Catechesis

We have made it a family tradition to read the daily gospel and recite the creed with the boys for 15 minutes of catechesis before bed time. As you know, in a three-year cycle of daily mass reading, we cover nearly all of the bible, so it's a logical and simple way to get them familiar with scripture, and honestly we are learning and re-learning an awful lot ourselves. They've got the basic prayers down pat (Our Father, Hail Mary, Glory Be, St. Michael), so we alternate between those and the Nicene creed. We want all of the boys to begin commiting it to memory so they can participate more fully in mass. And also, how time flies, Bobcat will be seven and approaching his fist holy communion in less than a year. So we discuss the meaning of the gospel reading, and discuss one or two lines of the creed, explaining what all those big words mean.

Tonight, of course, the gospel reading was about the Ascension (happy feast day to you all). After the reading, we do a quick quiz. One of tonight's questions was, "When will Jesus come back down from heaven, to the earth?" The answer we were looking for was, at the end of the world. Here are some of the answers we got first:

Bubba's guess: on Easter Sunday. Good guess, son, but that was when he rose from the dead.
Bobcat's guess: On Christmas. Another good guess, as the creed states, "...He came down from heaven, and was born of the virgin Mary." But, that was when he first came, not when he will return again.

It seems that all of our Lord's comings and goings from earth are easy to get mixed up. Both of the above answers were good enough and said with such enthusiams that we did promise a penny as a reward (with which to buy some skittles from the candy machine in the kitchen). So, at this point, Snookie is all excited about the prospect of earning his own penny, and when he gets that way, he'll throw out just about any answer in hopes of getting lucky. A lot of his guesses are entertaining, but this one was completely unexpected. His guess:

Jesus will return on Mothers Day!

Um... no, that doesn't even appear in the creed... but it was the first thing that came to his mind. He did earn a penny for a good effort, though!