The Humbling Spiritual Path of Teaching Teenagers

I have to say, it’s very humbling to become a teacher of any kind. When you have to stand up in front of a group of people and expound on a given subject, even one you think you know something about, it becomes clear very quickly how little you really know. As the old Jesuit joke has it, “I don’t know anything about that subject; I’ve never even taught it.”

Also, students have an annoying habit of asking questions that are so basic – so antecedent to the subject matter you are discussing – that you can be flabbergasted and utterly at a loss at how to answer them. Students can ask questions that are so basic they’re actually philosophical and therefore quite mind-numbing.

A lawyer standing up and giving a lecture on intellectual property law, for example, expecting and ready to answer knotty questions about the Internet and copyright, can be stopped in his or her tracks by a question like, “Why is it wrong to kill people?” or “What is a crime?” Questions like that are four or five degrees behind, or ahead of, depending upon how you look at it, what the lawyer really wants to talk about.

So it was that I became, kicking and screaming, a Catechist, a teacher for Confirmation. I agreed to do it because I have children going through the whole Confirmation program, my parish desperately needed teachers, I spent 10 years earning a master’s degree in theology, and I ran out of excuses. I also wanted to know what my own 14-year-old was learning from the program.

I’m a writer, not a teacher, but in the past whenever I imagined myself teaching a course of some kind, I always assumed it would be in front of interested, retired people or graduate students. I could see myself teaching Biblical Hebrew… or Kierkegaard… or Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. What I never imagined was standing in front of 15 or 16 nice enough but utterly bored 14-year-old Orange County kids who are being forced by their parents to attend confirmation classes and listen to a bookish, middle-aged guy (me) talk to them about such things as Baptism, Christian Ethics, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so on, as mandated by the curriculum we were given.

The problem with teaching subjects like these to teenagers is that they presuppose the knowledge and acceptance of other truths – and even the personal intellectual and moral commitment to them – that these kids simply do not share.

In short: Sometimes I feel like a Victorian Etiquette instructor, talking about how one should keep one’s pinkie finger raised when drinking tea, standing in front of some convicts in a prison cafeteria. On the other hand, an attitude like that is really just elitist and a coverup for the truth: That it isn’t easy to explain fundamental religious and moral truths in a way that can meet the common sense objections of contemporary teenagers.

“How can you prove that Christianity is true?”

“How do we know that someone didn’t just make up the whole Bible?”

“How can you possible believe that wine turns into Christ’s blood when you can see with your own eyes and taste with your own mouth that it hasn’t? And, even if it did, wouldn’t that just make you a cannibal?”

“What’s wrong with having sex with a girl when she’s on the Pill and really, really wants to do it?”

“Aren’t Christians simply victims of some sort of evil cult programming, tricked into believing nonsense that no sane person would ever believe?”

Of course, questions like these come from the smart ones, the ones who are actually slightly interested. Most are so indifferent they don’t even question, merely shrug, shoot spitballs at one another, and text-message their friends.

So, desperate times require desperate measures. Like most catechists, I’ve had to seek out materials that go back to the drawing board and address some of these prior, more basic, more difficult questions. For example, one class I showed excerpts from the gritty, disturbing documentary, The Devil’s Playground. We were discussing what Confirmation actually is – being confirmed in your religious faith in a deeper way – and this shocking film dramatically brings the issue of personal commitment to the fore.  (I won’t even get into the old and somewhat complicated history of Confirmation as a sacrament in the Christian churches and the various, conflicting theologies of what it is all about.)

The Devil’s Playground is about the Amish custom of rumspringa. When Amish kids turn 16, they are, in a sense, given permission to run wild. You want to rebel, the Amish say, go rebel… and the kids do, big time. They party like rock stars… do drugs… have sex… drive fast cars… sample everything the “English” world offers. Then, in a few months or a few years, if they decide they want to return, they must get down on their knees and ask to be readmitted to the community and promise to accept their way of life without complaint.

Strangely enough, the Amish have a 90% retention record. Amish kids go out and sample the joys of contemporary, materialistic society… and the overwhelming majority say, “No, thanks.”

To my surprise, my Confirmation kids were captivated by the film and eager to talk about its implications. The film, I said, dramatizes that they, too, have a choice to make, albeit a less stark one: To commit themselves to some version of the Catholic/Christian story, or not. They will, by their actions, choose – and that choice will, whether they like it or not, shape their lives, just as a similar, more draconian choice made by Amish teens shape their lives.

Now I know, though, why the Jesuits typically force their scholastics to teach high school for a few years before they earn their graduate degrees in theology. There is nothing like facing the boredom, incredulity and outright indifference of teenagers to force you to dig deeper and find more compelling reasons for “the hope that lies within you.”