Dough And Yeast

Catechism is like dough.  Yeast is like experience.  Catechism that is simply a series of answers, statements, doctrine, tradition is flat.  It will never rise to nourish us.  It needs the yeast of our personal experience.  Vatican II said that the laity are called to evangelize, not to parrot answers.  We are called to bring people to Christ.  I am becoming more convinced that the reason so many of our young people drop out of practice of our faith is because they were not evangelized in the first place.  Those Catholic schools gave them the catechism, but the teacher/parent did not bother or could not give them a reason why they believed.  The child knows the answer but has no personal experience to support it, nor has a tradition of experience, a yeast, if you will.   We get turned on by the story, the event in a persons life that brings us to make sense out of a catechism answer.  The reason most of us say little about the Trinity is that we have no experience in which to relate "substance" and "essence."  

What we pass on is the yeast life experience as it relates to items of our faith.  I am moved toward interior prayer and away from pietistic devotions because of the experiences related to me by those who have entered into prayer of silence and solitude and how it has changed their lives in ways that attract me.  I am unmoved by the emotional baggage of people with visions in their novena practices.  So I only talk about what moves me.  This is the only way we can attract anyone to Christ.  I now have the yeast of experience to go along with what I read in my Church prayer tradition.  When a young person asks me to tell them about "mystical" prayer, what they mean is, "Tell me what happens to you."  They want to know my story, my experience.  Evangelization is knowing Christ, not knowing "about" Christ.