Tim Parks was somewhat taken aback when his daughter Steffie announced "I want to be baptized, I want to do catechism and I want to take my first communion."
His own teenage years had been full of the agony of escaping religion. "My father was a Evangelical clergyman my mother his keenest collaborator. There was grace before meals, bible readings at breakfast, church, Sunday school, and prayer meetings, my problem was how to tell the people that I loved that I’d stopped believing."
And now his daughter aged ten with "a healthy interest in boys, who wiggles about to the spice girls music and can’t wait for her first period is telling me that she wants to be baptized".
Was it really religion she was interested in or just fitting-in? Tim asked her if she wanted to be baptized to distinguish herself from her brother? He asks "if it’s because she wants to be like all her friends....I hate myself immediately because it’s just the line my father took... "peer pressure son." I mean if all your friends were Moslems you’d want to be a Moslem too?"
His daughter Steffi told him that that "If all my friends were Moslems I’d probably want to be one too, but they’re not and I want to be a Catholic. I’m doing it because I believe in it." And so Tim arranges for Steffi to receive instruction from the priest.
After a couple of months Tim's wife meets the catechist in the street, who tells her how wonderful it is to have Steffi in the class; "she’s the only one who is excited about it all, who takes it seriously" And suddenly Tim says "I realise I need not worry, far more than the gospel, this is good news..Steffi is growing up."
