Knowing Christ is our goal

When I was a kid, we didn’t have “tech.” If we did, I would have been identified as “tech-challenged.” I once tried to make a telephone out of two soup cans and string. Let’s just say AT&T’s R&D department has nothing to fear from me. I also bought a set of those X-ray glasses that were in the back of the old Superman comics. In the ad, the kid using them could see people’s bones. When I finally got them, they were two plastic rims, each encasing a single chicken feather. I guess it was supposed to look like you were seeing “bones” when you looked through the feathers.

My next door neighbor, on the other hand, two years younger than I, was a budding scientist. He built a volcano one summer. It was about four feet high and spewed rivers of colorful muck all over his father’s driveway. He also built a working telegraph, which put my tin-can phone to shame. We stretched the wires between our bedroom windows, and he’d send me Morse code messages. The fact that I didn’t know Morse code dimmed neither his enthusiasm nor my amazement.

I feel the same amazement when I see children text messaging their friends or tricking out their MySpace pages. While I struggle to set the alarm correctly on my cell phone, people who have to be “this high” to get on a Disney ride are practicing a tech wizardry that must surely be classified somewhere under the dark arts.

How do we know?

I suppose I should be more disturbed than amazed by this. After all, as an elder to these tech-savvy youngsters, I should be the one who, after long years of experience and study, has acquired a superior and even mysterious knowledge. But I don’t think of knowledge that way.

To think of knowledge as something I have, like a bottle of water, which I open up and pour over you at my discretion, isn’t really how knowledge works. That bottle of water is more like information

Knowledge on the other hand is more like the ocean. It’s not mine to give or to keep, but only to discover. I can help you discover it or not. But if you get anywhere near it, you’ll discover it with or without me. The more of us who dive in together, the more we will discover. The more we will know.

As catechists and teachers, our ministry is about discovering knowledge, not dispensing information. The General Directory for Catechesis says our goal is “to know [Christ’s] ‘mystery,’… the requirements…in his gospel message, and the paths that he has laid down for anyone wishing to follow him” (80).

If we discover a new facet of the mystery, we could try to let others know by using my soup-can phone. But the kids will have it posted on their MySpace pages before I can find my can opener. More than any previous generation, they’ve turned the idea of “teaching” on its head. They are teaching us elders what it is to be co-discovers of the Mystery of Christ. Just as the gospel requires. I think that’s amazing.