Lesson 1: My Soul Longs for You Oh God

It's July 3rd and we just completed Lesson 1 on our back deck in cool 72 degree weather. Yes, 72 degrees in the middle of the afternoon at the beginning of July! With heavy cloud cover and a slight breeze, it was actually a little chilly. This is after what has to be record rainfall over the past few days. As you can see in the photo above, we put many of our resources to use. That is Bonnie's right leg and foot in the lower right of the photo. At the lower left of the photo is Maggie, our chipin (chihuahua and miniature pincher mix) dog. She was intent on getting in on our study.

Here is a list of the reference material we started with:

• The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Ignatius Press
• The New American Bible, Saint Joseph Edition
• Catechism of the Catholic Church, Second Edition (Green book)
• United States Catholic Catechism for Adults (Red book)
• Reader's Journal for the United States Catechism for Adults
• Compendium - Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Study Guide for the U.S. Adult Catholic Catechism

We actually began our study last Wednesday by reviewing the introduction in both the Red book and the study guide. This helped us gain an understanding for the organization of the material and how we can use it for our study. We decided that we will set aside time two days each week to dedicate exclusively to our catechism study. We chose Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon. With 36 chapters to cover, we will be on track to complete our study by early November and be ready to roll it out for small group study by the first of the year if not the end of the year.

 

We weren't quite sure how to conduct our first lesson: Do we use the study guide along with the red book or just the red book? It seems that the red book alone was organized in a way that is conducive to self study. However, the lesson in the study guide begins with a prayer to the Holy Spirit and included several Scripture verses to chose from for reflection. That appealed to us so we decided to use the study guide as our starting point. However, as we progressed through our study, it became distracting to go back and forth between the study guide and the red book. Needless to say, we got off to a bit of a rocky start and then we realized that the Journal was more than a place to record our thoughts. We realized that the Journal is a companion to the red book and it navigates you through each part part of each lesson. Part way into our study we began to use the Journal more and the study guide lesson. We decided that we will use the Journal for the other lessons.

However, there is value in the study guide but we consider is more of a companion to our study for reference and we don't plan to use in directly in our study. At the end of the study guid ether is a list or references for further reading. This lists includes Second Vatican Council Readings, DVD's about the various saints and writings from early Church Fathers among others.

 

After about 2.5 hours we completed most of our lesson but we still had not read the applicable sections from the green book. We decided to take a break and have dinner before we actually read from the green book. Reading from the green book after completing our study in the red book allowed us to get so much more out of the green book than we were able to before. Each lesson can  go on for hours because there is so much to talk about but we know we need to set a time limit. We are going to work towards completing each lesson in 90 minutes. On Wednesday, we will read the applicable sections from the green book during lunch and then complete the lesson in the Journal and red book that evening. Check back with us later this week to see how that lesson went.

 

Lesson 1 ended with a meditation from St. Augustine's Confessions and a call to put what we learned into practice. The meditation encouraged us to record a word or phrase from the meditation and reflect on it often, even daily. Here are the phrases that we reflected on:

Bonnie: "Late have I loved You!!!!!"

Dave: God is always with me.

Here is how we were inspired to put what we learned into practice.

Bonnie: " I am inspired to take this catechism study very seriously as I feel called to educate my self and, in turn others, in the faith."

Dave: "I am inspired to invite God into all that I do."