A couple of new students had joined the class last week, and I forgot to go over with them what we will be doing for the remainder of the school year. So although I had provided a brief map of the class in week 2, I thought that it would be a good reminder for the students who already heard and helpful for the students who had not, so I explained that our school year will be divided into three
parts--general teaching classes, Lenten project classes, and
confirmation preparation classes. We will have general teaching
classes whenever we don't have other types of classes. Our Lenten
project classes will be a handful of classes dedicated to preparing for our participation in Good Friday services. Our confirmation preparation classes will be at
the end of the school year and will entail preparing the
students for confirmation. I also added that as we get closer to Christmas, some class time might be dedicated to the Christmas pageant, although not nearly as much as last year. I then told the students that I added a small wrinkle to the structure of the class. The wrinkle was pretty much always there, but I now formalized it. I told the students that our class will now proceed as follows: attendance, opening prayer, brief "philosophical" discussion, general questions (and hopefully answers), reading and discussing the text, and closing prayer (the Our Father). Our philosophical discussion for the day was the students' moral obligations (or, as I called it, their moral imperative, taking a bit of poetic license with that phrase). We discussed that their moral imperative was somewhat simple: 1) listening to their parents; 2) doing well in school; 3) following the rules (in particular the Golden Rule); 4) being yourself; and 5) following Jesus. The students then had a few questions. The first was why do bad things happen; and does God cause these bad things. I explained that bad things can happen for two reasons: 1) bad acts by other people or simple accidents. As Catholics, we believe that God gives us free will to make choices and that some people's choices lead them to do bad things--in other words, unfortunately, some people act selfishly, do not follow what God wishes, and consequently they do bad things to other people. We also discussed that some bad things happen just as a result of accidents. For example, a car accident where say someone switched lanes without looking and two cars thus crashed. In that case, albeit there was a reason for the accident--someone switched lanes without looking--it might not necessarily a situation where someone was doing something wrong, such as playing with a cell phone; it can just be a mistake because people aren't perfect, and unfortunately serious consequences can occur, but it is not a case where God is punishing anyone. The same happens when someone gets sick. We usually don't know why someone gets cancer or other serious diseases, but we don't believe as Catholics that God is punishing people who get sick--sickness often just happens. |