A Catholic Goes to Backyard Bible Camp

Some new neighbors down the street were hosting Backyard Bible Camp, a truncated version of Vacation Bible School, and I sent the kids down last week. I went, as a youngster growing up in the Bible Belt, to VBS for several years, and still remember a few of the songs from the year the theme was "Joy Trek". ("Only one came back, only one came back, only one came back to say thank you to the Lord!") There was always the mildly strange element of being a Catholic kid in a predominantly Protestant group, but the strangeness was of the three-headed calf variety: more an oddity than a horror. And then there was the time my siblings and I were part of the cast of Kids Praise! 2, a musical featuring a big blue talking (and singing) Bible who put kids through their memorization paces. This is primarily memorable for me not for the theological content but because I first experienced the thrill of being in the theatrical clutch: one of the kids forgot a line which was necessary for moving the action forward; after an awkward pause, I stepped forward and delivered it, the show went on, and no one congratulated me for saving the day because from the audience it only looked like I had forgotten my own line and delivered it a beat too late.

So last week was full of songs, verse memorization, and games. Helping the kids memorize their verses was a cinch: I made it to Guards in AWANA back in the late '80s, so "God is my refuge and my strength; an ever-present help in time of trouble" (Ps. 46:1) rolled trippingly off my tongue as if I learned it yesterday. But the songs, oh, the songs! Christian faux-pop tarted up with the nasal stylings of auto-tuned teens wailing about how my God will meet all your needs. My girls, natural mimics all, had learned their verse after listening to their take-home CD the first day, but were also imitating the bad musicality of the singers. I don't care how catchy the songs are; I'm throwing the thing out because I can't stand much more of it. The message is good, true, and beautiful; the presentation? Killing me.

Watching Bible Camp from the outside was intriguing, as I watched most of the kids from the block file in each morning and recite (or not) their memory verses, urged on by the enthusiastic candy-wielding teenagers from my neighbor's Evangelical church. There are varying levels of religious observance on the street, and some children barely know what a bible is, let alone who Jesus is. Many of the parents were desperate for an hour and a half of daycare at the end of the summer. (I'm guilty as charged; I hadn't really considered sending the kids down to Bible Camp until I was so hard-up for quiet homeschool planning time that I would have let them beat each other with sticks outside if they would just leave me alone.) I wondered how effective an introduction to the Christian life it was to hand out isolated bible verses to those who have no basis for crediting anything the Bible says. I don't know; I'm not trying to be snide or dismissive of the clear and joyful effort put into the whole project. The parable of the sower and the seeds did become a running meditation for me all week: the soil must be prepared if the word is to be accepted and take root, and it seems to me that part of that preparation is that an appeal to the authority of the Bible must be grounded in the necessity of the search for God. The existence of the Bible, as a physical object, is incontrovertible, but its authority rests on establishing that God has indeed chosen this means of communicating Himself to man, something that gets circular when using the Bible to establish itself as such. The urge for God, or the search for meaning in life has resonance even to children, even outside of any established religious convention. Does this need to be explored, or even touched on, for scripture memorization to take on any significance other than a means to candy?

"He then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety." 

I know that the format of Catholic basic religious education for children has altered greatly since my days of atrocious catechesis in CCD. I can still remember the Silver Burdett books used for sacrament prep in second grade: banal and blithely content-free. From teaching second-grade classes at church when Eleanor was preparing for her first communion three years ago, I know that even the poorer textbooks under consideration made more of an effort to communicate a Catholic worldview, even if their paucity of vocabulary meant that the mass was described as a "celebration!" on every other page. I know that the catechism format of question-and-answer is having a bit of a revival, even if the questions are a bit simplistic. I celebrate this, if you will, because the catechism format gives a philosophical underpinning to the Catholic life. The traditional first question we ask children: "Why did God make me?" has several different answers, depending on the source consulted; the versions I memorized were "God made me to know, love, and serve him, and to be happy with him in heaven" and "God made me to show forth his goodness and to be happy with him in heaven". This kind of questioning, introducing children to the broader world of ideas and of an examined life (Why did God make me? Why did God make anything? What does the answer to this question say about the way that I should live my life?), starts to build an awareness of God and our life in him that is enhanced, transformed, and directed by the Bible; fed and enriched by the sacraments; encouraged and sustained by the Churches Militant, Suffering, and Triumphant.

I love this rich, multi-layered religion, and I love the the simple beginning. "Why did God make me?" isn't a just Catholic question, nor even a Christian one, but thanks to centuries of theological and philosophical tradition, and generations of systematic childhood catechesis, we OWN it.

But this isn't an infallible approach, if presented only as information. Generations of poorly-educated Catholics and Protestant converts can attest to that. So what's the answer? I don't know. All I can say is that I find more and more that I am Roman Catholic, not just by birth but by temperament as well as theological and philosophical inclination. The flatter spiritual approach of Protestantism is not for me, nor is it something I desire for my children, no matter how grateful I am for free babysitting. But I am grateful for it, and I hope that the zeal my neighbor shows bears fruit, and that the word so enthusiastically scattered will take root even in imperfectly tended soil.