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March 21, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 6Oakland,
CA
is best served family style
Religious truths need to be connected to everyday
experience. That’s where parents can help convey the faith to their
children, says Kathleen Chesto, a national consultant on family spirituality
and religious education.
“As a Church, we have to tell parents we can’t give faith
to their children,” said Chesto, who spoke recently at St. Anthony
Parish in Sacramento.
“We have to come right out and say the Church is going to help you,
but it cannot do the work for you.”
Chesto, a leader in family spirituality and religious education for 30
years, conveys much of her message to parents and families as a storyteller,
captivating her listeners with the holiness of ordinary life gleaned from
her experience as a wife and a mother.
Passing on the Catholic faith is the role of parents and the ability to
talk about God starts in the family, Chesto said in an interview with
The Herald.
The role of the Church, she said, is to identify the language and stories
of God and to share the stories of the larger faith community.
“If the development of faith doesn’t happen in the family
first, I don’t think it’s going to happen when kids come into
a parish at six or seven years old,” she said. “If parents
don’t tell the story of their experiences through the eyes of faith,
then children will not find God in their own experiences.”
While there are many good programs for teaching such parenting skills,
Chesto suggests that parents start more simply, such as telling family
stories and starting rituals with their children.
“It’s a very human thing to ritualize,” she said. “We
have to show people how what they already do every day is holy, such as
their rituals at mealtime, bedtime and family events.
“Children who participate in family rituals are ready to go to the
Eucharistic meal in the liturgy. They know that this is a ritual –
it celebrates something we believe to be real, that God is present. But
if children don’t have ritual, they aren’t given a change
to recognize and truly celebrate church and the sacraments.”
Chesto, who holds a doctorate in ministry from Hartford Seminary in Hartford,
Conn., and a master’s degree in theology from St. Joseph’s
College in West Hartford, Conn., helped develop FIRE (Family-Centered
Intergenerational Religious Education) in the 1970s and 1980s as a religious
education process to help people express their spirituality in their families
and small faith communities.
“We wanted to encourage our kids and our adults (in our parish)
to ask the questions we hoped to answer about faith, Scripture and morality,”
she said.
“One of our main objectives was to create an
atmosphere that gave rise to the questions. We eventually found, through
a lot of trial and error, that the best way to accomplish this was through
games and simulations that initiate questions about individual experiences.”
Ultimately the idea behind FIRE was “to bring people to prayer,
to quiet them down in their busy lives, and to surprise them by opening
them up to an experience of God,” Chesto noted.
“If you don’t teach people to pray, I don’t really see
any point in teaching them religious education. Why walk around with a
lot of religious information in your head if it doesn’t work for
you with prayer?”
Religious information alone won’t forge a relationship with God,
Chesto contended.
“One of the things I’ve found over my years of teaching is
that people want more – more about God, more about the Church, more
about support,” she said. “I worry more about people the Church
isn’t servicing.
“Some people say they’re not getting the basics, but I suspect
they are missing much more. That brings us to defining just what the basics
of the Catholic Church are. The most basic point of our faith is a love
relationship with God and Jesus that influences our whole lives. Everything
else is secondary.”
In recent years, Chesto has introduced the idea of a new phase of life
called “postadolescence,” examining parents and their young
adults in transition, as well as the influences that shape them.
She presented her findings in a 2001 book, “Exploring the New Family”
(St. Mary’s Press), which was based largely on her own parenting
experience with three young adults and interviews with more than 150 parents
and young adults.
Chesto contends that for many young adults, religion has little connection
with their reality and it fails to satisfy their longing for the sacred.
“We raised our own children with the new fruits of
spirituality and prayer that Vatican II had given us,” she said.
“We encouraged them to read the Scriptures. We taught them that
they could pray in their own words, that they did not need an intermediary
to be able to approach God, and they believed us. We shared with them
our new social consciousness.
“It’s not that our young adults are not spiritual. It’s
that they have lost the sense of need for a communal set of beliefs and
a communal celebration of faith. Their individual faith journeys reflect
the individualized culture of the ’80s and ’90s that gave
it birth.”
Chesto suggests that parents not be so focused on
“bringing their young adults back to church.”
She contends the Scriptures “make it abundantly
clear” that “as a Church we believe it is possible for differing
communities to perceive the same truth differently, and yet both are still
true. Both can be inspired revelation.”
Perhaps today’s young adults “have another perception of truth,
perhaps theirs is a different gospel,” she said.
“Perhaps accepting this truth would free us to listen to the word
of God as it is proclaimed in their lives, not to bring them ‘back,’
but to help us move forward together. When we are able to listen more
openly and honestly to this generation, I suspect they will be ready to
ritualize with us.”
Kathleen Chesto
