As I raise my children, especially as I raise them spiritually, I’m surprised at how much time I spend telling stories. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise, I feel, because Christianity (my faith) is fundamentally a storytelling religion. Some religions, like many pagan ones, are ritual religions. Others, like Buddhism, are philosophical or practical religions. Judaism, from what I know about it, is also a storytelling religion. So is Christianity.

I don’t know what I thought raising a child spiritually would be like. I think that, before our first child is born, as we prepare to be parents, everything about raiding a child is so huge and so intimidating that we just have to brace ourselves at what is to come. Even as I prepared for a second child, I wondered what it would be like to have two children too much to wonder how exactly we raise children spiritually. It’s all so much, and in many ways we hit the ground running (though if I have any advice for new parents, it would be to take things as slow as possible, both for your sanity and for that of your spouse and child).

Back when my oldest daughter was a toddler, my priest at the time gave her a rosary. It was a big one made out of wooden beads that were the size of marble shooters. As toy designed to help develop a child’s manual manipulation, it worked well, but as a religious tool, I had no idea how to use it. Was I supposed to teach my child to count beads as she prayed the Lord’s Prayer? Was I supposed to learn how to pray the rosary and teach my daughter somehow? What I didn’t know was this: that my priest was teaching me something very important: pray with your kid.

As a priest, I bless things all the time. I bless things in the liturgy, and I join in persona Cristi to consecrate the Eucharist. And these acts of formal blessing bleed over into my normal life during times that any Christian is invited to bless things, such as when we see an ambulance or hear sirens, when someone is sick or alone, when someone simply asks us for prayers. I remember blessing my children often as a young father. I would be holding them and make a little sign of the cross on their foreheads. This gave me comfort, and it actually helped me learn how to talk to God. Before having children, I felt so uncomfortable talking to God, even in prayer. Perhaps it’s that now I definitely have something to pray about, and so the words come more easily. Whatever the case, praying with our children, even if they don’t know the words or they can’t speak, is so important both for their spiritual development and our own.

But then there are stories. It took me a while to figure out how important stories are for our children – which is, again, surprising, both because Christianity is a storytelling religion and because I study literature and storytelling as a hobby. It took us a while to buy a children’s Bible, but even when we got it, I felt awkward reading the stories. They were all rewritten from what they are in the Bible so that they can be better understood by children, but they all seemed so stark and artificial. My children loved them, of course, both because they’re good stories and because I was spending time with them. And giving our children our undivided attention, this alone, gives our children such a deep sense of love and security that is unmatched in much of their lives.

As my children grew, however, I found that their questions about spirituality led, not to cracking open the Bible, but to telling my kids stories from my memory of them. Nor would reading from the Bible really work for the questions that they asked. Reading (or quoting) chapter and verse for questions like “where did God stand when he created the world” or “what happens to people who bully people when they die” wouldn’t cut it. And so we engage in a kind of active, back-and-forth kind of storytelling. Sometimes I relate a parable or something Jesus says in his final days (though always in the context of a story), but that story is what’s important, and I think the story is what my children remember and will remember and which transforms their lives.

In our world, we don’t often get to tell stories from off the top of our heads. We tell stories about ourselves, but that’s more relating experiences than storytelling (though relating experiences is also important). The only time I get to tell a story is at bedtime or when playing table top RPGs, and one of the reasons that I play table top RPGs is because I love group storytelling (so do kids, by the way. More children should play these kinds of games). Cultures around the world and in our own past told stories often. It was one of the ways that we related to one another, our past, and our lives. But we don’t, and I think that’s a pity.

So: more stories. Tell more stories and tell them often. Especially with kids, repeat those stories. Children never get tired of stories, at least in my experience. And tell stories to adults, even if you think (or they think) that they already know them. Because telling stories is fun. It’s part of who we are as people, and especially if you’re a Christian, it’s part of who you are as a disciple of Jesus Christ. Don’t worry if the stories you tell aren’t very good. That’s not the point. The creativity and the imagination is the point. It’s one of the major ways that the Holy Spirit connects us to one another in our lives.