Questions

I once had a conversation with a parent when I was teaching religious ed. I remember sharing with him that I felt it was important to teach students how to ask questions about their faith. His response was blunt and unequivocal: “You are not there to teach them how to ask questions, but to give them the answers.” In other words, according to him, my task was to transmit a set of beliefs, those held by the Magisterium of the Church. He had grown up, as I have, with the equivalent of the Baltimore Catechism in which questions were only used as a pretext to provide the “right” answers. I suspect that, in his mind, asking questions was potentially detrimental to faith because it left the door open to doubts. I knew that gentleman well and never questioned the fact that he had a deep faith. I was, however, taken aback by his reaction.

When I was in grade school, I was required to learn several questions and answers in “Le petit catéchisme” which was the Québec version of the Baltimore Catechism. Each school day, I would read the assigned questions and answers twice and, because I had a good memory, I could then recite them verbatim when I got to class. By the end of the day, I had forgotten both the questions and answers. They were quite meaningless to me. I recall that my main motivation for memorizing them was to avoid being rapped on the fingers by the ruler the teachers used to “reinforce” her lessons.

I was recently reading a book that mentioned the frequency with which Jesus asked questions in the Gospels – 183 according to the author. He also noted that Jesus gave his own answer to only three of these questions. As for the remainder, he let those he was talking to wrestle with their own answers. In other words, for Jesus, the questions were far more important than the answers. Questions must burrow deep within a person’s heart before meaningful answers can emerge. Jesus would have been in trouble often in my primary school classes since he seemed to have had only half of the assignments ready most of the time.

I think that if I were to teach religious ed now, I would make it a point to ask my students each week to come back the following week with their own answers to a different one of Jesus’ 183 questions. What wonderful discoveries they could then make about themselves and their faith!