My daughter is thirteen and Sunday June 4th is the date set for her confirmation. Traditionally, confirmation is a rite of passage, a transition from youth into a full and adult participation in the life of a church community. A cultural anthropologist would have a field day trying to describe all the ties that exist between the rite of confirmation and the coming-of-age celebration which can be found in virtually every primitive culture. The minister, like the shaman or the witch doctor, takes the young people apart for the dispensation of secret knowledge, and empowered by these secrets, the young people undertake an ordeal which proves their readiness to assume their new role. Football teams do it. Frat houses do it. Why not churches?
My wife and I are pleased that our daughter is doing this; it gives us a comforting sense of continuity. We remember our time in confirmation classes (we were in the same confirmation class together, long before we even had the slightest interest in one another); we are reminded of how our parents went through the same initiation; how their parents also entered the life of the church through the same door. And yet, overwhelmingly, our impression of our own experience is characterized by a single recollection: excruciating boredom. Was this our ordeal? If we could endure a term of mind-numbing talks about things which weren’t even remotely interesting to us, then we would be granted the privilege of being allowed to vote at meetings on important issues like roof repairs and whether the bread for communion should be white or whole wheat? This afternoon, while our 13-year-old daughter was on a “retreat” at the 65-year-old minister’s house, my wife and I smiled at one another, silently acknowledging our complete empathy for our daughter’s ordeal, then wondering aloud why we never spoke out. Why didn’t we intervene and tell everybody just what we think of this perfunctory exercise we persist in inflicting on our young people?
The meaning of the ritual (so deeply embedded in ancient pagan custom) flies in the face of everything we profess. We have an example which shows us that our children already have a full entitlement to participation: Jesus rebuked his disciples and insisted that the children be allowed to approach him. In the same way, our doctrine tells us precisely why this is so. Paul tells us about grace: an entitlement to god’s love which has no regard for age or accumulated knowledge or successful completion of confirmation classes. So what possible justification is there for inflicting such boredom on our children?
“So what did you do at your retreat?” we ask our daughter at supper this evening. There are two communicants this year (a far cry from the good old days of our confirmation classes when the room was crammed to overflowing). Our daughter starts to laugh. The minister and his wife are hippies, she tells us. The girls ask the minister what a certain clay pot is for and he tells them that’s where they usually keep books of matches; the minister likes to smoke a cigar now and then. The girls look at one another and roll their eyes and, afterwards, they joke with one another and wonder what it is the minister really smokes. Then she tells about how the other girl likes to snoop. (These two girls have known one another since birth.) Whenever the minister leaves the room, the other girl rifles through drawers and pulls things out to look at them. She finds a camera that still has film in it, so she points it at my daughter and clicks. The minister will be in for a surprise when he develops that roll of film. My daughter laughs and laughs as she tells us this.
To be fair, I think the minister has done a good job of the communicants business. He takes his role seriously. During the retreat, different people have met with the girls for “issue-oriented” conversations about: immigration policy and resettlement of refugees, environmental concerns, and personal relationships. Still, the concern for me, as with all matters of believing, is emphatically not the content. It is only and entirely about the method. Is a confirmation class really going to make a difference to the spiritual development of these two girls? I doubt it. If the girls remember anything at all from this “retreat,” they will remember impressions, those instances too vague to articulate, like snap shots taken all of a sudden. Years from now, they will remember how they were treated, whether the people they encountered were authentic (teenagers know this immediately). Whatever they learn which is worth remembering they will have learned by example.
I remember my confirmation class. I can’t tell you anything we discussed. I still have the book we used as a study guide. Overwhelmingly, my impression of confirmation class is dominated by the fact that the instructor, the minister, later committed suicide. From what I understand, he put a 12-gauge shotgun in his mouth à la Hemmingway and blew out his brains. What I learned from confirmation is that believing may or may not have anything to do with one’s formal office. What I also discovered, mostly by accident, was that I had been well instructed. I had many instructors, more than I can possibly tell here, and most instructed me without knowing that they were instructors.
For me, one of the greatest moments of religious instructions came, unwittingly, from my father. When I was five, we were driving through downtown Toronto, along King Street. My father pulled to the curb in front of the box office at the Royal Alexandria Theatre and hopped out to pick up some tickets he had ordered. We waited for him in the car. A man, obviously drunk, stumbled from the curb and planted a hand on the hood of the car to steady himself. He was probably homeless. He had a grizzled beard and wore a dark trench coat. Then, he stepped out into the traffic, trying to cross King Street. My father came out of the theatre and saw the man lurching one way and another between the cars. He stepped out with the man and took his arm and started to talk to him. They stood together on the yellow line in the middle of the street, then, when the way was clear, they walked together to the far side of the road. I watched from the car as the two men spoke for a couple of minutes. My father waved to the man and made his way back to the car. I don’t know if it ever occurred to my father that his sons might be watching him. I doubt it. Nevertheless, as young as we were, we sat with eyes wide open—and we understood exactly what had happened.
Confirmation class happens every day. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll discover that there are teachers everywhere. Some wear a clerical collar, but it’s not a requirement.