For the past seven months, once a week, I have been spending time with some very special men. They are cute, bright and funny, and, frankly, they are wearing me out. They happen to be 8 and 9 years old, and each week we meet to learn the ways of the Catholic Church. I am Mrs. Reilly, and I am their CCD teacher.

Once a week, on Tuesdays, we meet over at the Parish Center at St. Agnes, our neighborhood church. These boys are loaded for bear when I get them; hopped up on snacks they’ve retrieved from the bottoms of their backpacks, they are coming straight from school, where they have had to behave for hours on end. Every Tuesday they need a few minutes to wrestle each other before they get inside the classroom, and they are always starving. They are a gum-chewing, backpack-slinging, high-decibel group full of ideas, proclamations and questions – and some days not a lot of them about God, I’m sorry to say.

 

We do have a textbook of sorts which seems to have been written in the 1940s or 1950s, as it does not seem to pertain to any situations children are actually in, unless modern children are meeting at the swing set in groups that racially are perfectly mixed, or riding their bikes alone to the corner market, where a kindly old gentleman is sweeping the stoop. So I decided months ago to start with more of the Big Picture, putting the text aside a lot. Who is God, and why should we bother to learn about him? According to the boys, God is sitting on a cloud in heaven, watching over us all here on earth as we move around like ants. He loves sports, pets and nice people, pretty much in that order. He especially does not like lying. I generally get a lot of interesting comments and answers to my question in Room 303: When I asked what Advent is, one student, straight-faced, answered, “Well, it’s like Tylenol, and you take it when you are sick, or when you have a headache.” One student, when we were struggling to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, said, “Mrs. Reilly, I’ve memorized the Lord’s Prayer, but now I’ve forgotten the Pledge of Allegiance!” 

 

We’ve had one field trip – to the church itself, about 15 yards from the parish center. I should have asked for parent chaperones for the trip across the driveway; to these boys, fresh air on your cheeks is the international symbol for – you got it – more wrestling. When we got in the church, as I whispered in hushed tones about the sacred nature of the altar, the eight boys looked up behind them and saw the choir loft, and ran up single file to see what their coats would look like when dropped over the railing. I know how Maria Von Trapp felt when the Captain’s kids were hanging out of the trees over in Austria. “What do you think God would think of you running around his house?” I yelled up at the boys, who grinned down at me. “He’d say, ‘Thanks for stopping by,’” one boy yelled down, “‘I see you found a place for your coat.’”

 

We pray at the beginning and at the end of class, and we do a lot of praying for … hockey. The sport itself. We pray for every game coming up, and we pray that the Canadians get worse while Boston gets better. We pray for a lot of players with Russian-sounding names like Sergei and Samarov, who apparently are out with injuries, and we pray for local, regional and national teams. We pray for equipment, and we pray for shoot-outs. We pray for tournaments, regular season, offseason and try-outs. There is no reason for the Lord not to know about hockey. Hockey is covered by Room 303.

 

Eight is an interesting and sweet age; you are still a little boy when you are 8, but you are growing up. I’ve heard the boys, gathered around our rickety laminated lunch table, pray for sick parents, aged grandparents and siblings who, though annoying, still matter. They have prayed for soldiers,  strangers and the homeless, and once in awhile even each other, heads bowed, still-vulnerable necks exposed as they talk to the God they really believe is up there listening. They have amused me with their energy and amazed me with their insight. They have prayed out loud for me before, as a group, which is a pretty amazing feeling.

 

We wind up the year soon – we plan on celebrating by wrestling – and we will reconvene in Room 303 next year – the boys will be older, and who knows what will be going on in the world by then. But we will be there, praying for hockey, wrestling and trying together to understand that more than rules, textbooks and memorized prayers, God is a love that we can’t even get our minds around, and he is with us when we are the mystery of what is Classroom 303, brought together for a reason. His ways are beyond our comprehension sometimes, but we will still be in there, trying.

 

So until then, thank you, Brian, Liam, Wes, Kevin, Joe, Jamie, Pat and my own son James. You are great teachers, too. God bless you.