Learning From Our Family

*headslap* This is so basic but makes so much sense. Why has it never been explained to me this way before? That family example may be the best I have ever heard.

Establishing a canon did not mean the bishops started handing out Bibles. Most people in the fourth century did not know how to read, and it would be another thousand years before the technology for mass-producing books was developed. For centuries the Scriptures were circulated in hand-copied manuscripts and guarded lovingly by local churches.

But even if they could have put a Bible in each person's hands, the successors of the apostles would never have thought that to be sufficient. Scripture was never envisioned as standing apart from the church in which it was born, apart from the tradition -- the new way of life handed on by the apostles.

The Catholic does not limit the word of God to only the words found in the Bible. As St. Bernard of Clairvaux said, the word is "not a written and mute word, but the Word which is incarnate and living." Catholics are not "people of the book." We are children of the witnesses, begotten of the words and deeds of those who first saw the Lord.

Parents do not raise children only by lecturing them about right and wrong and repeating stories and words of wisdom handed down from long-dead relatives. Instead, they build a home life in which the family's character and values are passed on as much by shared experience and example as by words. It is the same with the family of God, the church. Our life in Christ grows not only through reading the words of our ancestors in the faith, but also by doing the things they did, sharing in the rituals and practices they received from Christ.

Catholic Passion by David Scott

Tags: Catholicism, Christianity