I smell like a charcoal-grilled hamburger. My feet have been close to a fire at the youth house with Aaron, talking with David and Anna Hirsch while David flipped burgers and awaited the arrival of the fifty students who are there now for their weekly Tuesday cookout. David is that precious gem hard to find in the Church: an excellent youth minister. “The kingdom of heaven,” Jesus said, “is like a merchant in search of fine pearls who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.” He might just as well have said that the kingdom of heaven is like a church seeking a rare youth minister. Saint Francis has been richly blessed to have a Student Ministry that’s produced scores of disciples over the past eleven years, first under the leadership of Jon Price and now under David’s. I thank God for David, and for Anna, Craig Windham and Betsy Harrison. They help me and my children keep the bloody faith.

Let me get a little philosophical about the teaching of religion. If the adjective ‘religious’ is taken to mean possessed of certain virtues such as faithfulness, compassion, integrity, humility, self-understanding, and self-discipline, you cannot teach people to be religious. If the noun ‘religion’ is taken to denote that area of human experience in which people encounter the Reality behind reality as a power which both judges and to their flourishing transforms them, you cannot teach religion.

To the extent that God is One whom we can never make the object of our speculation without to one degree or another reducing God to a god fashioned in our own image; to the extent that God can never become an ‘It’ which we reach at the end of a logical demonstration of divine existence, but remains always an ‘I’ confronting us with divine imperatives at times and in ways which we cannot control; to the extent that the most profound and subtle words we use to describe God are at best the crude metaphors that a blind man must resort to when speaking of the appearance of the sun which he knows only by feeling its warmth upon him, you can never teach God as an academic subject; to the extent that the deep and crucial questions with which religion is concerned involve people in every phase and area of their lives — to speak of a philosophy of teaching people religion is a kind of absurdity.

What then is left after all these resounding negations? What is it that Hirsch and the leadership team of Student Ministries intend to do teaching your children and mine religion at Saint Francis? Only this, I think, and it is plenty: to try to convince students — even the 7th grader who already tends to look upon religion as a cumbersome and implausible irrelevance (which much of the time it is) — that it is not religion in itself that matters, but the Reality to which true religion points.

This Reality is Jesus Christ in at least a double sense. First, in the life of Jesus as a human being is made manifest human life as it was created to be, a life where all our tragic estrangement from ourselves, from others, and from God as the true center of our being is overcome in sacrificial love. Second, in the event of Jesus as the Christ — his life, death, resurrection and ascension — a power is released among us which brings us to God and recreates us in His image.