The power of signs.

A colleague of mine recently built a grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes in a visible corner of his parish church. The priest who initiated the project faced some opposition from a handful of parishioners, as he had anticipated--for whenever he conceives an idea aimed at bringing the people to a deeper reverence for the Eucharist or to a more fervent devotion to Our Lady, he receives opposition from the very same group of people. But the pastor, once again, ignored their advice-which was that instead of a grotto, he should install a compost heap, perhaps as a token of homage to what they possibly regard as a more relevant mother, the earth? God only knows.

But the day after the grotto was completed, the pastor noticed two girls standing by it, staring and wondering what it could mean. The girls were not Catholic, and so they inquired of the grotto's significance. After he had told them the story of St. Bernadette, one of the girls asked the pastor what Mary was holding in her hand. He told them, "A rosary." "What is a rosary?" they wondered. He told them and then asked if they wanted one, which they did. So he gave them each a rosary and promised to teach them how to pray it whenever they wanted.

The girls left to visit a lady who lived just down the street. They showed her the rosaries and asked her if she knew how to pray the devotion. She too, however, was a non-Catholic and so had no idea, but a friend who was visiting her at the time did, since he had been baptized and brought up a Catholic, though he had not seen the inside of a church in twenty years.

But within the hour that man walked across the street to the grotto, sat down on the bench beside the pastor who was saying his breviary, and made his confession. Then and there he returned to the Church that he had neglected for years. There was something about those girls holding the rosaries that gave him a glimpse into a brighter world to which he had once belonged, and it seems he wanted back in.

The visual spectacle of the grotto obviously tweaked the girls' curiosity, exposing a world they did not fully understand. It opened up a window into history, and they stopped to have a look. And when this visual, which contained so much more than words could express, finally began to make some sense to the girls, they made off with a visible and tangible piece of that world, which had the effect of proclaiming the faith that this man possessed as a boy, to the point where he had decided to return to the Church that very hour--a chain of events that a compost heap probably would not have initiated.

Good pedagogy rightly emphasizes the visual and tangible, which were perhaps not always so accentuated in schools of former times. But when it comes to the teaching and celebration of the Catholic faith, the Church can rightly declare, "Been there, done that" from the beginning, and she will continue in the same vein till the very end, because the Church, founded by Christ, is always true to the nature of the human person. And yet there are some who believe that when it comes to Catholicism, progress means renouncing the visuals and tangibles that might suggest that anything that occurred before 1962 has any relevance for us at all.

What I found more puzzling this year than anything else were the number of people I encountered who have chosen to mark their bodies with large and elaborate tattoos. "Why," I wondered out loud, my wife sitting next to me in the car, "would people irreversibly mark their bodies with something they might not like in a few years time? Do they not realize that this is permanent and that their tastes rarely are?" My wife simply replied, "Perhaps that's what they are searching for, some permanency in their lives."

I was taken aback by this rather interesting thought. Indeed, people need to feel rooted, and if they are not rooted in a history, which does not change, they will search for permanency elsewhere. That is why a cultural heritage is so important for emotional well-being; for human beings need to feel connected in some way to their ancestors, and they accomplish this by appropriating the cultural heritage these people left to future generations; for a cultural creation cannot be separated from a people anymore than we can understand the person of Michelangelo without knowing what he spoke through his art. The same is true for the Church, which is a historical entity. To be drawn into her is to be drawn into her history, which is to be drawn into the entire communion of saints, and into the Word, who entered history.

Ignoring the Church's heritage and the tendency to regard it as irrelevant might very well mask a profound disdain for it. At the very least it cuts people adrift from their religious roots; hence, the importance of filling religious curriculum, catechesis, and liturgy with all the visible, tangible, and audible signs that teach us about the larger family to which we belong, thus revealing to us our true identity. Any decisions to bring back practices that will visibly enrich the liturgy or the religious demeanour of a parish Church, highlighting its historical significance, is not regress at all, but progress in the fullest sense.

Doug McManaman teaches the philosophy of religion at Father Michael McGivney Catholic Academy in Markham, ON.