Dear parents,

I hope you had a very Merry Christmas and are enjoying a break over this holiday season!

I am looking forward to celebrating the Sacrament of Confirmation with your child(ren) and your families in just under 3 week on Wednesday, January 15, 2020.

I know that several candidates have not completed their reflection forms that are provided in the Confirmation Guidebook that have attached below. Please encourage your child to work on these over Christmas break! (read my response to this below).

If you have any questions or concern, please let me know. Look out for an email that I will send in the new year which asks for confirmation on spellings of names. I want to make sure I get everything right for the celebration!

-David Heimann

In preparation for the last class I have with candidates for Confirmation in January, I was given a list of questions about faith and about the church. One student asked the question "What if we don't have all the forms in?" 

I've thought a lot about how I will respond to this question as it always comes up. I diligently am trying to help all of our candidates (and all of us for that matter) understand that God's love does not come from something we achieve or an exchange of value points. We can't bargain for God's approval by some accomplishment. We don't earn or deserve Confirmation for what we have done. (If anything, we earn it by what we do with our lives after Confirmation.)

It's a hard concept to teach adolescents (and sometimes adults) but the reason I constantly come back to it is because it is the only thing that I find is a sustainable path towards a life long relationship with God. Inevitably, everyone of us will encounter the disappointment that "I played by all the rules and I didn't get what I wanted." If that gets mixed up with our faith life, it leads to the surmounting lack of enthusiasm about faith and religion that we see dominating our society.

If on the other hand, we are nurtured in the understanding that God's love is a priori the gift that sustains our life. Then we mature in our relationship with God in such a way that is expansive, creative, and self-sustaining. When an individual starts to develop that type of healthy religious fervor, they start coming to Mass every Sunday not out of fear of hell (which erodes quickly) but out of a desire to affirm and sustain a relationship with the love that creates us, forms us, and moves us. 

So what will I tell your child(ren) if their reflection forms aren't completed? Well, for starters, I will not be telling them that they won't be confirmed. That is inconsistent with the most important lesson we are trying to teach about God's love. It is given freely without condition. 

Instead, my response will be "Then you won't be as prepared as you could be for the mission God has for you." That's the purpose of all the exercises that we give in religious education both at the school and in RE. These are activities we present to help strengthen each student's understanding of God's love and are meant to help prepare them to fulfill the purpose for which God has created them. 

In that light, I encourage you to help motivate your child to complete the exercises that I have assigned for their preparation starting in September of 2018. Non-completion of those exercises will cause me to challenge them to complete them in a timely way after Confirmation. In all, I want them to know how much God loves them and I want them to work on a fitting response to demonstrate that they are receiving the gift of that love with the fullest ability that they have.  Thanks for helping me and partnering with me in that learning objective. 

God bless!