Catechesis

Before anyone ever “Beat Bobby Flay,” back when crowning the next “Iron Chef” existed as only a glimmer in a young producer’s imagination, Violet Kuczka created in our kitchen.  I can still smell the enticing aroma of my mother’s culinary craft.  I learned how to cook from my mother, who learned how to cook from her mother, who learned from her mother, and so on.  I learned by doing and so I became Mom’s apprentice.  Whether she was kneading dough or chopping celery, I was right beside her kneading, chopping, measuring, whisking, beating, and doing whatever else was needed.  In the beginning, I learned how to follow a recipe.  But the more time I spent with Mom in the kitchen, I learned that being a cook means so much more than merely following a recipe.  It means being willing to be immersed in a life-long process of learning.  It means learning about change and transformation because everything is changed and transformed in cooking.  It means reminding myself continuously that the goal of cooking is to feed others.  And sometimes that means altering recipes or throwing them out completely and starting over.

The way I learned how to cook is similar to the way we learn about our faith.  We are often drawn to faith by someone whose faith inspires us and who shows us the way to faith.  We learn a lot just by being with those persons, observing how they live and then eventually doing what they do.  We become their apprentices.  Learning our faith may initially involve a basic recipe for prayer--memorizing the sign of the cross or the Lord’s Prayer.  But as we grow, we discover that our faith can’t be contained in knowledge alone.  We eventually come to understand that learning about our faith is not enough, that more is required.  We must live out our faith.  That means trial and error.  Eventually we learn that like food, our faith is not just for ourselves but is meant to be shared with others.

This is the Church’s vision of the Catechumenate, the process by which an unbaptized person is formed in faith.  Catechumens are not merely given information about faith.  Rather, they are formed to live out the faith in a gradual process within a particular faith community.  Catechumens are formed by listening to the Word of God, by praying with the community and by serving alongside the community.   They are apprentices to the community of disciples.  That is why the Church calls the Catechumenate the model for all catechesis.