Growing Up Catholic Memoir Writing Group Summer 2002

If you are a baby boomer or older, let’s go down memory lane. Do you remember the day you made your first communion, the catechism lessons that had prepared you for this day, how you felt spiritually (or not), was it a day full of sunshine or rain, was your attire new and fancy or hand me downs, how were you treated, was there a party or no party, were photos taken to mark the event? Also, do you remember the first time in the “box”, confessing your horrible sins, mortal and venial? Did you go to Catholic school with Nuns that used rulers? Remember the fish dinners every Friday? Remember when you could not eat after midnight until you took communion?

Over the years things have really changed within the Catholic Church. The realization that our children or grandchildren have little knowledge of the old ways of the church, beyond the stories we tell them, and that after our generation these practices will likely be forgotten forever, was one of the reasons for a group to meet and work on writing these stories for a memoir or adding this dimension to the “memoirs in progress”.

Pat Greene(right) facilitated the group that met this summer on Friday mornings, for eight weeks in the parish center. It was a diverse group with their Catholic upbringings, from the normal (?) Scandinavian Catholic of the Midwest, to growing up in Germany during the Hitler regime, to having parents of mixed religions, to being raised Southern Baptist and then converting to Catholicism, to the experiences of being a Black Catholic in the South.

Each group meeting the stories written during the proceeding week were read and shared with everyone. This gave everybody a chance to have their writing peers critique their stories, to gather new information on how someone else’s family or parish church operated within Catholicism, to jar the brain cells of memories forgotten, and to give countless enjoyable laughs. It was an enlightening experience to see how far the church has moved forward and changed some of its ideas.

and

Nancy Lynch says, "Joy is being a wife, Mom of fourteen, eight with varying disabilities and living at home, Grandma of thirteen, and Great Grandma of three. Serenity is listening and watching the ocean, alone, at our home on Maui. Passion is friends, photography, reading, swimming and children." Nancy can be reached at nalynch@aol.com.

Look out, the next forgotten memory will be (maybe); “Remember when only men were priests”?