Tag: catechesis

An Analogy for Teaching the Necessity of the Incarnation

Christian Renaissance Movement2 Comments

Eamonn Clark

When I was in middle school, I wondered about many things. “Do I have a chance with this girl? (No.) Will I make the high school basketball team? (No.) What does it mean to say that Jesus died for our sins?” Though I didn’t get a satisfying answer to the third question until much later, thankfully it didn’t bother me too much. But for those of you who are looking for a way to teach kids – or even adults – the main idea of St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, here is a helpful analogy which can be elaborated or simplified according to time or audience. (Be careful not to ruin the central ideas though!)

A caveat – it is an analogy, so despite its strength it isn’t perfect. You’ve been advised.

Imagine a town with a strict but kind mayor. He lives in a large house near the local baseball field and, in his spare time, he makes incredibly ornate and unique stained glass windows, together with his son. One of his windows faces the field, and at night the light from his house shines on the field – just enough for the local little league team to practice for a while before night. The mayor knows the evening is the most fun time to play baseball… He knows all the kids on the team and wants the best for them.

One evening, the team captain steps up to the plate. He knows he is strong enough to hit it out of the park, and his friend, the pitcher, knows it too. They have been having so much fun that they have lost their good judgment… They conspire and decide to show off by going for a major home run. A friendly pitch, a hard swing, a big hit, and a crash – the ball went right through the mayor’s priceless window and shattered the whole thing. The light goes out, and the mayor comes out to yell at the players… He discovers it was really the fault of two – the pitcher and the batter both, and that the batter is in fact team captain. He is especially at fault as batter, and since he is team captain the whole thing is made even worse… Because of the town’s laws, people like team captains get to represent a whole group of people in public events, but they also get the whole group in trouble if they do something wrong publicly. To punish the team, the mayor tells them they are banned from playing on the field until the debt gets paid – they’ll have to settle for cheap imitations, like parking lots and back yards, which don’t even allow for a real game at all. The team now owes the mayor a debt of the worth of his window. It is a debt that they can’t repay and could never repay. To replace the window is a task that belongs only to the mayor and his son.

Due to his strictness, the mayor won’t simply forgive the debt to the team. It would be inconsistent and unfair. They don’t get special treatment. But because of his kindness, the mayor wants to find a way that he can let the kids play again, and so he needs to come up with a way to get the team to repay the debt.

The solution occurs to him: it is time for his son to start playing baseball. The mayor gets his son signed up for little league, and he insists that his son also become team captain. Now the mayor’s son, who can make the window again, represents the whole team.

In a short while, after some difficult work, the son has remade the window, paying the debt on behalf of the whole team. He made the window stronger this time, too, so if it gets hit again it will only break in one pane instead of shattering – easy to fix. The mayor is satisfied, and he is willing to let the team play baseball again, with their new captain, but not in the evenings anymore. Though it’s the most fun time to play, they will have to settle for the normal daylight. The light still comes through the window, but it can’t be seen clearly. The mayor says that one day, however, the team will be allowed to play in the evenings again, and the colorful, beautiful light will be brighter than ever before, and they can play as long as they like into the night.

The End.

In case it’s not obvious, the mayor is God the Father, his son is the Son, baseball is the life of virtue, the first captain is Adam, the pitcher is Eve, the evening is Eden and Heaven (with the better light), the light and the window are the operation of God’s love and grace, breaking the window and the debt incurred is original sin, the town rules are the natural and eternal law.

It has its limits, but I think it’s alright. The essential point is that the son has to join the team and become its new captain in order to pay the debt that the team couldn’t otherwise pay. What do you think? Have you used similar metaphors with any success?

Transubstantiation – An Analogy for Children

Christian Renaissance Movement

Eamonn Clark

As Corpus Christi approaches – and with the season for First Communions already upon us – I would like to offer a simple analogy to help explain transubstantiation to children. Or adults. Or both.

First, a note: there is no perfect analogy for the process whereby bread and wine become Our Lord (Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity), because in all other kinds of changes, either an accidental change causes the substantial change (as burning a paper changes it to ash), or the substantial change is at least followed by accidental change (as death causes the body to stop functioning as a living, unified whole). For neither of these things to happen, but for the “what” of a thing to change nonetheless, is altogether special.

That being said, we can point to the reality indirectly, by using the “via negativa” (transubstantiation is not Jesus hiding in the substances of bread and wine, it is not a destruction and replacement of the substances bread and wine and God producing an illusion of the accidents of bread and wine, etc.), or, in this case, by making an analogy of experience.

From far away, a rainbow looks like a colorful, solid, translucent band which could be touched, like a window. This corresponds to our experience of the accidents of bread and wine – it really does look, feel, taste, etc., as if bread and wine were before us, and we really do see what looks like a solid, translucent band of colors. As any keen 2nd grader knows, that’s not what a rainbow really is. A rainbow is a bunch of little bits of light that look like one big band of colors. Now, for some kids, perhaps it will come as a shock that you can’t really reach the end of a rainbow – but plenty will be able to tell you that when you move towards a rainbow, it moves away from you. The “reality” can’t be reached by looking more closely: it will always be hidden by an appearance of what it is not. Of course, one can go to the spot where such-and-such bits of light are being refracted, but then there won’t be any experience at all. In each case – chasing a rainbow, or being where a rainbow was seen from a different spot – the reality is hidden from our senses.

I have used this analogy myself with kids and have found it to be helpful. (Of course, it is really an explanation of the effects of transubstantiation – I have no idea of how to explain the change itself rather than by laying out all the doctrine and its metaphysical pieces, which would not be necessary or helpful for a 2nd grader.) I would recommend showing first that a thing doesn’t change its “being” just because its shape or color changes… This helps to give them an idea of the difference between accidents and substances/essences.

Have you found any different analogies that work well? Comment below!