Good Mrs. Murphy's Law

A child was assigned to memorize the 23rd Psalm and recite it in front of his classmates. A week later he confidently stood up to proclaim it, beginning with "The Lord is my shepherd" and ending with:

"Surely good Mrs. Murphy will follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for years to come."

Actually, good Mrs. Murphy would probably come in handy some days, when you needed her to put on a Band-Aid or administer a little "goodness and mercy" along the way.

But whether your version includes good Mrs. Murphy or not, one way to enrich our children's spiritual imaginations is to help them stock their memories with the treasures of our Catholic tradition: the 23rd Psalm, the Memorare, the Magnificat, the Beatitudes, and many other soul-strengthening prayers and passages. Think of it as giving them an inheritance they'll be able to draw on for decades - especially when their lives take a turn through the real "valley of the shadow of death."

Family spirituality author Kathleen O'Connell Chesto recalls a time of tragedy in her family: "I would be jarred awake from a fear that would clench my stomach. The only thing that worked to ease this anguish for me was praying the Memorare. I began to ponder the fact that we have a whole generation of children who don't even know the Memorare." Chesto regretted that while she had taught her children to pray spontaneously and often, they didn't have the Memorare and other short prayers to fall back on, as she did.

And listen to the late Father Lawrence M. Jenco, who was kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985 and held hostage for 564 days. "I had nothing to read so . . . I tried to remember as many verses as I could from the scriptures. . . . Many of the things that are imprinted upon your soul are from your earliest years. For example, the hymns that came to my mind were hymns that were taught to me as a child. For some reason they were the only hymns I could remember."

As parents we have unique opportunities to help our children (and ourselves) learn the words of our heritage by heart. We create the many small rituals - at bedtime, mealtime, holidays, Sunday dinners - that mark our lives. Adding a psalm, prayer, or scripture passage two or three times is all it takes for it to become part of the ritual. Read it for a month, and your family will be well on the way to learning it by heart.

Or try asking your son or daughter to commit something to memory as a gift to you for Mother's Day or Father's Day. You'll really be giving them the gift, but they won't know that.

Don't worry that your kids won't understand fully what they're memorizing. "Had I waited to memorize the Lord's Prayer until I could finally understand it, I still would not know it from memory," writes Father Eugene LaVerdiere. "Memorizing requires that we learn about things such as faith, love, and hope with whatever understanding we have at any given point in life."

If our memories can expand to hold the Thursday night TV schedule, the name of our second-grade teacher, and the number of home runs hit by Babe Ruth, think of the legacy we can bestow on our kids by giving them the gift of a faith learned by heart.