borrows from the 1980 pastoral letter of the Irish bishops, Handing on the Faith in the Home, and How to hand on Faith to your Children, by Mickey and Terri Quinn, Veritas, Dublin, 1983)