Friday, November 21, is my daughter’s feast day. Sometimes called “name days,” these celebrations—often featuring special meals, a cake, perhaps a small gift—of the memorial day of the saint for whom one is named, remain a tradition for some Catholic and Orthodox families.

When the kids were younger, they welcomed feast days. Those were the years they would, with minimal encouragement, stage a living room play about St. Martin and the beggar, linger over dinner talking about Advent candles, or listen to Bible stories and tales of the saints.

With time, they realized their friends’ families didn’t do such things. Will, the oldest, began interrupting my stealth theology lessons with “Nice sermon, Dad.” All three protested we weren’t a normal family because we didn’t have cable TV (still don’t), and my reply, “If that’s the only reason you have for thinking we’re not normal, you’re not paying attention,” didn’t keep them from requesting even more forms of electronic entertainment.

This November 21, Maria didn’t want a special dinner or a cake. She only wanted to see an opening night showing of Twilight, the teen vampire movie based on the popular book series by Stephenie Meyer. Maria talked about it for weeks, read all four volumes in the series, and my wife, Jill, finally caved and took Maria and some friends to see it.

Jill’s verdict: the movie is as clearly targeted to the erotic longings of tween-to-adolescent girls as was the book, though the film, being necessarily shorter, was not nearly as repetitive.

Maria’s: “I’m in love with Edward!” (Edward is the hunky, literally cold as ice vampire with whom Bella, the stormy human protagonist, falls in love.)

My point, however, is not to pan Ms. Meyer’s work or ridicule my daughter’s taste (I still wince at those two months in early adolescence when I admired Barry Manilow). I simply wonder, as others have before me, how to make stories of Torah, New Testament, and Church remotely as compelling as those of the entertainment industries – who measure accomplishments by market share and gate receipts—without succumbing to cultural captivity.

For me, it’s not a matter of God vs. pop culture, but whether the human desires upon which that culture plays and profits reach toward transcendence or curve back on themselves.

My kids, now 12, 16, and 19, begrudgingly tolerate their parents’ faith and religious practice. Maria appears tortured by an hour in church, but would listen to Britney Spears soundalikes all day long if we let her. Peter, the thoughtful anarchist, loves heavy metal and gangsta rap at least as much as his high school Sacraments and Scriptures courses. Will, hoping to make a career in professional sports management, apparently finds religion a quaint family diversion, though he did call home from college recently, asking for prayers before his Economics exam.

“Faith,” it’s said, “has no grandchildren.” Each generation claims it anew, if at all. My late parents, however, watched five of six children leave the church of their baptism, and may have wondered what, if any, faith their grandchildren would inherit. I don’t know if the fragile faith we’ve handed our children can survive the noxious haze of electronic distraction. Sometimes I wonder if it’s too late.

But then, who knows what lengths Creation’s Lover will go to win the attention of distracted creatures? “I fled Him, down the arches of the years…from those strong Feet that followed, followed after,” wrote Victorian poet Francis Thompson, an opium addict and late penitent, in “The Hound of Heaven.” So much of my adult life is procrastination and flight, ignoring immediate urgencies while attending to distant trivialities. What useful distractions am I pursuing even now?

Yet sometimes I glimpse moments when someone—almost never me—unexpectedly attends to the present, to the place where living bodies move and act. It never looks planned or controlled. The wayward pilgrims more often look startled, sheepish, a bit bedraggled, as if, having awakened, they’re surprised not to have drowned.

This past Sunday, Advent’s first, my parish welcomed three new catechumens—unbaptized adults who will join the church at the Easter Vigil—two women and one man, importunately knocking at the church door as mass began. The pastor brought them into the assembly, asked them what they were seeking, and members of the parish signed their bodies with the cross.

Why anyone would interrupt their adult life to join the very messy family that is my global church is a mystery to me. One woman has worked in Catholic education for twenty years, the other, now in dental school, drives more than a hundred miles each weekend to join us at mass. The man has a long career of teaching and sculpting behind him. Did any of them imagine five years ago—much less when they were teenagers—they would one day stand in the front of a Catholic church as total strangers prayed for their spiritual growth?

This coming Easter, Jill and I will once again drag the kids to the Easter Vigil. After nearly three hours of liturgy, beginning in silent darkness and ending in light, singing and joy, we’ll walk across the plaza to the post-Vigil party. I’ll offer my standard greeting to these newest among my sisters and brothers: “Welcome home; sorry we left the house in such a mess.” Then, if time and the celebration permit, I’ll ask to hear their stories, hoping to learn what they fled on their strange journey here.