What if it doesn’t feel like home?

Recently my younger sister who was born in Australia visited Lebanon for the first time with dad and her best friend. My wife and I had the pleasure of being their tour guide. Having been born in Lebanon and coming here at a relatively older age, it was hard not to see my wife trying to convince my younger sister that Lebanon is the place to be, despite the many clear signs that the country is a mess, chaotic and for some unsafe. This is a typical debate in migrants’ households. For my sister it was hard to feel emotionally and see through the mess. It was hard for her to appreciate history, tradition, language and life in the absence of childhood attachment and in the absence of clear evidence.

I am always amazed how childhood memories of places conjure up joyful or painful memories which ultimately influence our outlook on life. Feelings and attachments are so powerful.

If positive, they fill our lives with unshakable confidence and positive outlook and we want to convince the world that the places, memories, conversations, food, people and way of thinking is the one and only way. We want to tell the world that this place is home and we want it to be home for everyone else. If negative, they can leave us wounded, resentful and quite pessimistic.

But what if it doesn’t feel like home? What if more importantly this is not the place where I was born and have no connection with? Have no friends, memories, experiences and conversations. Or have many gaps in these areas. What then?

This situation serves as an analogy for many young people and their connection to Church today.

In my role in youth ministry I conduct a lot of interviews with young volunteers and staff to be, more than 50 interviews in three years. A key question we ask concerns their faith life and Church involvement outside school. Keeping in mind they come from Catholic schools, almost unanimously they come back with two types of answers:

1) I don’t go to Church. My parents have never gone to Church and don’t believe and are not into the faith stuff. But my personal faith journey developed through the youth ministry program and I feel a great connection.

2) Ah yes, my parents used to take us to Church when were in primary school but we stopped going a long time ago and I never went by myself.

In a recent study in the U.S by the Centre for the Study of Religion and Society it was found that 1 in 2 Young Catholics are losing their Catholic identity by their late 20s.

So how do we communicate and give “formation” to the young people who have these characteristics and background.

As older people and faith educators we need to firstly reflect on our experience of church. This is a prerequisite to any attempt to ‘evangelize’. If those experiences have been positive like migrants who have a positive relationship with their home country, then the Church will be like home and our outlook, language and expressions will be generally positive. If however these experiences are negative and filled with disappointments, anger and resentment for right and wrong reasons, then our language and explanations about any aspects of the Church are likely to be negative and skewed.

Secondly and importantly we need to heed to the warning of Pope Francis in his first encyclical: “We need to be realistic and not assume that our audience understands the full background to what we are saying, or is capable of relating what we say to the very heart of the Gospel which gives it meaning, beauty and attractiveness” (Evangelii Gaudium).

Here is the locus of my argument: Just as those migrants coming from a country that they have a positive attachment to, cannot assume that those who are from there but have not visited, should feel what they feel and hold the same values they hold; so it is with educators who have emotional and moral attachment to the Church. They cannot assume that Church language including what we perceive to be basic like Sacrament, scripture, adoration, Mary, Rosary, theology of the body; are familiar or draw in them some deep emotional response. The Church does not feel like home to them. It may even feel like hell.

We cannot and should not throw at them back of the book answers or end-product of moral teachings that are multi-layered and the product of thousands of years of reflection in the form of only one-hour talks in our attempt to defend the faith. These talks have their place and audience but they do not appeal to the majority of young people who are not coming to Church.

We must not as Pope Francis says: “be obsessed with the disjointed transmission of a multitude of doctrines to be insistently imposed…the message has to concentrate on the essentials, on what is most beautiful, most grand, most appealing and at the same time most necessary. The message is simplified, while losing none of its depth and truth, and thus becomes all the more forceful and convincing.”

How beautiful and blessed are we? We are called to retell the Gospel again and lay the foundations once more. We must be like those first disciples preaching and retelling the “Good News” starting with the life of Jesus but from a stronger position, with two thousand years of tradition, learnings and reflections on our side.

Hence we are called to develop new formation programs, well researched and extensive, with modern language that take into account massive gaps in the education of young people and their needs as they are led to us, else we might as we have done so often, drive them away. This will include moral teaching, tackling the hot topics of our time, but with good foundations and relationships built first and using the appropriate language. In those programs, accompaniment is a must and as best possible delivered by young people who are themselves well formed.

We need a patient-patient-patient approach. We need to enter through the narrow gate to formation. It is hard and I have struggled with it too. I struggle with it now. I have been called soft and impractical because this approach does not deal “urgently” with the many issues present. Yet we have been challenged by Pope Francis, to avoid the “temptation” of falling into a “scheduled faith”, “where everything is listed” (Concluding Homily for Family Synod 2015).