One of the many amazing things about parish life is that we come to learn each other’s foibles and weaknesses, virtues and strengths. We live alongside each other in joys and sorrows, through births and deaths, weddings (and divorces) and graduations, suffering and illness, unemployment and times of economic success. Even without trying, we hear a good deal of the gossip about each other and like any family, we learn how to love each other, and how to hurt each other with surgical precision if we choose. WB Yeats pleaded “I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.” With such knowledge comes a sacred responsibility, especially to our children, who learn as much by watching what we do and how we act as by what we say.
I remember a song by Barbra Streisand called, “Children Will Listen.” Its lyrics and melody are haunting. Here’s a snippet of the lyrics:
Careful the things you say,
Children will listen.
Careful the things you do,
Children will see.
And learn.
Children may not obey,
But children will listen.
Children will look to you
For which way to turn,
To learn what to be.
Careful before you say,
Listen to me.
Children will listen.
So if we take them to Eucharistic Adoration to applaud a person, what then? If we dress them up in custom made protest T shirts, help them decorate banners with handy gospel slogans and march them to mass in the morning to parade around outside church, blow car horns to disrupt worship, race after the pastor with protest placards, then spend 20 minutes pounding on the school and parish office doors ringing the intercoms non-stop, what are we teaching? We hope we’re teaching the words we’ve encouraged them to trace on their glittery signs, but if they can read our faces and our hearts, we should shudder.