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.’”
