How high on a five-year-old child’s list of favorite things do you think sitting quietly and listening for an hour rates?

Exactly. When you have a short person in the house just beginning to catch onto the whole concept of Catholicism, you can’t rely on the ceremony of church to awe them into believing.

At least that’s what we’ve found in our home. By the time Cassie hit her fifth birthday, we could see that she was starting to catch onto Catholicism. One clue was when she tried to require all her little party-going friends--from as-yet-unrevealed religious backgrounds--to pray before we cut into her "Little Mermaid" birthday cake.

She is quite the little messenger of God (with a little Disney thrown in).

How she came to have this strong foundation of belief is still somewhat of a pleasant mystery to us. We did immerse Cassie in Christian messages from when she was very wee.

Some of it probably even helped:  Things like giving her a toddler’s Bible with pictures and easy-to-read stories, and letting that be one of the books she could get down herself to look at, sleep with, take on car trips, wrinkle, set up doll beds on, whatever. We thought of that little Bible the same way we think about religion: Live with it, don’t just pull it off the shelf once in a while.

If I had to make a list of the things we did right--in that grand old tradition of parenting by trial and error--I’d pick:

• Teaching her a short grace to say before dinner. This has become a mixed blessing, so to speak. Cassie’s philosophy is: If it’s dinner time, it’s prayer time. No exemptions for other people’s homes or restaurants and no excuses. No funny prayers, either. Daddy tries sometimes and she is NOT amused.

• Telling Cassie that, even when she’s bad, Jesus loves her.

• Encouraging her to pray for friends and family before bed. This has led to some of the most heartwarming experiences--the kind that make me feel like my heart grows about three times its normal size. (Think of the protagonist at the end of that famous Grinchy tale.) For example, a wonderful friend of mine had breast cancer. I couldn’t even tell if Cassie understood why she had lost her hair and how scary her sickness was until one night before bed Cassie said she wanted to pray for my buddy. Of course, the thrust of Cassie’s request was that God help my friend grow her hair back!

• Stressing the REAL Christmas and Easter stories. Plus weaving God’s presence into all types of tale--combination storytelling and subliminal parental advertising (in only the best sense).

• Taking her to church with us, of course. But also teaching her that she can talk to God anytime she wants and doesn’t have to go to his house for him to hear her. I know she took that lesson to heart because one morning I went to once again into the kitchen to prod my pokey turtle into finishing up her cereal before school. She jerked her head up quickly, caught in the act of not eating, and defended herself with: "I was just praying to God!"

• Enlisting the help of grandparents and friends to reinforce our messages. At one point, Cassie told me that Grandma and Grandpa love Jesus, too. Somehow this cross-generational buy-in really made the message stick.

Lest you think my husband and I are naturals at this parenting gig, we also took a few side roads that I don’t think helped Cassie at all and may have, in fact, waylaid her a little on her trek into Catholicism.

For example, I remember trying to make Cassie sit still in church and listen when she was three years old. Talk about doing penance! Getting in trouble every Sunday morning didn’t exactly make church Cassie’s favorite place to go.

Here are a few other boffs (the ones I will admit to):

• Sent her on down to Sunday school when she would have rather stayed with us. Sunday school is wonderful for keeping the Word simple and weaving activities and messages together. Most of the time Cassie loves to go with the other kids. But when she’d rather stay with Mom and Dad at mass, we should have let her.

• Attempted to explain too much. The world seems so big and complicated when you’re little anyway. At times we tried to be too exacting in sharing our theologically sound but toddler-baffling interpretations of famous Bible stories like Noah’s Ark and Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. I still remember watching little eyes glaze over as my husband tried to explain "original sin."

• Made God the great enforcer in the sky. Just think: You’re five years old. You’re in kindergarten. You have Mom, Dad, teachers, daycare providers, grandparents, friends, basically anyone who is bigger than you telling you what to do and what not to do. Do you really need to think His watchful eye is only waiting to catch you in the act of yet another time-out offense? I remember invoking the name of the Almighty more than once after we had run out of our own arguments. The message of His all-encompassing love is so much more important for kids to learn first.

• Stopped her during dinner grace to correct "Holly Spidit" and "from my county." We caught on pretty quickly, though, and still love hearing how she massacres some traditional prayers.

I guess the good news is that most of what we did right took. Cassie loves God, Jesus, the Virgin Mary and even knows a lot of "begats" by heart. She prays, she insists on going to church and her most recent crusade is to teach her friends about guardian angels.

Better yet, we’ve got a second chance. Our second daughter, Jenny, is just seven months old. Who knows what kind of little missionary of God we’ll make out of her if we do it all right this time around?

by Gwen Kopetzky
E-mail comments to the author at:  gmkope@home.net

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This article is © Copyright 1999 by Gwen Kopetzky

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