Golden Rosaries and Sticky Faith 10 comments

By Jessica Mesman Griffith

This is the first place I’ve ever lived that isn’t overwhelmingly Catholic. I grew up outside of New Orleans; I went to graduate school in Pittsburgh; I worked at Notre Dame after I got married—Catholic cultures all.

But here, in rural Virginia, we are a minority. Outnumbered by the secular humanists on our college campus. Outnumbered by the evangelicals of nearby Lynchburg, the home of the late Jerry Falwell and Liberty University.

I always assumed my daughter would go to a Catholic school, but for the first time, it might not be a viable option. There is only one Catholic school serving our region, and I’d have to go back to work full-time to afford it. There are plenty of Christian schools in the area, including an extremely tempting classical school that teaches both Latin and Greek. And there are secular private schools—Montessori, Waldorf, and Christianity-free Quaker. I’m sure any of these would be academically superior to my little school near the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where the teachers were mostly our moms.

It’s true; my school wasn’t very good academically, in religion or otherwise. I was there during the height of Medjugorje madness: We spent most of our religion classes sharing stories about so-and-so’s mom whose rosary turned gold on her pilgrimage and later saw Mary’s face in the sun in some pictures she developed at the K&B Drugstore. Otherwise we passed a prayer candle and listened to something Enya-ish in the dark.

Not exactly top-notch catechesis.

Honestly, I doubt I could have told you a single substantive thing about my faith on my eighth grade graduation day, and I didn’t take Latin until college. But the faith part stuck. I make fun of my naïve little school (and so does my public school-educated husband, when he has to remind me where certain states are located on a map of our own country), but I’m grateful that I had the pleasure of growing up in what now seems to me like an old-world kind of Christian culture—going to weekly Mass with my classmates, walking the stations of the Cross during Lent, lighting Advent Candles, crowning statues on May Day. There’s real substance in those rites and traditions, and their holiness works on us even when they’re handed over clumsily.

That’s the gift I long to give to my daughter. I want her to experience a faith that reaches beyond our home and into her world. I want her to grow up in a community where the communion of saints is taken for granted, where the mystical and the sacred mingle with the everyday, and where the impossible—gold rosaries and all—is seen as likely. I want her to have something to cling to. A crutch, some might snicker. But is a crutch really such a bad thing to give my child? A strong knowledge of world geography would not have propped me up so well as the Mass when my mother died in my freshman year of high school.

Many of the schools I visited or researched—even some of the Christian ones—celebrate seasonal feasts scrubbed of any religious significance, hoping to engender an appreciation of nature and a multicultural sensitivity, but my education developed in me a love and longing for beauty that was tethered to something beyond the natural world, something that never died. That love directed me through a murky adolescence when my parental compass was gone, redeeming my wrong turns and bringing me home, again and again.

My daughter can learn the other stuff later. Much of it we can give her at home, if Dave will handle the geography. But if she misses the chance to process in a St. Lucy’s Day parade with her best friends when she’s six, will the wonder she might have experienced, and the mark it might have left on her soul, be lost?