While in Seminary I made regular trips to my grandmother’s house to learn Dutch. Together we would sit on the sofa. I would read out loud from a Dutch Bible and translate. She would help me through the rough spots. This is a good way to learn a language. Too bad I didn’t go there more often.
During one of these visits my grandmother quoted from the Heidelberg Catechism. This prompted a few questions on my part. I discovered that as a teenager she was required to memorize the Heidelberg Catechism for one of her catechism classes. And now some 60 years later she still knew the Heidelberg Catechism word for word. To test her memory I found a copy of the Catechism and asked her to recite Q&A 55. She did. What about Q&A 26? She recited that too. Without any help or prompting. She didn’t even ask what the first word was.
Amazing!
But is it so amazing? My grandmother was not a woman of superior mental abilities. She was an aged saint with normal abilities of someone in their middle 70’s. The fact that she knew the Heidelberg Catechism so well after so many years was not a testimony to any superior abilities but to the fact that she had memorized it so thoroughly as a girl. What is thoroughly memorized as a young person is never forgotten, especially if it is used again and again in adulthood.
It was a good thing that my grandmother knew the Heidelberg Catechism so well in her old age. A few years after this my grandmother had a debilitating stroke. She lost the ability to read and communicate. She was confined to a nursing home, unable to attend church. By this time my family and I lived out west and were able to visit her only once a year. Although she couldn’t say our names or communicate, her face would light up in recognition when we came into the room. Obviously her memory had not been destroyed. What a source of comfort and encouragement the Heidelberg Catechism, which she had committed to memory, must have been to her during those final years. It’s a good thing to memorize sections of the Scriptures and the Catechism in our youth.
Now let’s test ourselves.
How many of us can still recite what we memorized last year in catechism? How many can recite what they memorized last week? How many of us can recite at the end of the class what we recited at the beginning of class? (I always wonder about this, when I see some nervously pouring over their catechism books just before class.) And how many of us fail miserably in our recitation for catechism because we simply haven’t taken the time to memorize the material?
From what I have seen over the years as a pastor I think very few catechism students today are as diligent as my grandmother and, I believe, many others in her day were in memorizing their catechism lessons.
Let’s not be content to do as little as possible for catechism! Let’s prepare for each catechism class by mastering the material we are supposed to learn.
This doesn’t require hours and hours of our time each week. It requires that we study our material a little every day, instead of waiting until the last day or minute. It has been proven scientifically that what is memorized in short periods over several days is memorized in less time and is retained longer than what is memorized in one sitting.
How important is all this?
First, youth is the time God has given us to memorize and learn. Learning and memorization become more difficult as we grow older. Those who squander this opportunity of youth never have another opportunity like it.
Second, what we learn from the Scriptures in our youth stays with us to guide us into God’s ways for the rest of our life. This is the thrust of Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” The training a child receives guides him the rest of his life. So too does the catechism he learns.
Finally, some of us may reach a point in life when the only source of comfort and encouragement we have is what we have committed to memory in our youth. This can happen in time of persecution. It can also happen in old age.