Family is Where Faith Begins
/The Boston Herald
There is a boy and he has thick, dark red hair with lots of cowlicks. And he has freckles on his face and hazel eyes. And there is gentleness about him, and something else, too, a kind of joy that makes you smile and wish you had a boy his age at home. I asked him last week, “How old are you?” and he said, “I’m nine.”
I thought he was older. He has an earnest, fresh-face that you’d see in a Disney movie. He is a farm boy you’d hear whistling while walking with his dog to the barn.
He acts older than nine, too. I used to teach fourth grade. I know nine-year-olds. They’re antsy and he’s not. They fight with their brothers and he doesn’t. They think the world spins around them. And this boy’s world revolves around his mother and his father and his two brothers.
I sit a few pews behind him in church. He has one brother his size and one smaller - a boy about three. I don’t know if he is the oldest in his family or if he is the middle child or how it is that he and his same-size brother sit and listen to the priest and don’t fidget or poke each other, or sigh or roll their eyes the way children do when they’re someplace they don’t want to be.
Maybe it’s because this boy and his family are exactly where they want to be, happy in church, not so eager to bolt that they scramble out of the pew while the last hymn is being sung. That’s how they appear, anyway. Happy and relaxed and as comfortable as if they were at home.
Every week, they take their positions in the same pew: the mother, the nine-year-old, the father, the other boy, and the three-year-old who walks and is passed among them. The three-year-old is a bit of a challenge. He doesn’t sit still and he doesn’t pay attention, but he also doesn’t scream or cry. He goes from brother to mother to father to brother and he hugs them all. And he never stops.
And they hug him back, even the boys, even when he leans hard against them. And even when he plants giant kisses on their cheeks, they don’t scrunch up their faces and push him away. They very quietly kiss him back.
They learned this from their parents. That’s what I witness. They learned and are now teaching this quiet affection. The father has his arm around one boy and the mother has her arm around the other and there is a lot of shoulder squeezing and hands on arms and the gentle patting down of cowlicks. And there is no pushing away in this family, no “Sit up straight.” Or “Please don’t do that.” They are five peas in a pod, five people all on the same team, bound and surrounded by love.
My friend, Father Coen, would have loved this family. He used to say that it was important to take a child to church, even a very young child, because although children may not understand the religious significance of the mass, they have, for nearly one hour, their parents’ exclusive attention. For there are no interruptions in church. No telephones ringing. No TV. No doorbells. No friends stopping by.
He used to watch from the altar children with their parents. And he used to say how sometimes he’d see a toddler take his mother’s face in his tiny hands and without words make her look into his eyes. “That’s how children learn love,” he said.
And once learned that love is passed on. And on. And that’s what you see and feel in this family. And that’s what I see and feel in this boy.
People wonder if it’s possible to raise good children in these crazy, immoral and violent times. I see this family and I know that it is. I look at this red-haired, freckled- faced boy and I have faith in the world.
