A Small Cataclysm

I'm once again a bit belated with my blogging, and I have no one to blame but myself.

Oh, and Martin Luther. I'll blame him, too.

For the past week or so, my mind, in seemingly every spare moment, has been consumed with memorizing the Small Catechism, Luther's masterwork for instruction of the everyday Christian. I have to memorize it for my Lutheran Confessional Writings course. The deadline is a week from today.

This morning, I finished memorizing Luther's plain-spoken analysis of the Apostles' Creed. I still have to memorize Luther's commentaries on the Lord's Prayer, Baptism, Communion and, of course, the Office of the Keys. A long way to go, for sure. I wouldn't have waited so long to start on this, except I was waiting to pick up my dad's copy of the little, orange catechism booklet when I was in Green Bay two weeks ago — to save myself, oh, about a dollar.

So what does this have to do with the picture of a bunch of kids holding up their spoils at the conclusion of an Easter Sunday egg hunt? (That is what the picture is of, by the way.) Well, because pretty much every kid in the picture could run circles around me when it comes to the Small Catechism.

I spent much of my Easter break memorizing the section on the Ten Commandments, and Tracy and I spent much of that Easter break in Tracy's hometown of Cedarburg, Wis. As I was working on the memorization, I learned that pretty much everyone in my wife's family had memorized the catechism when they were in grade school. They're Missouri Synod Lutherans, and my wife and her mom, aunts, uncles and many cousins attended their church's school through eighth grade.

I, on the other hand, went to public school. And even though I was a pastor's kid, I never dug so deeply into the Small Catechism as to memorize it. In confirmation, my dad taught the catechism to my classmates and me, but he saw to it that we understood the ideas without making us memorize the entire Small Catechism (which, by the way, is really not that small).

But that doesn't cut it for a seminarian ... or, as it turns out, for a fifth-grader in my wife's church. It was one thing to have Tracy randomly reciting pieces of the catechism to me or to have her mom, Ellen, chime in along with me when I was reciting the commandments in the back seat of my in-laws' truck. It was quite another thing to have my wife's cousin, Jonathan, fresh from an Easter Sunday game of Twister (he was calling out colors and limbs in place of a missing spinner) sit down next to me and ask what I was doing with the little, orange booklet.

I was memorizing the Small Catechism, I said. Turns out Jonathan was doing the same, along with his fifth-grade class. Doubting that at his age he had to memorize all of Luther's explanations, I asked him whether he only had to memorize the commandments, creed, and prayer themselves.

"No," he said. "My teacher figured we already knew those."

Arrgh.

Unfortunately, the kids learn a different translation, so Jonathan can't help me. Guess I'll have to keep reciting the catechism in my head endlessly, listening to the cheesy, pop-music rendition that has made a long-term home in my car's CD player and employing whatever other means necessary. This is most certainly true.

Oh, sorry — not sure how that last sentence got in there.