Our grandfather who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name...
There are small Christian communities where a missionary can only visit from time to time. On one such visit, a missionary priest met a catechist who was teaching the children an unusual version of the Lord’s Prayer. God was not invoked as Father but as Grandfather...
That catechist was simply doing what all good catechists should do: starting from the existential reality of each person so as to be able to proclaim the Word of God, in a way that is understood and suited to his or her reality. The concept of Father was not understandable by children who were being raised by their grandparents because their parents had died of AIDS.
The AIDS crisis is very serious in Africa; of the 35 million people infected with the HIV virus in the world, 25 million live in Africa. "Al perro flaco todo son pulgas" or "It never rains it pours" says a Castilian proverb. It was the last straw for Africa, already decimated by so many other diseases due to the level of underdevelopment in which it still finds itself.
The witness we receive from our parents is not being passed on to our children because the faith of the present generation of parents seems to be affected by the equivalent of the AIDS pandemic in Africa. Parents transmit life to their children, but they do not pass on the faith, without which life has no meaning.
Faith is to life what the operating system is to a computer; without it, nothing in the computer works because it is the basis on which all programs function. It is sad to live without knowing why we exist and what we are existing for; studying in order to have a profession, to work, to eat and to enjoy ourselves are very poor reasons; human life is more than this and this is not why we are so radically different from other species of living beings.
The natural thing would be, as in other times, for parents to pass on the faith they have received to their children; that after mommy and daddy, Jesus would be the third word the little ones would learn; and that the lap should be the first pew in the Church and where the first catechesis takes place. But this is not the case, today's parents if they baptize their children is out of tradition or superstition; if they send their children to catechism, it is so that they can make their First Communion, which is also out of tradition and the equivalent of rites of passage in other cultures.
All this indoctrination is seen as a bore by parents and children alike; neither of them ever has a personal relationship with Christ, so both look at religion with ignorance and prejudice; from their simplistic minds, they conclude that religion is of no use in everyday life.
Where parents fail, the grandparents can be quite successful. When an artery is blocked and the normal flow of blood is impeded, a bypass is performed. The same thing can happen when it comes to passing on the faith from generation to generation; when parents abandon the faith they received from their parents and do not pass it on to their children, grandparents can take on this task and reach out to their grandchildren. Many are already doing precisely this in the hours they spend with their grandchildren, because they know that faith is as vital to a child as the blood coursing through their veins.
The child has only two parents but four grandparents; it would be sad if none of the four took on this commitment of bypassing the faith to their grandchildren.
Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC
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