The Riches of Catechesis, by Julie Lane-Gay

By Julie Lane-Gay

Editor’s Note: This article is drawn from a new book by my friend Julie Lane-Gay called The Riches of Your Grace: Living in the Book of Common Prayer. Julie is a gardener, editor, wife, mother, and much more. The book is a beautiful reflection on her life lived through the prayers and liturgies of the Anglican prayerbook tradition. It goes through different parts of the prayer book, such as Morning and Evening Prayer, Compline, Baptism, the Eucharist. Historian Bruce Hindmarsh writes about the book that “Julie's compelling personal narrative is all about how these ancient words seep into you, little by little, and change you at the very depths of your being." This selection is from Chapter 8, entitled “The Catechism.”

Late at night, when others are ensconced in a Louise Penny mystery or watching Netflix, I have my light low and my covers high, maybe a small mug of something warm, and I read (rather predictably) about plants. It doesn’t get much better than Anna Pavord on tulips, or a new favorite, The Nature of Oaks.

I’m constantly mulling over how late I can sow lettuce, how hard I can prune my pale pink climbing rose, why my blueberry leaves are looking shriveled. What is that new lacy white flower in my neighbor’s back garden? When I arrive somewhere new, I don’t pull up Yelp to find tacos or sushi, I study the trees. I try to figure out why the streets are lined with firs instead of cedars, how low the temperature dips in the winter, how much rain falls in a year. As nerdy as it might be, trees and shrubs are how I first make sense of a place.

But plants—even the most stalwart of pines or roses—can’t be understood in isolation. You can plunk them in a pot and they’ll grow for a year or two, but you won’t enable them to thrive. To make sense of how plants grow, you need to not just learn the Latin naming system but to study the local ecosystem—the soil, rainfall, sunlight, and surrounding plants.

Similarly, Scripture can’t be fully understood in discrete parts; you need ways to make sense of it as a whole—the Old Testament, the New Testament, as well as the enduring creeds—to see these as an ecosystem, and Catechism provides a way to do so. This enduring system of learning offers a way to make sense of God’s ways—what He has been doing, is doing now, and will do in the future. It’s the best way I have found to hold His whole story together in your mind and in your life.

Before I’d noticed it in the pages of the prayer book, a friend said he thought Catechism was what “the church needed most.” I was mystified; if it was so needed, why was it so rarely mentioned in church, or elsewhere? Why was it buried deep in the prayer book? I assumed what we needed most was Bible study, prayer, attending to the Holy Spirit. It was a long time before I figured out that Catechism offered all of these, even connected them to each other.

To catechize means to teach, to give synthesized information using a question and answer format; it’s a system that originated with the Jewish system of learning faith orally. It may seem unusual that a teaching tool of questions and answers is placed in the middle of a collection of prayers, but it’s stood well the test of time. Not only does Catechism make sense of the world, it helps us make sense of praying, of the prayer book itself.

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My husband subtitled a book he wrote, “Why It’s Tempting to Live As If God Doesn’t Exist.” By this he meant that in our increasingly secularized culture, where God has been removed from holidays, music, education, and history (and more), Christians have to pay close attention to see God at work in the world, to observe Him holding it together. We have to become attentive, like astronomers on moonlit nights or bird watchers in thick forests. Yet if we can learn Scripture’s history and teaching, if we study the stories of Jesus, the Bible can tell us nearly everything we need to know about making sense of the world, to find Christ in it. As Bible expositor Jen Wilkin writes,

We read its words and come away with a plain meaning or a personal meaning, but we miss the deeper meaning. We are like a casual visitor to the cathedral, awed by its architectural grandeur but unaware of the symbols the architect has carefully chosen to draw us into worship and remembrance. Our eyes are untrained. We fail to see what we ought to see.

This “deeper meaning” of the Bible is astonishingly well presented (and synthesized) in the Catechism. Depending on the version of the prayer book, the pages of Catechism might be tucked within the services for life’s stages—Baptism, Confirmation, Marriage, Burial—or they might be ensconced in the final pages with a list of specific instructions for clergy (someone called Catechism the “prayer book’s flyover state”). Depending on the comprehensiveness of the version, sometimes the Catechism is five pages long and sometimes it’s seventy-five. Sometimes it’s printed in a separate booklet, such as the recent Anglican To Be a Christian; sometimes it’s in the prayer book itself.

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Catechisms are all around us. These tools of educating ourselves to make sense of something, to instruct us, aren’t exclusive to Christians. Philosopher James K. A. Smith explains this phenomenon as we are constantly being formed in “longings and desires that orient us toward some version of the good life.” Netflix and Disney films form us by vivifying that the surest route to the admiration and adoration we long for is beauty, fame, and money. These films may not articulate questions and answers, but they skillfully catechize us with their plots and characters. My phone catechizes me in the importance of being connected, of not being left out. Studies show our phones implicitly ask us, Might you want to lighten this conversation up because you might get interrupted by a call or text? Do you want to be restrained in your empathy because you might need to go quickly? How do we answer?

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Wendell Berry, one of my favorite writers (and farmers), has been described as the catechist of the “lost art of stewardship and community.” In his poem “Questionnaire,” Berry asks in the initial stanza:

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade?
Please name your preferred poisons.

His use of direct questions (each of the poem’s five stanzas begins with one) presses his reader to personally consider what they don’t know or don’t want to acknowledge, and it does so far more effectively than if he had used statements. Similarly (though less confrontational in tone), the Catechism’s use of questions shows us what we are missing (or have forgotten). It helps us do the remembering that God calls us back to. By concentrating on the Apostles’ Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Sacraments, the prayer book’s Catechism structures and prioritizes our learning.

Most versions were written in the last 450 years as responses to challenges that confronted the church. Luther wrote one of the first Protestant versions soon after the Reformation in the early 1500s. Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan created “The New City Catechism” in 2011 in response to the increasing secularism of New York City (and beyond). Baptists, Lutherans, and Presbyterians (and countless others) have created their own versions. Questions such as “How is God like earthly fathers?” “How is God unlike earthly fathers?” “How did God prepare us for redemption?” and “How do we recognize the presence of the Holy Spirit in our lives?” are staples. If taught well, these questions become conversational; they show us where we’re missing pillars in the scaffolding of our faith.

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Historically the Christian Catechism was taught to prepare new believers for Baptism, or teenagers for Confirmation, a follow-up process to their infant Baptism. More recently, as so many of us have been raised without much biblical knowledge (and often without Baptism), churches are focusing on offering classes for adults and resources for households as well. Some families talk over one question and answer each evening during dinner, enjoying the combination of the joy of four-year-olds, the skepticism of sixteen-year-olds, and the wisdom of seventy-year-olds. Wrestling through “What is the church?” or “How does sin affect you?” becomes clearer conversing with others; it stays in your mind better as well.

Most frequently, the Catechism is taught as a class within a church community. For several years, a friend and I hosted eight people at our house for a Friday night and Saturday. The first evening we did an overview of the Apostles’ Creed, asking questions such as, “How does recognizing God as Creator affect your understanding of His creation?” We discussed where the Bible delves into this, where we see it (or don’t) in our work and homes. Enjoying spaghetti and caesar salad, we chatted over why (and if ) it matters that Jesus descended to the dead. How does it change our lives if we believe in the resurrection? Saturday, we got a start on the Ten Commandments. “What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself ? What might you covet? What does it mean not to steal?” As we ate sandwiches and munched potato chips, we talked (and laughed) about stealing towels from hotel rooms, how we are more prone to steal from the faceless Marriot than from someone we know.

For several years, Craig taught the Catechism after our Sunday service (doughnuts were a bonus). He moved slowly through the questions, meeting most Sundays for eight or nine months. The group often became a community, collectively making sense of hell, the Ascension, and the virgin birth. A few weekly Bible study groups at our church have opted to go through the Catechism’s questions instead of their usual book study. Occasionally a catechist (a trained person appointed by a local bishop to teach Catechism) joins them for six weeks to guide the group through it.

I try to spend a few days revisiting the prayer book’s Catechism on my own once or twice every year. I feel the need for the reminder, to be regrounded. Last summer, sitting on the deck in the early morning, overlooking the waters of Trincomali Channel (off the coast of Vancouver), I reread the questions about the Ten Commandments. I noticed that when the Catechism asks, “What is your duty towards your Neighbour?” it answers, “to hurt nobody by word or deed, to be true and just in all my dealings.” We have a new neighbor, and he leaves out messy garbage; he parks his huge truck in front of our house instead of his own. Do I consider going over to chat with him about this? Or quietly just cleaning up the papers and bottles? I am neither true nor just “in my dealings.”

As I walk through the Creed and Commandments, the questions and their answers show me that I sin against God at least as much as I sin against people, that the ordinariness and hiddenness of my sin keeps me from attending to it, from repenting. The Catechism asks, “How do you rightly live in the fear of God?” and the answer takes me first to the Ten Commandments, then to the Sermon on the Mount. How am I hiding God’s goodness, hesitating to voice the ways of Christ? How have I suppressed generosity, or practiced it so that others would admire it?

The Catechism’s questions and answers initially seem like a long test with lots of short answers included. Yet the more I focus on them, on my own or with others, the more I notice they create something bigger; they offer a structure far more than the sum of their parts.

Similar to when I say Morning Prayer at home, I try to ask the Catechism’s questions and answers aloud—to hold myself accountable for what I’ve forgotten, for questions I can’t answer. Once I corralled a friend to do some questions with me (a nice glass of wine sweetened the endeavor). Her surprise and delight at the answers reminded me what gems these truths are. This past July, after revisiting the Ten Commandments, I spent time reading the questions and answers about heaven: “How are the Church on earth and the Church in heaven joined in worship?” and “What do you know about the unending resurrected life of believers?” Like reading an interview, the questions help me process these tenets more personally. The poet and pastor George Herbert noted that “at sermons and prayers, men may sleep or wander; but when one is asked a question, he must discover what he is.” I discovered I didn’t know much about heaven.

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The older prayer books’ Catechism often begins by asking, “What is your name? Who gave you this name?” God’s interest in me is personal, attentive. After your name (the easy part!), the questions delve into the Apostles’ Creed. “What do you learn in these Articles of Faith?” The answer intrigues me for how it’s worded: “I learn to have faith in the one true God: in God the Father, who made me and all the world; in God the Son, who redeemed me and all mankind; and in the Holy Spirit, who sanctifies me and all the people of the world.”

An early question about the Creed is “What is the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and his divinity?” (a challenging one for the dinner table). This takes us to those passages in John’s Gospel that show us that all Christ does as a human, he also does as God—the two can be “distinguished but can never be separated.” The answer also restates who the Trinity is: “Before He ever became human, he was eternally living and active within the unity of the Trinity.” The questions “How do the Father, Son and Spirit work together?” and “How does the vastness of the Trinity meld into the specificity and sanctification of our salvation?” push us further. Theologian Jeremy Begbie frequently explains how it was music that helped him understand the Trinity—that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit can be understood as three notes of one chord. Hearing them separately enhances how we hear them together, and hearing them together amplifies how we hear them alone.

One of the last questions about the Creed asks, “How is the communion of saints practiced?” The answer always moves me. “By mutual love, care and service, and by worshiping together where the word of the gospel is preached and the Sacraments of the gospel are administered.” We work at loving and caring for each other, and a part of that work is worshiping side by side. Through that care, and worship, God holds us communally as well as individually. Psychiatrist Curt Thompson writes that the “brain can do a lot of really hard things for a very long time as long as it doesn’t have to do them alone.” Armed with love, we can offer care and service, we can proclaim the gospel, and we can receive God’s grace in our Baptism and the Eucharist.

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Even with my long-standing timidity of poetry, I’m drawn to the poems of Brett Foster. I find myself looking for good quotes in them. They are pointedly honest but never self-absorbed. Several years ago, I happened upon his “Catechism”:

What sort of belief would you say is yours?

Porous. Calibrated to the times. The week.

In what ways has superflux affected you?

Too much esteem. Tuned finely to the body’s work.

What do you fear has not been delivered?

The disease of courage. Will it be required?

No questions, please. Can you see yourself tested?

I have never suffered for anything.

In how many dimensions is your faith?

One thin one, at least. [Aside] Was that a trick question?

What is the single thing that sustains you?

Abiding hope that being here’s made good.

Care to clarify? Care to offer last words?

I offer essentially nothing, but enough—

“Calibrated to the times,” “One thin one,” and the culture’s “superflux” (or superabundance) indeed leave me with a “thin” dimension of my faith. Superflux shows up on my laptop effortlessly.

To push back at my own thin dimension, I recently made myself try a small experiment. Every time I felt the urge to check my phone, to ask if it might delight me with a fun text or distraction, I “answered” by quietly reciting the Apostles’ Creed. The difference in my reaction, in my mind and in my body, shocked me. At first it was hearing “maker of heaven and earth”; another time it was “resurrection of the dead”; these phrases both calmed and cheered me. After saying the Creed for the fourth time one afternoon, I literally heard myself admit, “That’s the world I want.”

After the Creed, the Catechism’s questions and answers concentrate on the Ten Commandments, moving from truth to living out these truths, from the grace articulated in the Creed to ways to respond, to act. The Commandments were originally revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai as a structure for the Israelites to live together, but they’re equally relevant for us. When a friend’s son was a teenager he saw the Ten Commandments for the first time, and after reading them through a second time, he said, “You know, even without the God parts, people could avoid a boatload of trouble and get along a lot better if they just stuck to these.”

Catechism students (or catechumens as they are more formally called) are asked to recite the Ten Commandments aloud and then to answer practical questions.

Question: “How might you use God’s Name irreverently?”

Answer: “In false or half-hearted worship, oppression of the poor, and conflicts cloaked with divine cause, people use God’s Name without reverence for him and only to further their own goals.”

It’s interesting that swearing isn’t on that list.

When we come to the eighth commandment, we find:

Question: “What things besides property can you steal?”

Answer: “I can steal or defraud others of wages, and honor; credit; answers, and inventions; friendship, hope and goodwill from others.”

Despite my friend’s son’s observation, the Ten Commandments and the full Catechism have a surprising vulnerability. Instead of providing a tool to help us mature in Christ and see God’s enduring work in the world, they can be, and have been, co-opted into tools of power for the purposes of others’ agendas in a variety of settings. One of the worst examples of this misuse was perpetrated by enslavers in the 1800s, who created and instituted a horrific version of the Catechism’s emphasis on the Ten Commandments as a means of manipulating their slaves’ behavior for their own gain. Instead of the owners asking “What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself ?” some translated the question into “How must Negroes behave to their masters?” Even worse, they rephrased the answer to this: “to be honest, diligent and faithful in all things, and not to give saucy answers; and even when I am whipped for doing well, to take it patiently and turn to God for my reward.” To make this horrific deviation even more awful, some enslavers upheld their use of the Catechism under the guise of teaching slaves to read.

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While family dinner table conversations focusing on a Catechism question were not common in our house, one Sunday heading home after church we were discussing the meaning of the sabbath. With the aroma of McDonald’s drive-through bounty wafting through the car, one of our sons looked at Craig and asked, “What don’t you do on Sunday?” Craig thought about it for a second and said he tried not to do the work he does Monday to Friday (and I thought to myself, “and sometimes Saturday”). He said he tried to treat the day as the one in which we live in the reality that everything is done, the reality that God has everything in His hands, that we can take a day off from frenetically trying to do our part. He said, “I can rest because the world is God’s project, not my project. It is our day to ‘practice’ what heaven will be like, to live into that.” Over lunch, ketchup packets littering the kitchen table, Craig added that the commandment also calls us to celebrate with God’s people, so going to church together, eating lunch as a family (one of the kids raised a french fry in acknowledgment of lunch together), or dinner with friends was a priority.

Some years I’ve used the Catechism’s questions to form my NewYear’s resolutions or shape a Lenten practice. I invariably somehow center my resolution on my behavior toward my husband and kids; it’s where I sin again and again. Am I attentive and kind to my husband when the pressures on me are heavy? Does my honoring my father and mother manifest as grace extended to my own parents for mistakes they might have made? Do I love myself well? Do I give myself time for enough sleep and time alone, mindful that these habits replenish me and are a crucial part of my treating others well?

The Lord’s Prayer is the prayer that Jesus taught in his Sermon on the Mount. After you say it aloud, the catechist asks you to ponder, “What do you desire of God in this prayer?” The answer is more comprehensive than I think it will be, and different requests come to mind each time I read it. I want God to do a lot. The Catechism’s answer states:

I desire my Lord God our heavenly Father, who is the giver of all goodness,

To send his grace unto me, and to all people:

That we may worship him, and serve him, obey him as we ought to do:

And I pray unto God, that he will send us all things that are needful both for our souls and bodies:

That he will be merciful unto us, and forgive us our sins, and help us to forgive others:

And that it will please him to save and defend us in all dangers both of soul and body; and that he will keep us from all sin and wickedness, and from everlasting death.

And this I trust he will do of his mercy and goodness, through our Lord Jesus Christ. And therefore I say, Amen, So be it.

The order of these requests illustrates a spiritual truth I am quick to distort. My inclination is to worship, serve, and obey so that God might be willing to send me his grace. Instead it all begins with Him.

The Catechism finishes with the Sacraments. Some of these questions reflect historical challenges Cranmer was facing in the 1500s, such as “What is the outward visible sign in Baptism?” and “Why was the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper ordained?” Some of the more theologically probing include “Why is it appropriate to baptize infants?” and “What is required of those who come to the Lord’s Supper?” I have to keep resituating myself within these inward and outward signs. The Eucharist is not solely a matter of kneeling at the altar with a reverent demeanor.

At the end of some versions of the Catechism, we find the encouragement for every Christian to structure for themselves a “Rule of Life,” which truly is not a diet nor a regime but a means of helping us focus on the “essentials” (Cranmer’s fine word) of our lives in Christ. The six parts echo the much longer sixth-century Rule of Saint Benedict (created for Benedict’s monks) and has been simplified for laypeople:

The regularity of his attendance at public worship and especially at the holy Communion.

The practice of private prayer, Bible-reading, and self-discipline.

Bringing the teaching and example of Christ into his everyday life.

The boldness of his spoken witness to his faith in Christ.

Personal service to the Church and the community.

The offering of money according to his means for the support of the work of the Church at home and overseas.

The tone of these six relieves me and daunts me. I’m daunted by the magnitude of what the Rule calls us to do but relieved at its straightforwardness. Does personal service to my church infer I need to say yes to anything I am asked to do at church? Am I called to be bold in all contexts? I calm down remembering that these callings, like the Commandments, come as a whole. I am not called to sign up at every job at church if it means that I will neglect the sabbath.

This Rule of Life, I have slowly come to see, mirrors the broader prayer book, offering a structure, a trellis to grow onto, a means to find our lives rooted and ordered and flourishing in Christ.

One Sunday morning after the service, I was chatting briefly with a young lawyer in a brilliant red dress and shiny gold hoop earrings. Her glamour and poise intimidated me, but I wanted a cup of tea and she was in a hurry for coffee. She explained that she was racing to get to the Catechism class but needed a bit of caffeine. I asked her if she was enjoying Catechism, and she looked at me a bit surprised. “I only did it because a friend wanted to; all the learning sounded sort of medicinal. But it’s been fantastic. I have learned so much about my faith, about God. It’s offered me a way to see into the Bible so much more clearly. I think we forget that faith is not just about feeling; we need to know enough about God and Christ that we know they are there regardless of what we feel. It’s like the prayer book. Catechism takes all these pieces and makes them into a cohesive whole. It feels pretty needed in a city like Vancouver, probably in any big city.”

She looked at me and shrugged her slim shoulders. She raised her cup in a slight salute and smiled. “It’s probably needed everywhere.”