Joyful mystery: could the joy of our children be the missing ingredient in today's church crisis?

Spare us further edicts. By now the American bishops must be hoarse with apologies, backpedaling, one-strike policies, press conferences, commissions, committees, and all the verbal trappings of the new, improved, stainless steel church.

The leadership doesn't seem to know the followers aren't in it for the grim pronouncements. Those of us who remain Catholic stay because we're seduced: by the spirituality, music, poetry, profound symbolic gesture, and little pockets of holiness--people whose living genuinely incarnates Christ.

For many years I've asked workshop and retreat groups, "If you are Catholic, what persuades you to stay?" Not a single person has ever answered "transubstantiation" or "infallibility." Instead people name friends who offer exquisite care, a "family tie," mentors who inspire, sources of joy.

Understandably, joy is rarely mentioned in battlefront reporting from today's beleaguered church. Enduring the crisis, evading bankruptcy or jail, and getting back to business seem higher priorities. But our leadership has sorely miscalculated the importance of precisely this missing ingredient. Losing deep-rooted joy would cut our last tie to health and healing; preserving it may, in the end, save us.

Thomas Merton once wrote of Karl Barth that we are saved by the divine child in us, symbolized by the music of Mozart. Merton said, "Though you have grown up to become a theologian, Christ remains a child in you. Your books (and mine) matter less than we might think! There is in us a Mozart who will be our salvation."

For a huge majority of Catholic laity, joy takes root not in any church structure, not even in the most stimulating adult education, beautiful liturgy, or challenging document. Nor, as we are so frequently reminded in homilies, does it arise from our power or possessions.

Instead, joy begins to bubble as we turn the key in the lock at the end of a workday and rejoin the family. Our children may annoy, enrage, or spend every last dime of disposable income. Because their intimacy can cause the deepest sorrow, they are also the source of our exuberance. They place on us irrefutable claims, and we find our deepest identity in honoring those.

As one sickening story after another rolled from the pages of the Boston Globe, the thoughts of parents and grandparents turned first in one direction: toward their child or grandchild. Such a deep archetype exerts considerable pull and accounts for the rage that ensued. By contrast, the hierarchy appeared to focus first on preserving the church's image and its coffers, children apparently being much lower on its list of concerns. How sad--for most of us the sight of a freckled face or a tumble of curls is both our buoyancy and our grounding.

How could church leaders have so completely forgotten a major chunk of our biblical heritage? Why does Sarah pine until the angel tells her and Abraham "to dip into their old-age pensions for cash to build a nursery," as Frederick Buechner once put it? What does Hannah long for? What blessing does Elisha bring to the Shunammite woman who has provided him with lodging in her home? The winning lottery ticket isn't another set of rules. It's a fragile promise that holds the happiness: "At this season, in due time, you shall embrace a son" (2 Kings 4:16).

When we think about getting through life gracefully, it isn't any abstract theological vision that sustains us. It's the daily blessing: the lamp, the bed, the chair and table so kindly provided the prophet Elisha. He reciprocates in kind: the incomparable blessing of booties, a small blanket, a toy, the potential for a child.

The source of God's joy is the same as the Shunammite woman's. In Hoses 11:3-4, God calls to Israel as to a wayward child. God's unshakable love cannot be deterred even by Israel's crimes:

   It was I who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them in my arms;
   I drew them with human cords, with bands of love; I fostered
   them like one who raises an infant to his cheeks ...

The agonized cry torn from the heart of God resonates with the heartbreak of a mother or father: "How could I give you up? ... My heart is overwhelmed" (Hoses 11:8). We understand this paradoxical torment because parenting gives us constant opportunities to practice godlike, unconditional forgiveness.

The experience of parenting seems crucial to Jesus' life as well. He grew up hearing his mother's Magnificat, and its strains shaped his identification with marginal folks. Over the watery cradle of Jesus' public life wafted God's fatherly affirmation: "You are my beloved child: in you I take delight." Again, it is a joy every parent could echo--at least on better days.

Like father, like son. Jesus didn't come to set up a cumbersome institution. Instead, he came that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete (John 15:11).

When I give workshops on family spirituality, I like to watch the alert faces of young parents in discussion groups. The prompts are designed to let them brag about their children. It's probably more fashionable to decry the kids, drag out the negatives, bemoan the failures. But how parents love to tell the success stories! Empathy spreads around the tables as similar descriptions emerge: cuddling after an argument, sharing a passion for baseball or banjo.

When such stories are not told, parents are relegated to silence, the richness of their experience lost to the larger community. But in novels such as Sue Miller's Family Pictures (Harper-Collins) they recognize a familiar note: "`My dear!' her mother had said, and her face shone with joy to see her daughter." They nod knowingly when Martin Sheen, playing President Bartlet on The West Wing, tells his daughter, "All you ever had to do to make me happy was walk through the door."

In the words of Beatrice Bruteau: "When we take a little time to remember to look, to marvel, we find that there are sources of joy, of esthetic delight, of quiet happiness on every hand." Indeed, our children can bring "a million tiny sources of pure happiness" that sustain us long after the homily is forgotten and the hymn has faded.

It's a theme rarely heard from the pulpit: Our joy in our children mirrors God's joy in us. If one listened only to the official line, parenting would be all negative burden: constant clucking about birth control, getting kids to Mass on time, mandatory parent meetings for sacramental preparation, and keeping those teenagers away from booze, drugs, and premarital sex.

One prelate who seemed to understand parenting was Pope John XXIII. Thomas Cahill's biography (Pope John XXIII, Viking Press) recounts that when he was elected pope and carried into St. Peter's Basilica for the first time on the ceremonial litter, he was deeply moved to remember being carried on his father's shoulders when he was too small to see a procession.

Another memory that remained with John XXIII for over 70 years was his pregnant mother Marianna taking her five children under 6 to a shrine of the Madonna. Because they were late and couldn't squeeze inside, she lifted him to the window and whispered, "Ecco, Angelino." She showed him the beauty of mother and child, depicted as Italian peasants.

Perhaps he remembered his parents the night he opened the Second Vatican Council. Some 50,000 people crowded into St. Peter's Square for a papal blessing. He told them to go home where they belonged, "and give your children a caress. Tell them it is `la carezza del Papa.'" The custom continues in Italy: Children who received that hug that night have passed it on to their children, and they in turn to theirs--"la carezza di Papa Giovanni."

When John XXIII met Khrushchev's daughter Rada, he asked her "to tell him the names of her children, not because he didn't already know them (he did), but `because when a mother speaks the names of her children, something exceptional happens.'" How we need John's spirit today!

Jesus could have been looking directly at our community in crisis when he said, "So you also are now in anguish" (John 16:22). Trying to console his anxious friends, he chose from all the metaphors at his command the one of a mother forgetting her labor pain as she sees her newborn child for the first time. "I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and no one will take your joy away from you." It is that joy we long for today.

By KATHY COFFEY, the mother of four. Her most recent book is God Knows Parenting Is a Wild Ride (Sorin).