“What’s community?” asked Pat Coyle’s teenage son when she thought she had produced the clinching argument about why he should go to Mass. It was the beginning of her journey of letting him follow his own path.
I knew I was in trouble ‘passing on the faith’ the day my fourteen-year-old son looked at me blankly with his beautiful grey-blue eyes and said, ‘What’s community?’ That was his response to a heated debate we were having about going to Mass, – or rather, his not wanting to go to Mass. He was trying to give me good reasons why I shouldn’t force him to go every Sunday.
One of the better arguments, he thought, was that he could pray much more effectively to God on his own, instead of getting distracted at the ‘meaningless, boring Mass with all those people muttering their prayers’. So I explained calmly to him that the whole point of the Eucharist was that it was a community event, the coming together of the local parish to share and pray and celebrate the great love of God as shown to us through Jesus his Son. His innocent and entirely truthful question, ‘What’s community?’, really did stun me. Where would I start?
In actual fact, I thought that I had started a long time ago, since he was a baby with prayers every night without fail, after the bedtime story. And not just traditional prayers; I tried to make them interesting and relevant. He came to Mass with me every Sunday and he knew it meant a lot to me and that I went during the week as well. And I answered as truthfully as I could his questions and reflections as he got older.
At age eight he became a Buddhist for a short while after his dog died because he wanted him reincarnated, and that was a time to talk about Christian belief in an afterlife as well as grappling with why a so-called good God let his much beloved pet die. I was open and ready to discuss faith at anytime, and tried not to alienate him by preaching religion at him. I thought I’d done quite well; in fact, until that fateful day of the question, the day I woke up to the reality of his world, a very different world from the one that helped shape me.
His world was one where the individual was prized, designer labels defined who you were, and to succeed at most things you had to compete, not cooperate. Even for those who did excel, there was always some higher bar beckoning. Just being yourself was never quite good enough: there was always some star to emulate whilst celebrity gurus’ music, and chat filled your ipod, your Bebo, and the multi-television channels.
As a teenager he was a consumer, the target of those who had something to sell, with lots of money to promote their goods and the most sophisticated communications system ever to filter their consumerist vision of life. No surprise then that it wasn’t just the notion of community that was lost on my son – who by the way is a very bright young man – but also any understanding of the things that I would hold dear as part of my faith: prayer, repentance, God’s love, the need for guidance, a sense of the presence of something greater than ourselves. None of that had any resemblance or relevance to his formative daily culture, and he was simply not interested in mine.
So I determined to make him interested because I was the parent and he the child, and I knew what was best for him and I was panicking that he was losing the faith. So I threatened and manipulated him into going to Mass. And he went, to the very last one every Sunday evening, standing at the very back of the chapel, arms folded wearing that face of utter boredom and disgust that teenagers have down to an art form.
I was like the ageing farmer in Donegal who used to feed his calves from a bucket until halfway through when he would get fed up and just throw the contents of the pail over them, believing that almost by some process of osmosis the food would seep through the calfskin and nourish them.
I did that for a year until the madness stopped after a conversation with a Jesuit spiritual director. Bemoaning my son’s lack of interest in his faith, I proudly stated that at least I still made him go to Mass. He looked at me horrified. ‘How awful to force another human being to the Eucharist against their will. Why would you do it?’ Why indeed?
After a time of prayer and struggle, I found my answer. I did it because I never really thought of my fifteen-year-old son as an independent human being with a mind of his own, a will of his own, and God forbid, a spiritual path of his own. But he was, and I had done as much as I could for him. He didn’t want what I valued so much, so it was time for me to cut the strings that for him felt like chains. I did, secretly hoping that he would say, ‘Thanks Mum, I’ve seen the light, I’ll go to Mass with you voluntarily and pray to God every day.’
He didn’t, and just recently after his sixteenth birthday he told me that he probably (his word) doesn’t believe in ‘the whole God thing at all’. Not easy to hear, especially when you know as a parent how little support there is for young people in our modern culture, as they face into the painful enough journey that is life.
But I am happy that I have done the right thing and I am now in the continual process of accepting the tough but liberating truth that you cannot control or change another human being, even if that person is your own flesh and blood. They have a right to make their own choices and more importantly, their own mistakes, especially on the threshold of adulthood.
On Good Friday of this year I was delighted to be asked to be narrator in the Gospel reading of the Passion at the three o’clock ceremony. From my position at the lectern, I could see right down to the very back of my parish church. There, standing with his arms folded was my big six-foot-two son. He gave me a smile but has not darkened the doors of a church since. He hasn’t lost his faith – he’s lost my faith. He has yet to find his own and he may or may not do that. That’s his journey and I have passed something on to him for the long road – the gift of my faith in him.
This article first appeared in The Messenger (January 2009), a publication of the Irish Jesuits.
