In the Catholic tradition, when a child is Baptized the light of Christ is given to his parents in the symbol of a candle, for them to protect and keep it glowing brightly.\u00a0 His Christian faith and morality are their responsibility, and they joyfully accept this extra burden in the hope of leading their child to Heaven.<\/p>\n
In parts of Europe, the tradition continues at his First Communion when the candle is lit again and the child and his parents both hold it.\u00a0 The three of them are now responsible for the faith and spiritual well being of the child.\u00a0 The parents acknowledge, symbolically, that the child has reached the \u201cage of reason\u201d and now must stand before God as his own person, but not yet alone.\u00a0 His parents still bear the burden of teaching, instructing, leading, and counseling their child in the way he should grow.\u00a0 His salvation is a team effort.<\/p>\n
At Confirmation,he holds the candle alone.\u00a0 His soul is his own, and his parents must step back and allow him to make his own decisions about what to do with it.\u00a0 He stands alone before the Throne of the Almighty and must answer for himself.<\/p>\n
We watched today as our son took his next step upon this pathway.\u00a0 This morning, our #3 received the body, blood, soul and divinity of our Lord in his First Holy Communion.\u00a0 He beamed from the pew where he sat with his classmates and smiled with innocent joy at all he had achieved.\u00a0 It has been a long and winding road to get him to this point, and I think that we all shared in his sense of relief and his profound happiness.<\/p>\n
His father and I cried. \u00a0 Our eyes brimmed with tears of pride in our son who has worked and pushed himself to remember all that he needed to know.\u00a0 He has struggled to understand the awesome mysteries laid out before him and to understand the miracle that is the Consecration.\u00a0 He truly deserved the happiness of this day.\u00a0 There was also tear, or perhaps two, over the passage of time and over the little baby with the goofy hair who this morning was offered the Body of Christ and nodded his head, flashed a smile and said \u2018Amen.\u2019 And with that one simple word, his faith became more fully his own.<\/p>\n
I know that you\u2019re thinking to yourself \u201cThat\u2019s great for #3, but what kind of sexy shoes was the Mom wearing this morning?\u201d \u00a0 What else?\u00a0 Leopard, of course.<\/p>\n
Aren\u2019t you glad you asked?<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the Catholic tradition, when a child is Baptized the light of Christ is given to his parents in the symbol of a candle, for them to protect and keep it glowing brightly.\u00a0 His Christian faith and morality are their responsibility, and they joyfully accept this extra burden in the hope of leading their child […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1979,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-919","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n