Getting Through Fall with the Grace of Confirmation

Art/Photography: Rock Creek Park Fall Foliage, Mr. TinDC, PD/CC/SA, https://www.flickr.com/photos/mr_t_in_dc/5124280391/

A post on Confirmation in the middle of September seems out of place. Agreed.

However, as the school year starts again and my duties get more serious: I must send them to school with lunch every day (there’s no more subsisting on snacks at the park anymore); I must bathe them regularly (no more “bathing” during swim lessons—surely the chlorine kills stuff?—or in the hose); I must read to them every day (words on cereal boxes no longer count); I feel like I need my own Parents more.

So, what’s the connection to Confirmation?

From our Confirmation classes (a thousand years ago, for me), we remember that at Confirmation we receive an “increase and deepening of baptismal grace” which:

• Unites us more firmly to Christ
• Increases the gifts of the Holy Spirit in us
• Renders our bond with the Church more perfect
• Gives us a special strength of the Holy Spirit to spread and defend the faith by word and action as true witnesses of Christ, to confess the name of Christ boldly, and never to be ashamed of the Cross. (How about that as a boost for your Monday?)

But one last effect from Confirmation that really soothed my soul is:

• It roots us more deeply in the divine filiation which makes us cry, “Abba! Father!” (CCC 1303)

The grace we receive at Confirmation truly strengthens and deepens our spiritual childhood in the Father. It helps us reach out to Him as our dad and gives us the grace to allow Him to lift us above the stress, anxiety, fears, sadness, and sin that keep us overly wrapped up in the cares of this world. At Confirmation we’re given both the grace and encouragement to become more little, more dependent on Him who loves us infinitely more than we love our own children.

And that should put a spring in our step as fall begins.

“Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.”

–St. Ignatius of Loyola

Copyright 2014 Meg Matenaer