A college student of my acquaintance is taking a course this semester in Catholic theology. This course marks the first time she has chosen to study anything theological or religious during her four years at college. In response to my interest, she explained why she has made the choice.
Her father died two months ago after an illness lasting two years. He was only in his early fifties, and his death hit family members hard. For his daughter, it raised questions that she had never before faced.
Though she had been brought up in the Catholic tradition and had gone through religious education classes, her faith had not kept pace with her overall personal development. Or, at least, her beliefs had never been challenged by a personal crisis. Her father’s death, however, has changed that situation and now she wants to understand better the faith of her family and of her own childhood.
This young woman’s experience has relevance to the question I have been asked most often by grandparents encountered on speaking tours in Florida. At churches there, I have been surprised by the number of people deeply troubled by their grandchildren’s indifference to the spiritual tradition handed on to them. They lament that their children’s children no longer go to church and they worry about the consequences of abandoning religious practice.
My response relates to the situation of the college student mentioned above. She needed a crisis to awaken her interest in her religious tradition. Until her father’s death, it was all lifeless doctrine to her, without sufficient meaning to make her ask vital questions.
Many young Americans who have grown up in middle-class society have never suffered any serious loss or personal failure. They have arrived at early adulthood without any shocks to their expectation of daily life being safe and more or less rational.
No encounters with evil in any form have upset their complacent outlook on the world. Affluence and education, among other factors, have shielded them against the rude events experienced by so many older people.
These young people do not need religion. At least, that’s what they think. In the world as they have known it, everything is well enough ordered that church seems superfluous. When all is well and everyone thriving, why complicate life by bringing in religion?
Sympathetic though I am with the desire to see one’s own spiritual tradition passed on to descendants, I always advise grandparents to be patient and wait. Inevitably life will surprise their grandchildren and their spiritual situation will change. Someday they will suffer the death of people they love; they will also come up against other events that shake them to their roots.
Perhaps they will then discover a personal need for religion; they may find in their own tradition more value than they once thought.
In response to this kind of worry, I emphasize that the God in whom the grandparents believe is one who loves their grandchildren. No matter what they do, they cannot escape God’s love. As the Psalmist asks, “Whither can I go from thy spirit / Whither can I flee from thy presence?”
God has not finished with these young people yet. They are still works in progress. Most probably, long life lies before them with plenty of opportunities for spiritual discovery. In the meantime, believers cannot afford to sell God’s love short.
Lurking behind the worry may be fear about salvation. Though in some quarters it may seem old-fashioned nowadays, people still feel anxious about their loved ones escaping punishment for their sins and entering through the gates of heaven. Christians often fear that, if children are not baptized, then they will re-main outside the ranks of those who have been chosen for heaven.
There again, does not this attitude come perilously close to a denial of God’s universal love? To place limits on divine love seems equivalent to making God merely human, subject to the same inability to love that afflicts us.
A truly spiritual approach would instead seem to call for confidence that God loves those we love at least as much as we do. Yes, concern for the spiritual welfare of our loved ones is certainly appropriate – it can even be called God-like. But should not believers have enough confidence in the God whom they profess to be above all a lover, that they dare entrust their loved ones to God’s hands?
Richard Griffin