This weekend’s Gospel reading is always a fun one to explain to children. As we sat in Mass this weekend and the deacon talked about the woman caught in adultery, child number four leans over to her mother and asks, “What is adultery?”
“Let’s just say the woman was caught in the company of another man,” came the response.
“Isn’t that just dating?” the child replies.
“Well….”
The oldest child wanted to know what happened to the man. Why is it always the woman caught adultery? What ever happened to the man?
Good question, but the deacon never got to that.
The whole situation reminded me of a day a lifetime ago when I was teaching middle school. We were discussing Henry VIII and had just finished reading Robert Bolt’s play “A Man For All Seasons” about St. Thomas More. We engaged in a powerful discussion about the formation of our conscience how we too could shape our lives so as to be “God’s first” above all that society tells us is better or more important.
At some point, the discussion turned to the mistresses of the late king. For the first time that afternoon, I saw a couple of blank stares on a few faces in the crowd and upon questioning the reasons for such looks, I was told that while I had been cruising along quite nicely discussing kings and servants, popes and acts of succession, I had never really outlined what a mistress was or how these women had worked their way from housemaids to queen.
Puzzled, I asked “Yo,u know what a mistress is, don’t you?”
“Oh sure,” came the response from one student in the front row, “she’s like a wife’s helper.”
Sit with that for a minute.
I must have grinned from ear to ear because she knew from the laughter of those more experienced than she that her answer had been off the mark just a bit. When I explained a better definition of a mistress, she too joined in the laughter at her previous answer and left class that day with her head held high that she had been the one to not only cause us to take a break from some serious discussion, but that it had been her uninformed answer that had left us laughing right up until the bell rang.
As teachers and parents, children arrive before us with an emptiness that we feel obliged to fill. We fill it with information we think they should know and beliefs we think they ought to hold. Sometimes we forget to leave a little room in that space for them to learn for themselves. Daily, we pour in facts and experience that are unique to us and expect them to shape their lives accordingly. We ignore the individuality before us until one of them says something that makes us realize that what we have created is not quite what we had expected. We have told our version of the world, but we left out some important details.
Parents are first teachers, but we better make sure we always lead in the right direction.